Save the Garage
5/8/06
ne of the coolest things about drag racing of old is that a good lot of the legends of drag racing started not far from where they lived their lives at home. Before racecars ran out on the dry lakebeds, on the boulevard, or out on the quarter mile, they got wrenched on out in the garage. In many ways, drag racing was born in the one-, two-, and three-car garages attached to regular old houses in regular old neighborhoods of Anytown USA.
Work accomplished under the bare bulb of a shop light after work paid off out on the track on the weekend. The average Joe or Joey Bagodonuts could drive a car to work, work on it at night, and motor out to their local drag strip on weekends. All was well. Folks even campaigned nitro dragsters and funny cars out of their garages. One look into the pits at any major drag race is all it takes to realize that things have, in fact, changed.
On the modern reality side of things, running a professional drag racing operation requires a little more space than a one- or two-car garage. For better or worse, this is the way things are. Even at vintage drag races, some of the rigs that roll onto the paddock are often bigger than most home garages! On the TV side of reality, one would think that everyone needed to have a 20,000 plus square foot state of the art facility with disco lights, instant replay, and regularly visiting movie stars to build a dragster, a hot rod, or even fight over welding a bunch of gee gaws onto a motorcycle. This is not necessarily the case.
In my travels as a collector of information surrounding the vintage drag racing scene the fact that a lot of folks still manage to go drag racing out of their home garages has always impressed me. The Mallicoat Brothers' gorgeous blown Plymouth Barracuda fits snug into one space of a two-car garage. To make room, ceiling and roof rafters have given way to headers and an ingenious electric pulley system. With a touch of the button the body is hoisted up by all four corners and tucked away into the roof for easy engine and chassis access.
Rich Facciano keeps his '32 Ford Gasser in his garage right next to a beautifully restored Harley Davidson 750 flat tracker. Rich started drag racing after his flatracking days came to a close. The real miracle is that Facciano and crew gets the trailer up the narrow and near vertical driveway – backwards! Deep scars at the foot of the driveway are proof of the Herculean effort.
Larry Petit took home the Goodguys VRA Funny Car title running a nitro-powered flopper out of his two-car garage in Southern California. Most impressive of all, however, was the garage of old school Bay area hot rodder and longtime Jugger's Racing Team member Harold Hungerford, who kept his diminutive Little Old Lady nitro-powered fuel coupe in a space out in the garage with barely enough room around to work on it. So small was the space that he would have to wheel it out into the driveway to fire it up – much to the dismay of the neighbors. In fact, the tiny coupe's wheelbase was as short as it was not because of any rulebook, but the space it had to fit into. To all the others who make more with less, you know who you are, and we salute you.
Ironically it is a lack of space, or the rising price of it, that is endangering the American garage. Skyrocketing real estate prices and greedy developers have crammed too many unaffordable houses onto too small properties, reducing the size and function of the American garage and thus endangering drag racing as we know it. Worse even than greed are condo and home owner's associations that don't allow folks that own their own homes garages to wrench on their cars in their driveways with the door open and hang out – so to speak.
The post World War II rise of the automobile may have in fact been responsible for suburban sprawl, the decline of the American front porch, and the decline in social interactivity that comes of saying howdy to your neighbors, but it seems there are much more broad reaching and nefarious forces behind the dwindling number and size of our garages. This is not good news. Wrenching on cars and saying howdy to your neighbors is as American as freaking apple pie. Once the connection between man and machine grows too distant, the soul that is at the very heart of the joy of driving an automobile is lost forever. Wrenching on and then driving your own racecar down the dragstrip keeps that connection, and the soul of driving alive.
Moreover, the friendly social and sometimes even argumentative human interaction that surrounds spinning wrenches on a car after dinner or while listening to the radio on a Saturday is not only good for you and your neighbors, it's good for America. Sadly, the American garage seems to be an endangered species. Don't let it happen, I say. Write your congressman today! 
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