If one concedes that the sport's first weekly drag racing track is a good barometer, then it could be said that the first dominating type of vehicle or close to it, was the motorcycle. It also should be noted that the bikes did not always run on gasoline in the very early 1950s and since no records were kept, it's hard to differentiate who ran what with what in the tank.

Santa Ana opened on July 3, 1950 and in its first 19 events top speed was set seven times by motorcycle riders. Keep in mind, that there was no such thing as elapsed time in 1950 with the sole emphasis placed on speed. Chet Herbert's "Beast" a lay-down fuel-burning (sometimes) 80-inch Harley Davidson set top speed with riders Al Keys (primarily) and Johnny Hutton atop six times. Keys also wheeled Joe "Frenchy" LeBlanc's "the Beauty," another Harley to top speed once. At the end of calendar year 1950, Keys' 122.95 on the LeBlanc bike was the track speed record, a genuinely big deal in those days.

Throughout the early 1950s, the bikers continued to win. Louis Castro became the first motorcycle rider over 130-mph when he beat Otto Ryssman's D/Roadster in a Top Eliminator final in January 1952. Racers like Bud Hare, Pete Lockhart, Lloyd Krant, Bill Johnson, Mike Ward, Pat Presetti, and Tommy Auger all won Top Eliminator titles and set top speed marks at Santa Ana in the years between 1950 and 1956.

Of this group, Auger remains as one of the most impressive of all fuel motorcycle racers. San Fernando Raceway opened in late 1955 and winning Top Eliminator that day was the Vincent of Duncan-Auger-Martz. In August of 1956, the first of two San Gabriel Raceways opened for business, and Auger pushed the same fuel burner past 1955 NHRA Nationals runner-up Fritz Voight and his gas-burning Chrysler dragster to win Top Eliminator there.

As the 1950s faded into the '60s, though, the bikes started fading from the landscape. The biggest reason was that as far as Top Eliminator went the preferred means of travel became the dragster, especially when the blower became de riguerre in 1959. When competitors such as Emery Cook start running eight's at 166-mph and the Don Garlitses of the world start approaching the 180 mark, two wheels just couldn't keep up. Moreover, as late model Stockers became more prominent, and professsional chassis builders started setting up shop, the bikes were soon relegated to a backseat position.

Drag News, the top drag racing newspaper, began running a records page on its page two in 1959 and there was no spot reserved for the bikes. Except for a brief flirtation with gas cycles in 1960 and early 1961, the bikes were absent from the records page. When NHRA's National Dragster began publishing in 1960, the bikes were not noted in the records pages.

Moreover, by the early 1960s bikes did not have all that many places to race. Two probable and related reasons crop up explaining why. Cars outsold motorcycles by a wide margin then and bikes, thanks to the movies and headlines, conjured up the image of outlaw groups like the Hell Angels, Satan's Slaves, and the Gypsy Jokers motorcycle gangs. At heavy traffic dragstrips like Lions Dragstrip in Southern California, the bikes ran once a month (if that) in a given year, and they were almost always street bikes. This situation applied to midwest tracks like Cordova, Union Grove, U.S. 30, and Detroit. Infrequently, they would run bikes, but almost always they were street machines and not nitro burners.

At big races such as the 1961 U.S. Fuel and Gas Championships in Bakersfield, no bikes were entered and the same applied to NHRA's two big races that year, the Winternationals and Nationals.

However, nitro motorcycles did exist in the 1960s, most of them raced on the West Coast. Two tracks that stuck by the bikes in this period were Fontana Raceway and Colton Dragstrip at Morrow Field, both located in San Bernardino County, ironically enough the birthplace of the Hell's Angels.

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