History Drag cars in motion.......picture thread.

He didn't win as much as did Willie or Leon, or Rich Guasco, but Jim Miles was never boring...this Bantam came after his Fiat coupe that puked the crank out at Lions....(was also badly burned in a pit fire)...

 

Jake Shuljak towed out to Bakersfield from the Midwest, held the 1320 record for B/FC...I remember it from Bakersfield, body work was really well done, ran a stroked Chevy

 

The all time modified fuel coupe was the ' leffler & Loukas ' with the top panel that opened up for the pilot to get in

So setting there warming it up the driver would raise up the top with a sign painted on it that said

' Not ready Starter ' I all ways thought that was all time cool

 

Agree, it was a real surprise when Leffler and Loukas beat the Speed Sport roadster, Lyle was late (I think Lyle was driving?), at the '61 Smoker's meet, I remember watching the race from the fire truck at the top end...

 

Those early Smokers meets were the best as all those one off kind's of cars would show up, and we got to see & hear them all at one place and one time once a year ' Priceless '

Such great memories we all have that has lasted us for 55 + years

 

According to Red, he was driving. I asked him about being asleep on the line and letting Neil get the jump, and all he said was " I did that quite a bit"!

 

I remember one yr I think it was the Smokers 60' meet we spent Sat. nite on the spectator side trying to get a little sleep, well we heard a bunch of engines running and low and behold it was about 10 - 12 cars like tri 5's and corvettes drag racing each other in one big race all lined up side by side with headlights on

They were way over on the spectator side as that pavement went on forever, well you ain't lived till you see that many cars going throu the gears with the lights going up & down with each shift then they would hit the brakes turn around and go the other way then back again for quite a while

Just one of the really bitchen things about those early meets, we did not get much sleep that nite as there was way too much cool stuff going on and did not want to miss a thing

 

I could sit here and read the conversations of Ardun-D.N.D. and Dean Lowe all day. Thanks for sharing the story behind the photos guys.

 

I was there also in '60, and remember the bikers who showed up...they had been there in '59, and became pretty rowdy, so by '60 the cops were ready for them. I clearly remember two cops walking down next to the track with a huge cardboard cutout middle finger on a pole that the bikers had been waving at the cars as they went down the track. The cops also set up a trailers by the starting line as a place to take arrested bikers and beat the crap out of them. The trailer was full of bikers being beaten (it was rocking back and forth), so this one cop had to take a biker and beat him over the hood of a car. However, each time a car left the starting line, the cop stopped beating the biker and they both watched until it cleared the traps, and then the beating commenced again. This went on at least for a couple of runs (I remember them stopping to watch the Fox, Holding, and Adair purple dragster).

As Don remembers, the pits were huge, so that's where you did push starts to warm the engine...so as you pushed back into the pits after a run you had to be really careful that someone was not coming directly at you from the pits at 50mph or so trying to get a fuel motor to light...we almost got run over by Paul Sutherland's Fiat-bodied competition coupe in '62...and we knew he couldn't really see out of it because of the chopped top....so he missed us by a few feet...