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RACECARS

The Camaro is one of the most popular cars on the street, and strip, in the USA. As Chevrolet's answer to the Mustang, the Camaro was an instant hit when introduced in 1967, and is still a best-seller several model generations later. Just about every imaginable combination of engine and transmission has been fitted, although big- and small-block Chevy's are favourite, and they have been built for almost every doorslammer class of racing, from Stock Eliminator, through to Pro Modified.
They are just as popular in Europe, just harder to find! This '67 Camaro, arguably the best looking model, came over from Sweden for a couple of the first Gary's Doorslammers meetings at Santa Pod in the early eighties. Supposedly street-legal, it ran in the nines with a small-block Chevy and a 5-speed Richmond transmission, with some very light-weight fibreglass panels.

George Ciarella's wild '37 Ford coupe replica: originally built as a Pro Mod car, it is seen here running a blown alcohol small-block Chevy in the 8.90 second Super Comp class. Sadly, the car crashed badly at Santa Pod in October 1999, but thankfully George walked away from the wreck.
However, thankfully for spectators, it has been rebuilt for 2001, and looks as good as ever.

There is a noticeable bias towards nostalgia in the street car and bike sections, but there will usually be more contemporary cars in this one - however, the best looking race cars will probably still be based on older body-styles!

The next car is one exception to the rule, being both one of the best UK-built racecars, and based on a relatively modern body style. Unfortunately, it too suffered a spill - a major top-end roll at Avon Park Raceway in the summer of 1999 writing the car off.

Capable of running well into the 6-second zone at over 200mph, Andy Robinson's self-built Rover 800-based Pro Modified car is seen here in the midst of a typical smoky Pro mod burnout. Thankfully the comprehensive tubular roll cage saved Andy from serious injury, a tribute to his chassis-building skills.
The car was built by Andy at his racecar fabrication shop, and it used many lightweight composite panels produced by Dale Edmonds at DRE racecar composites.

Pictured here at the 1985 Gary's Doorslammers meeting at Santa Pod, the Persakers Speed Shop hemi-powered Dodge Challenger was originally campaigned in the US as a Super Stocker. The Stock and Super Stock eliminators were, as the name implies, classes for stock-bodied cars, and modifications to the chassis, drivetrain, and body were strictly regulated. The Super Stock cars were the most modified, but still used stock-type leaf sprung rear suspension, and original engine castings to entertain the fans with wild wheel-standing starts and 9-second quarter mile passes.
This car, driven in the States by Paul Rossi, was brought to England by Geoff and Sylvia Hauser to replace their similar-bodied car. It was later sold on to Sweden to be replaced by a full tube framed Sierra built by Geoff for Sylvia to run in Super Gas.

Doorslammer racing really took off in the UK during the eighties. There were regular 'run-what-ya-brung' weekends for street cars at Santa Pod and the then-named Long Marston, including the annual Gary's Picnic, the Doorslammers meet, and numerous American Auto Club events.

Another popular 9-second runner is Roger Butterworth's flamed '57 Chevy. Shown here running in one of the 1999 Super Series meetings at Avon Park, the latest addition was a set of whitewalls on the slicks! It would not have worked on many cars, but along with the candy root-beer flames and stock body shape it looks like it is probably the fastest custom in the country.

This is a HOT ROD! Flat out on its way to a mid 6-second run, this supercharged '37 Chevy is as bad as they come. Driven by Tommy Moller, and owned by Kenneth Lorentzon, the black alcohol-fueled monster runs in the fastest doorslammer class, Pro Modified.

Super Pro drag racer Nigel Payne was busy over the winter of 1999-2000, and his car now sports a '61-'62 Corvette-style body in place of the old Nissan one. While Dale Edmonds at DRE racecar composites was building the lightweight stretched shell, Nigel was upgrading the big-block Chevy motor to run on alcohol. The Super Pro bracket car should be heading towards the seven-second zone in the year 2000 season with this new combination.

This looks a little like a DRE benefit, but this early seventies' Opel Manta also has a complete fibreglass body made by Dale. The car's owner paints cars for a living and this is reflected in the excellent preparation of the original steel shell used for the moulds. The deep shine of the black gives little clue to the shell's construction. The flamin' Ford-powered beauty is destined to run in Super Gas, and if you get the chance, have a look to see how straight it is. Just DON'T go tapping the bodywork to check that it is 'glass!

