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

From June 1966 Hot Rod, Sunday eliminations, already a bunch of guys eliminated Saturday. I would have turned 6 years old in July. A few years before I went to my first race. These shows must have been incredible to watch!

 

. . . never saw anything like it before or since.

 

Early Hair Canary. 2nd shot is soon after the funnycar style engine setback

 

Couple later shots

 

Prolly been posted before but fuuuck. Can't get much cooler.

 

The Surfers, note no idler pulley.

 

But not the best design, if you want to change blower overdrive you'd be limited by pulleys to match same length belt. Maybe why they only appear to have 1:1 ratio on blower drive, instead of overdrive.

 

Must be why they ran so terrible!

 

Seen this Monahan Motors shoe box ford in a 1965 video of the Hot Rod Nationals at Riverside, I really dig the front end !
I did a Google search but couldn't come up with any info on it.

 

@ttwomotor

Hello,

Nice photo capture of the “Scorpion.” It was one powerful drag race build. We were fortunate to see the action up close and personal, as well as sitting on a tall cliff looking down as the Scorpion came whizzing by at Riverside Raceway in 1959. It was one of those So Cal days, freezing in the morning with jackets and long sleeves required.

But, by mid morning, back to t-shirts for the day's activities. As soon as the sun started dropping again, or one was in a shady spot, it became cold again and jackets were brought out until we left late.



Then three months later, the same "Scorpion" was making some outstanding runs at the 2nd Bakersfield Smokers March Meet, about a 170 miles North in Central California. Most of the top racers that were at the Riveride Raceway drag meet were in attendance in Bakersfield.

We had to get up very early to get to the gate at the opening hour. It was a long drive for a couple of teenagers from the Westside of Long Beach.

Jnaki

Bobby Langley Riverside Raceway 1959 + Bakersfield 1960


Drag Cars in Motion...

 

Early Kenz & Leslie. Ron Leslie on the right.

 

They used different thickness spacer plates between the blower and manifold to adjust for the various overdrives.

 

This is an amazing car. It seems that every other picture the dive changes from left to right hand. If the car ran as fast as they could apparently switch the drive side, it had to be some kind of record holder.

 

Could it just be that it's center steered and an optical illusion?

 

I see some overdrive, maybe only 10 percent, they made it up in the percent of Nitro. I do wonder what length belt they ran, as the standard with an idler was 57", same as BBC.

 

I thought, "back in the day", they came in a variety of sizes and lengths as they'd been sourced from industrial usages.

 

@Marty Strode has it, they were known to run a higher percentage of nitro then everyone else at the time. Tom Jobe used smaller nozzles and higher pressure to atomize the fuel for better combustion and around 95% nitro with toluene instead of alcohol.

 

Jobe explains how they sourced the belts in one of the excellent video interviews that are out there