Howard Koby
What a Drag
April 1, 2005
During the postwar years, on the dry lake beds of the Mojave Desert, drag racers
pitted their modified machines against each other in
simple
tests of
straight-line shove over a measured distance.
The racing
remained
strictly
amateur until a former
GM tank tester named
Wally Parks
grasped its commercial
potential. And when his
Southern California
Timing
Association (SCTA) promoted
“Speed
Week” at the famed
Bonneville
Salt Flats in 1949, a sport was
born—even
though prize money was almost
as small as the entry
fee, and
helmets
were strictly optional. Early
dragsters or
“rail jobs” were essentially street
cars stripped down to
their bare chassis (or “frame rails”) to reduce weight,
with
engines
massaged to produce more
horsepower.
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Larry Dixon Sr. lays down some traction in the
“Real Don Steel” Chevy fueler at
Irwindale Raceway in 1975,
left. The
“Red Stamp” participated in 2004’s
California Hot
Rod Reunion,
right. (Click image to enlarge)In 1953, Parks and his cronies moved drag racing out of the desert and onto an abandoned airfield in Santa Ana, Calif. Both competition and crowds grew, attracted by the drivers’ increasingly extreme machines and the makeshift track’s newfangled computerized timing gear. By this time, drag racers had evolved into custom-designed “rails,” made by bending and welding chassis tubing. The engines were still in front of the driver, but they were no longer slightly modified versions of street-legal powerplants. They were ingenious monsters, capable of hitting triple digits over a quarter mile in less than a quarter of a minute.
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