Last weekend – well, when I started this it was last weekend, now it’s two weekends after last weekend – Malcolm Pearson and I went to the Winternationals. I am sure that there are lots of sports – and I want to get to that – that have a Winternationals, but, in the car universe, there is only one Winternationals, the racing weekend that starts the Drag Racing Season. It is always in Pomona, Southern California, and is always the second weekend of February. I am not a drag racing fan and neither is Malcolm but this is where drag racing started, it is where hot rodding itself started, and this was more of a pilgrimage than a trip to see a race.
Because this was a pilgrimage to an unexplored country, at least to us – although I had been to several legal and official drag races in the 50s and even ran in one with a ’48 International flatbed truck – Malcolm and I wanted it to include some background to help us understand what we were pilgrimaging to. In this case, our homework is going to the Wally Parks NHRA Motorsports Museum which is, unironically, “dedicated to safety” (sort of like a Rock and Roll Museum dedicated to ear health).
Ever since the second car, people have been trying to make them go faster. In the entry to the museum is a 1932 Ford three-window coupe, the kind of car a young doctor might take on house calls, facing that transportation device is the same car, now without fenders and a bigger engine, being transformed into a Deuce, the classic hotrod. At first, I guess, hot rods were just cars that could go faster, however, by the fifties – when I first started driving – the Hot Rod had become a separate, identifiable, genera, divided into three basic species, Hot Rods people drove on the street, Hot Rods modified for top speed, and Hot Rods modified for maximum acceleration. The most visible species are cars designed to drive on the streets. These Street Rods, it should be noted, however, are not meant to be road racers, they are meant to be cars that look good, within strict parameters, and can be driven on the road (the road racing hotrods, like Troutman & Barn’s Scarab or Max Balchowsky’s Old Yeller, are, for some unfathomable reason, not considered Hot Rods). It turned out, to my surprise, that Street Rods, my favorite, are in short supply at the Wally Parks, but a couple of very classic Hot Rods were hidden in a corner.There was also a Custom ’49/’50 Mercury on display and I was reminded of how disdainful I was of “Lead Sleds” like this when I had a real Street Rod, a five-window Deuce (even though it was really a 1932 Plymouth with a Ford Flathead engine).After saying that road racers are not Hot Rods, I want to show the exception, a recreation of the original Hot Rod Lincoln built by Bill Stroppe to race in the La Carrera Panamericana in the early 50s. While the Stroppe brothers were building Hot Rod Lincolns, other hot rodders wanted to see how flat-out fast they could go. With the fortuitous combination of a large number of engineers and mechanics that had worked in the aircraft industry during the war and dry lakes, Southern California soon became a hotbed of very sophisticated, if somewhat obscure, hot rods that became known as Lakesters or Streamliners. The car on the right had a top speed of 178 mph with a flathead Lincoln engine producing about 120 hp in 1952! The car in the middle went 307.977 with a supercharged four-cylinder Chevrolet engine. We had come here for drag racing and that meant drag racing cars. The National Hot Rod Association – hereinafter called the NHRA – was founded in 1951 by Wally Parks, in Southern California, but it took years for it to spread. We did not get an official drag race strip in Northern California until I was 17, in 1957. Before that, we raced on the streets and one of the favorite streets was a usually deserted section of Cañada Road near the Pulgas Water Temple. Occasionally, some out of towner would show up with a ridiculously fast car which always made me wonder how an out of towner would know about us but the police never caught on. One Friday night, a friend’s mother showed up and was shocked at what was, obviously, risky behavior. Even more shockingly, her reaction was to write an editorial in The San Mateo Times campaigning for a legal drag strip. And even more shocking than that was that we got one, at the Half Moon Bay Airport. The tradition of ridiculously fast cars showing up to challenge the locals continued and the car above is one of them, Called Swindler A, with a blown Crysler Hemi, stuffed into a 1941 Willys, cars like this toured around challenging the locals. These cars still burned gas but they were well on their way to becoming specialized dragsters. A couple of early dragsters. The purple car in the background, BTW, is the Glass Slipper and I saw it turn a 166 miles per hour at Vacaville Raceway, in 1959 or 1960. I was going to write about the Winternationals in one post but there is too much here so I will do this in two parts.
Originally, this was going to be a single post but it is running longer than I thought so I will show the actual races in the next post.
Last weekend – well, when I started this it was last weekend, now it’s two weekends after last weekend – Malcolm Pearson and I went to the Winternationals. I am sure that there are lots of sports – and I want to get to that – that have a Winternationals, but, in the car universe, there is only one Winternationals, the racing weekend that starts the Drag Racing Season. It is always in Pomona, Southern California, and is always the second weekend of February. I am not a drag racing fan and neither is Malcolm but this is where drag racing started, it is where hot rodding itself started, and this was more of a pilgrimage than a trip to see a race.
