Drag Racing Online

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As could be guessed, AHRA stumbled awkwardly in its infancy, but its first national event fared better than its competitor, the National Hot Rod Association's National Championship drag races, a year earlier. The NHRA event was held in Great Bend, Kansas on Labor Day weekend, but its conclusion didn't occur until that November in Perryville, Ariz., thanks to a downpour that washed out final eliminations.

The first AHRA Nationals competitors were blasted by headwinds that blustery weekend, so much so that fishtailing by the hot cars, i.e., roadsters and dragsters, was commonplace. At times, dust clouds obscured the pit and strip areas for minutes at a time, causing momentary shutdowns of the action.

As things developed, performances were down notably when you consider that drag racing's best speed was a 155.97-mph run by Red Henslee and Emery Cook's rear-engined roadster. Top speed at the AHRA event was a mere 125-mph by Jim Hopper in the Hopper-Hensley Spl., and that occurred while driving into an estimated 45-mph headwind.

The winner was Bobby Joe Rutledge in the San Antonio, Texas-based “Poor Boys” hot rod club A / Modified Roadster and he never ran faster than 122.95-mph.

All in all, not much of an auspicious debut, but events leading to the first AHRA Nationals seemed to indicate that the little organization would be around for awhile.

AHRA did last well past the original Aug. 29-Sept. 3, 1956 dates, making it as far as Sept. 27-30, 1984 when their last national event, the AHRA World Finals, was completed at Eunice, Louisiana.

AHRA, founded in 1955, really emerged on the scene in March of 1956 when an amalgamation of hot rod clubs from Kansas to Pennsylvania met in Great Bend to produce the country’s “only democratic national hot rod organization....” At that meeting Walter Mentzer of Pittsburgh, Pa. was elected as the group’s first president. (See “The Secret Life of Walter Mentzer” on the Table of Contents)

On the weekend prior to the Nationals event, the group re-convened and had grown to where 18 states were represented at the second meeting. The elections put Nelson Pointer of Great Bend in as new president with Mentzer taking the vice-presidency by acclamation. It was also announced that AHRA would hold its National Championship drags at the 8,000-foot long Great Bend site through 1959.

AHRA's first four years would mark a key period for the organization and drag racing. By the time of the 1960 AHRA National Championship drag races, the event had become one of the bigger drag races in the country. Certainly, NHRA had the edge with its national championship race, then in Detroit, Michigan, and right up there with that were the World Series of Drag Racing show at Cordova, Ill., and the brand new Smokers Car Club U.S. Fuel and Gas Championships near Bakersfield, Calif. AHRA, if it trailed at all in the area of prestige, was not far behind.

This ad appeared in the August 10, 1957 issue of Drag News.

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