1 Weekend, 2 NHRA Shows —
2000 Miles and a World Apart

Photo by Mike Bumbeck
10/10/05

here were two NHRA fuel meets last weekend that tempted me enough to record them on the oversized At-A-Glance calendar hanging above this old Macintosh. Alas, they were to occur 2000 miles apart, so I had to choose. As much as I would’ve loved to have witnessed the history made at Joliet, learning about Bob Stange’s unfortunate experience in his own Chicagoland backyard (see “Burk’s Blast” for details) reinforces my hunch that I made the right decision. If you were back there, I hope you had as much fun as I did out here.

Yeah, I went to Bakersfield, again.

Strange Engineering’s founder and friends wouldn’t have had to worry about reserved seats at the 14th California Hot Rod Reunion; there weren’t any.

ADVERTISEMENT

At Famoso Raceway, your bottom end might’ve picked up a souvenir splinter, but you could’ve collect it from any seat you wanted, on either side of the drag strip. You needn’t have looked longingly upon some unsold seat adjacent to the starting line; you had only to walk up there and claim it about half an hour before any round of fuel cars began, when the sound of nitro brought everyone else, huffing and puffing, from the pits.

Nor was there a pit area into which you could not enter, and feel welcome. Whether that space was occupied by a modern fuel car in actual competition (i.e., AA/FD or injected A/FD) or by any of the dozens of “Cacklefesters” doing endless “warmups,” just for fun, chances are good that you got just as close as you cared to a 98-percent load during the combustion process; so close that, in daylight, it wouldn’t have been impossible for a set of weed-burner headers to set your socks on fire with unseen header flames.