10/7/05

he funny thing is that sometimes it seems like about a week ago that I went to my first nostalgia drag race, and other times it seems years ago. That's the paradox of mixing the past with the present, while attempting to plod along into the future. In a perfect world the cars at a nostalgia drag race do their best to transport one back in time to another perhaps more glorious era of drag racing.

There is a reference point for the folks in the stands, and that is drag racing that's already happened. Drag racing about busted knuckles and backyard engineering - before corn syrupy sponsors seemingly meant more than the racing itself and back when the guy that ground your cam smiled as he stood at the 1000-foot mark chomping on a cigar and taking notes.

The other funny thing is that I was never really there in the first place. Sure, I hung out at New England Dragway with my dad watching Funny Cars when I was a wee lad, but that was certainly a long way from the big drag strips of California and the legendary races that occurred.

Nonetheless, the whole vintage drag racing scene speaks to me because of the continuation of the legend – a carrying on of the nitromethane fueled torch of drag racing mythology. I like seeing a Gasser struggling to keep between the lines while the eight-inch slicks do their best to push a screaming blown small block on top of a high axle down the track. I grin when I see a nitro huffing funny car that doesn't require a six-inch high letters on the front of it for me to tell what kind of car it is. I like the idea of two feet, two hands and maybe even an elbow controlling all the action on the 1320. Foot and/or hand brake tire smoking lead foot induced guardrail-to-guardrail action is what I like. Call me crazy, but that's just the way I am.

The folks that really call me crazy (along with other things) will argue that I am indeed nuts, and that what the vintage drag racing show is now is what it would have inevitably become if Father Time had picked up all of drag racing in the late sixties and then dropped it back on to the track in the late eighties. If we all want to keep taking the trip, they argue, the whole scene must keep moving down the big dragstrip paved with the money to make it happen.

That may more or less be true, but if we're going to keep calling it a vintage racing scene, some steps are going to have to be taken to at the very least keep it at the looking vintage. If the cars don't look old school or reference the halcyon days of drag racing then there's really no point in calling the racing nostalgic, vintage, or anything else. Celebrating the collected mythology of early drag racing literally feeds the fire of nostalgia drag racing. Take away the references to the myths and the fans that would come out to see the way things used to be will stay home.

Worse still is if the grassroots appeal of the vintage drag racing becomes replaced by a battle of cubic dollars we'll have another backwards mess, with the racers paying in large part for the whole show, and nobody in the stands that cares. Correct me if I'm wrong but back in the salad days of drag racing there were enough folks in the stands that dug going to the drags that the money they put in the tills paid for the show. When the fans go home it's tough to get them back, and the money needed for insurance, logistics, ambulances, and so on gets stacked onto the racers until the racers start to go home. Game over.

That being said, the main problem with the nostalgia, vintage, or whatever what you want to call it, drag racing scene seems to be keeping a bead on what was great about the past while continuing to grow the fan base, and moving the whole show into the future. How do you keep the grassroots aspects of the whole show intact and experience the economic growth required to make any series viable and affordable for the racers? How do you get new eyeballs out to the track fork over some hard earned cash, eat some hot dogs, and say "Wow, that was one bitchen' show, when's the next one?

Number one is to keep the visual aspects of the race cars appealing to those who may not have been there the first time around but really dig seeing, hearing, smelling, and feeling a little of the way things used to be. Keeping the cars looking old school with their visual roots planted firmly in the past is key, and one sure fire way to go back to the future is to get some period correct looking wheels back on the cars. There's just nothing cooler than a high axle gasser with some oxidized magnesium kidney beans spinning on the spindles, and almost nothing worse than a set of modern wheels on that same car. A '70s era doorslammer ought to be sporting some '70s era hoops when running in the vintage ranks.

The problem is as the supply of original wheels has been drying up, prices have entered into the ridiculous zone. As the last of the old school drag racing wheels oxidize back into the earth, get bent into a k-rail, or bolted up to a museum piece, it's time for manufacturers to step up, bust out some of the old molds or fire up the computin' machine and start casting some retro repops. If vintage drag racing can't literally open the time portal into drag racing history, let's at least try to keep it looking like it could any second.