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Most will be burning nitro. Many an old tuner
will be competing to shoot the tallest flames. Some have installed
oversized fuel tanks, and will keep their ‘92s running
‘til the zoomies turn white and fall off on the ground.
It’s gotta be the hardest-to-breathe 15 minutes in motorsports,
if not the best. (I’d buy a ticket just to see how Gibbs,
master event director that he is, is gonna get ‘em all
parked on the drag strip at the same time.)
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Two
things I like about today’s NHRA are its annual Bakersfield
and Bowling Green Reunions and its Pomona museum. Not coincidentally,
both are operated by the same, small crew of gearheads whose
love for the sport and its history runs deep and true. Perhaps
coincidentally, this little team operates at the L.A. Fairplex, one town away from the “mother
ship” in Glendora, where much-higher-paid workers with
little, if any, knowledge of our history gather each weekday
to run (ruin?) a form of drag racing that doesn’t give
me many goose bumps, anymore.
Admittedly, the only places I feel like I’m right in
step with what’s going on around me seem to be museums
and old drag strips. Don’t anybody tell Glendora, but
the second-best value in all of NHRA is a ticket to its Wally
Parks Motorsports Museum, for the price of a national-event
beer ($5, or free to members).
Nothing on earth beats the California Hot Rod Reunion’s
$55 bargain for three days and nights (Sept. 30-Oct. 2) of
near-continuous entertainment, both on the track and off,
plus a complimentary barbeque and a wonderful yearbook (produced
by museum-curator Greg “Rip Van” Sharp) that’s
packed with vintage photos and accurate information.
Yeah, okay, I know: Time marches on; things change; tastes
change; the whole world changes. As Bob Dylan advised my parents’
generation, “Your old road is rapidly aging/Get out
of the new one if you can’t lend a hand.”
Famoso-Woody Road, here we come! 
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