I see the legendary Don Garlits' name there.
His first dragster:
"Don and Pat built the “T”, their first “Real” race car, under an oak tree at their home in North Tampa in 1954. An electric welder and gas torch modified an old 1927 Ford Model “T” Roadster to accept a 1948 Mercury Block, ’39 Ford floor shift transmission, and a ’48 Ford rear (a very common method of building a “Hot Rod” in the early 50′s). The “T” was sold in 1956 but during a 1986 parts search in N. Georgia Don accidentally found the old “T” rusting away in a junk yard. He purchased it and personally did the restorations, completed in 1988, and taken on tour with S.R.I. This “Hot Rod” represents the latest “state of the art” in drag racing in Florida during the 1954 period."
@ Clay:
I'm sure there was other stuff goin' on in the '50's but autos were a
major part of American culture, maybe due to the interstate system being instituted by Eisenhower, all of a sudden folks could travel easily all over the country at highway speeds and the the "land yacht" made it comfortable, too.
Then there were the "submarine races" at the drive-in, and the drive-in diner, and a sizable contingent of guys like Grot's Dad who just wanted to see how fast they could go, or at least watch other guys doing it..
Some of the popularity of drag racing's also been attributed to veterans returning from WWII and Korea and either having the skill sets to build 'em or the desire to recapture the excitement of flying, too.
In the '60's muscle cars were huge in the midwest: Ohio, Illinios, Iowa, Indiana, Nebraska, Kansas, where you had miles and miles of straightaways through cornfields between intersections and even then it was only a stop-sign, assuming you
saw it.... :glee:
The chase scene in "Dirty Mary Crazy Larry" evokes some of what that must have felt like, in the setting of walnut groves in California:
There's a lot of truth in the observations that those cars were built to go as fact as they could in a straight line.
In the heartland, there were a lot of l-o-o-ng straight lines.
And Sunoco "World's Highest Octane"
102 octane gas:
When compression ratios routinely exceeded 10.5-1