While most of our race stuff will be from drag racing, we will occasionally venture further afield: here we have some action from a club meeting at Donington Park in late 1999. The meeting had a wide variety of races featuring, amongst others, all ages of Aston Martins, MG's, Porsches, lightweight E-Type Jags, and more than one Lotus (note the careful avoidance of the plural of Lotus). This particular race featured our favourites, Camaro's, Vettes, and Mustangs mixing it up with English sporty cars. Definitely entertaining, and worth a day out if there is no drag racing on.

You can never have too many early Camaro's, so here is another one to drool over. Martin Curbishley had been running the old ex-Pro Stock 'Money Hungry' Camaro in Super Street, but that has now made way for this super-clean '67 running in the 9.90 Super Gas class.

Drag racing's Pro Stock class mandates the use of current, or recent, bodystyles, powered by normally aspirated engines. The class is the ultimate incarnation of the Stock Eliminator cars of the 60's, running through the 1/4-mile in less than seven seconds, at speeds over 200mph in the USA. The technology required to be competitive demands million-dollar budgets and heavy sponsorship, and the class is represented in Europe solely by Scandinavians. Luckily their championship includes a couple of rounds at Santa Pod in England, where we get to see superbly engineered cars like Norwegian Kjetil Hauge's Ford Mustang fighting it out on the strip.

Super Gas is one of the most popular doorslammer classes, originating in California in the early eighties as a 'heads-up' alternative to bracket racing's handicap starts. Initially specifically for full-bodied cars, the 9.90 second index meant that the fans got to see all manner of body styles and wheelstanding starts. Richard Eaton's Plymouth Duster was one of the first cars in the UK built specifically for the fledgeling class, photographed at the 1986 World Finals at Santa Pod. Its simplicity was key to its appeal, with the contemporary paint job and lettering the icing on the cake. It was only campaigned for a season or so, then sold on, eventually making its way to Scandinavia, where it may well still be earning its keep on the strip.

Take the following ingredients:

1. Tube chassis.
2. Big block engine - at least 600hp (make sure it has got an alternator).
3. A decent radiator and cooling system.
4. Automatic transmission with trans-brake.
5. Fibreglass front panels and doors.
6. Polycarbonate windows.
7. Lightweight race suspension and wheels.
8. Trick paintwork (optional, but preferred by the fans).

Mix them together, and what do you get? A racecar that can run in the mid-nines, with the charging and cooling systems allowing it to do so all day long. This makes the perfect Super Gas car, and is a fair description of Paula Marshall's Camaro, shown here in its new-for-2000 paint. Of course, if you can run mid-nines, then it shouldn't take too much to step up to the 8.90 class . . . .

Long, smoky, burnouts are a trademark of the Pro Modified doorslammers, and here John Ellis performs for the crowd in the bright yellow 'Lethal' Calibra. Newcomers to Pro Mod in 1999, the team faced the steep learning curve of establishing the right combinations of engine/clutch/chassis setup necessary to get down the strip in less than seven seconds.

In 1963, Chevrolet introduced the new Corvette Stingray, a major re-design of their popular sports car.
In 2000, Jon and Sharon Hogarth introduced their version, although little, if any of it, actually came from Chevrolet! Jon welded-up his own tube chassis to mount the subtlely streamlined Hairy Glass-manufactured repro body. We don't know if any of the big-block engine put together by Jeff Bull is from General Motors, but whatever parts were used, their job is to power the slippery missile to high 8-second Super Comp bracket times.

Short Wheelbase + Big Engine = Frightened Christmas Tree.
Paul Hensher's Mopar-powered GAS ATTACK has run in the Outlaw Anglia series for a while now, and can usually be relied upon to start its 9-second runs in this sort of fashion. And it is this sort of behaviour which is precisely why Pops and Anglias have been crowd favourites since they first became embroiled in the gasser wars of Sixties' America.

Steve Green has been entertaining crowds with his unfeasibly quick Rover V8-powered Mk.1 Cortinas since the early Eighties, starting with a simple 3.5ltr version. After a nasty top end spill in his original stock-bodied car, by that time wheelstanding its way into the nines, the decision was taken to build a new car. The scratch-built tube chassis mounts a streamlined facsimile of a Mk.1 Cortina body, designed to keep the air going over the top of the car during high-8 second Super Pro ET races.

We can't tell you much about Bob Cote's Bad Banana, other than it is a circa '68 or '69 Chevy II Nova, and was a Super Stock racer. We think the driver (presumably Bob?) was a US serviceman based in Germany, and was one of the many continental racers visiting the Doorslammers and World Finals meetings at Santa Pod in the autumn of 1985. We loved it then, and would love to own it now.

