White Knuckles and Nitromethane
The Last Drag Racing Column
7/7/06
s I said in my first column published here by the mighty Drag Racing Online empire I was never there for the first time around in American Drag Racing, but I write this thankful for being around for the time I have. It was roughly a dozen years ago when I returned to Sears Point Raceway in Sonoma, California, to a drag race for the first time since my youth. It just so happened to be a vintage drag race put together by some outfit I had never heard of called the Goodguys. Hearing the lopey V-8's rumbling around the pits and watching all that old junk launch out of the hole was more than enough to immediately hook me into it. Snapping some shots with a trusty old Nikkormat 35mm camera here and there led to attaching some words to the images. Hanging around the track more got me to meeting some more like-minded folks, and before I could say nitromethane I was shaving main bearings with a pocket knife in between rounds with an even bigger bunch of like-minded hooligans in the dusty pits of Bakersfield and Sacramento.
To think now that two of those very hooligans have passed on to the great dragstrip in the sky makes me on the one hand sad, but on the other happy. To have met them and experienced their influence on the drag racing world first hand is a gift. These guys were true characters, and more than willing to pass the collected knowledge of messing with nitromethane on to those willing to learn. There was no manual for putting together a 392 Hemi to run on a fuel it was never designed to run on. These cats figured it all out by blowing things up and trying things that would work to keep parts and pieces in the block instead of all over the track. Someone had taught them a thing or two, and to this they added their own. When it came time this knowledge was passed on to those scrappy enough and crazy enough to want to learn it themselves. Thus the chronicle of drag racing continues. To all those I have met along the way I am immensely thankful.
Somewhere between that fateful day at Sears Point and shaving bearings among the dust at Sacramento I picked up a 1967 Plymouth Barracuda for 500 bucks. With the engine running on maybe three and a half cylinders and perhaps one of the four drum brakes working properly, I white knuckled the beast to my then home of Oakland over a rainy Highway 17 from Santa Cruz. With a remanufactured engine and a heap of parts sourced from the junkyards, the mighty Mopar was soon driveable to work and running down the dragstrip a little faster than it did when it came from the factory in '67. The Barracuda also took me to and from races, along with a weekly trek to the Sierra Foothills to wrench on the Foothill Flyer AA/fuel dragster. After the team and car as I knew it came apart and morphed into its next incarnation, the mighty Mopar lived on and continued to serve well as my daily driver and occasional grudge night racer. Since faster is always better, I took a trip up to the Wagons of Steel top secret island race shop and dropped a built 360 in place of the 318. A trip back to Sears Point Raceway produced a time-slip that proved the transplant was well worth the effort. Sadly, the Barracuda was t-boned by a thoughtless hit and run red light runner on the streets of Oakland. Since then it has laid dormant in the same Sierra Foothills where I learned of the horrors of nitro, hemispherical combustion chambers, and shaving main bearing chamfers with pocket knives.
Thus continues the saga of good news and bad news that is life. While this may be my last column here at Drag Racing Online, it marks the beginning of a new venture as Editor of MoparMax.com, the Mopar Magazine Online.
In a great number of ways I have everyone involved in vintage drag racing to thank for being able to carry on the Mopar tradition from the past into the present, and on to the future. To name everybody personally would carry more space than is allowed here so to all of you goes my heartfelt gratitude. I've enjoyed following and chronicling the vintage drag racing scene over the years and will continue to be involved from a more Mopar-oriented focus. If it wasn't for the bunch of racers and folks that somehow brought drag racing how it used to be back into the future and into my life I probably never would have gone back to Sears Point that day and most likely would have ended up getting involved in some other pursuit like the professional dog show circuit, Canadian rules ice curling, model railroading, or as the editor of Cat Fancy magazine. Not that any of those are undesirable, but I'm happy things turned out the way they did. I hope to see you over at MoparMax on August 1. 
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