Tim Adams double-duty Super Gas / Super Comp '27-T roadster keeps everyone else in both classes on their toes with quick reactions and on-the-index ET's. The aftermarket Buick-headed smallblock powerplant served duty in his squirrely little 105E Anglia before being transplanted into this superbly painted rocket.

It looks like Plymouth has hit the right spot with its PT Cruiser: they are selling them as fast as they can build them, which is quite an achievement in these days of over-capacity in the motor industry. Hats off to them for building a refreshingly different-looking car. The only problem is that they come from the factory with front-wheel drive, and everyone knows that hot rods are driven by the back wheels. Even more so on race cars. This one, destined for 'Super' class racing, the first in the UK (and Europe?), has corrected that oversite with a full tube frame, and with its V8 most definitely driving the rear wheels.

Top Swedish driver Michael Malmgren's Camaro has the distinction of being the first European Pro Stocker to run under 7 seconds. His final-round win at the opening 2000 FIA Championship meet at Santa Pod was completed in 6.99 seconds, at 197mph. European Pro Stocks are built around American NHRA rules, which include limiting the engine size to 500 cubic inches (8 litres), drinking unleaded racing fuel through two carburetors. Comparing this to the 700ci engines and the use of superchargers or nitrous oxide in Pro Modified cars, makes this sort of time and speed all the more impressive.

Mid-20th century Indianapolis 500 race cars still had a lot in common with other hot rods of the time, effectively having developed from the same early roadsters. This four-cylinder Offy-powered car, owned by Norm Olson, was driven by Duke Dinsmore in the 1949 running at the brickyard. It started 15th on the grid, and was classified in 15th position at the end, although not actually going the whole distance.

Organised drag racing was really taking off in the early Sixties, but racecar technology was a bit behind what it is nowadays. The simplest way to go fast was to put as big an engine as possible into a small and lightweight car. This made the little '33 Willys a popular choice of vehicle. Tyre and suspension technology were also a little lacking, and to overcome some of these limitations, the easiest way to get the power down on the track was to raise the front of car. This improved weight transfer when launching from the line. Of course, big rear tyres didn't easily fit under the rear wings, so the back had to be raised too.
And that is why gassers look the way they do, faithfully duplicated in this modern-day replica.

We love sky-high 60's cars, and this, the second of our nostalgia racers, is a '65 Dodge. As the motor manufacturers became more involved with racing, they obviously wanted to see their current models on the strip, winning. By the middle of the decade, the factory-backed Stock Eliminator cars had evolved to combine the big engine/sky-high stance of the gassers, with 'stock' looking bodyshells. We say 'stock' looking, but lots of tricks were used to get an edge over the competition: acid-dipped panels, aluminium bumpers, and plexi-glass windows all saved weight, while moving the front and rear axles forward transferred the remaining weight on launch.

This '27 T-roadster was one of the pioneers back in the early days of Super Gas racing in the UK. Looking very much like an early Street Roadster from the Sixties, 'Mr. Shifter' was especially popular for its wheels-up launches and wild runs. A big-block Chrysler provided the motivation, while it all rolled along on big-and-little slot mags. Owner-driver Mick Cheley later moved on to a 7-second Calibra, while the roadster was last seen advertised for sale in 2000 or 2001. It would be great to see it back out again looking as good as it did here.

Although there are plenty of hot Japanese bikes at the strip - some classes are almost entirely populated by them - cars from the Land of the Rising Sun are quite a rare site. The bikes are popular because their engines, such as 4-cylinder Suzuki GSX motors, can be made to provide enormous amounts of power, reliably. Well, that is precisely what big-block Chevy V8's are also famous for, and that is what powers Jon Evans' and Steve Dunn's tube-framed 'Tokyo Toy'. In fact, its predecessor was originally successfully campaigned with a 2.0ltr twin cam engine, but, frankly, if you want a fast car you need a V8, the replacement small-block Chevy producing regular 12-second runs. An unfortunate top-end spill wrecked the old '76 Celica in 1997, but every cloud has a silver lining, and in this case it resulted in this all-new car, a strong 9-second Pro ET runner.

Four hundred miles an hour! To be precise, a 409.277MPH two-way average on 12th November 1965, gave the Summers brothers, Bill and Bob, the world Land Speed Record. They took the record from Donald Campbell's Bluebird, which averaged 403MPH the previous year.
The 32-feet long Goldenrod held this record, as the world's fastest wheel-driven vehicle, right up until 1991, when Al Teague beat it, just, with 409.986MPH. Weighing nearly four tons, the gold-painted missile was powered by four fuel-injected petrol-burning 426ci Chrysler Hemi V8 engines.
Just imagine being strapped into that tiny cockpit, and thundering across the Bonneville salt flats at over 400 with those four engines roaring up in front. Very few people on this planet will ever get to experience anything like that for real.

This was one of the very first British purpose-built dragsters, conceived by the late Sydney Allard in 1961. Power was supplied by a 354ci Chrysler Hemi, with a front-mounted GMC blower connected by a Potvin drive. This fed back through a Schaeffer clutch to a '39 Ford gearbox, apparently - perhaps unsurprisingly - a source of recurrent problems. Looking a little out of place on a rail are a set of disc brakes, hiding behind those magnesium front wheels: RAC rules of the time mandated their use.
Actual performance figures are not known, except that it ran fastest ET of the day at the October 1961 NSA National Records Day Sprint, a demonstration-only run of 10.8seconds. The beautifully formed bodywork and (over-engineered?) chassis totalled 1800lbs, which was too heavy to remain competitive, so a new car followed in a couple of years or so, the engine used in the new rail. Thankfully the car was not sold on or broken up when retired, but put on display at the Beaulieu National Motor Museum, where it can still be seen.

Harry Miller's race cars were as renowned for their superb build quality as they were for their winning performance. This four-wheel-drive racer (yes, even back in the 1920's and 30's, 4WD and front-wheel-drive racing cars were common), was entered at Indianapolis in 1932 with a Miller 308ci V8.
The Four Wheel Drive Automobile Company-owned car only managed 38th place that year, the V8 not performing as expected. A couple of years later it was running a 255ci four-pot Miller, and in 1936 achieved its best Indy finish of fourth place. It was raced competitively for many years, including at Pike's Peak in 1948, and many other road races and hillclimbs.
The great thing is, this beautiful car can still be seen and heard at classic race meetings today!

A car with a long history, we originally put this '69 Chevelle in the Street Machines gallery. However, although photographed at the Surrey Street Rodders' Wheels Day in 2000, it was originally built and raced in the US back in the Seventies. After being imported into the UK it was initially raced here too - we have a picture of it racing a 'Cuda, in a 1973 Drag Racing Pictorial, so decided it really belongs here.
The name should give a clue to its powerplant, 'rat' being the nickname for the venerable Mk.IV Chevrolet engine: a big-block 427 being installed by it's builder, Frank Russo. We know it was around as a street car in the Eighties, but hadn't seen it for years. The only obvious difference between 1973 and now, is the rolling stock - we are sure it originally ran slot mags (just about everything did in the Seventies!) - although we don't know what the current engine is. The bonnet scoop wasn't there before and the paint appears to have been re-done, but staying pretty faithful to the original scheme. It is always good to see nice cars that have been kept 'as they were' - new owners often try to make a car their own by changing things, losing a lot of character in the process. The longer they remain unchanged, the more it seems they should remain that way.

Another car that maybe should be in the Street Machines rather than Race Car gallery, this was one of our favourite new cars of 2002.
Following the proven gasser formula of using a big engine in a small car, the little Ford Falcon fitted the bill perfectly. Small (by American standards), the Falcon was Ford's entry into the compact market, and proved a resounding success, up against stiff competition from the Corvair from Chevrolet (a couple of years later the Chevy II jumped into the fray), and Plymouth's Valiant.
However, this is not how the top brass at Ford envisaged their baby: the straight tube axle at the front and the radiused rear wheel arches to clear the drag slicks were obviously not on the list of factory options. And we're darn sure that heavy green flake wasn't an option either!

We don't think the '41 Ford was a common sight on the dragstrip during those Sixties' Gasser Wars. If we're correct - and there's a first time for everything - that would have been because of their size and weight, and not because of their looks. Ford's own advertising included claims of "Massive Beauty", and they were about a third again as heavy as a '40-'41 Willys coupe (2800+ pounds to 2100+ pounds)!
Come to think of it, compared to a '40-'41 Willys, the Ford is no beauty contest winner either, so maybe looks were also something to do with it, despite the maker's feelings. But, no one could claim a Henry J was pretty, and that didn't stop them being used.
Perhaps we should just shut up and let you decide. We love the coupe, and would be quite happy to see more Forty-Ones on the strip.

For drag racing news try these sites, or see the links page for some more:

EURODRAGSTER - current news from the European drag race scene

NHRA - the major US drag racing sanctioning body

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