History of Street-Legal Drag Racing, 1949 to 2013 - HOT ROD Unlimited Episode 41 - video Dailymotion

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In this episode of HOT ROD Unlimited

Transcript

00:00 This time on Hot Rod Unlimited we are going to tell you the history of street car racing in the United States from

00:05 1949 all the way through the Hot Rod Drag Week coming September 9th to 13th

00:10 [Music]

00:31 Racing street legal cars goes back to the very very beginning of hot rodding as a matter of fact in

00:37 1949 the Santa Barbara acceleration association held what some people consider to be the very first sanctioned drag race and the real draw

00:45 was a showdown between two Los Angeles street racers Tom Cobbs and Fran Hernandez and

00:51 Fran won because he was running nitromethane in his car

00:55 And that is just a snapshot example right there of how the street legal cars end up becoming just too radical to actually be street

01:03 cars and how throughout the years various sanctioning bodies have tried to bring it back to have actual drag racing with at least the

01:10 illusion of cars that are streetable by the time of the very first NHRA drag race in

01:15 1953 there was already a class called stock

01:18 And it was for just that a guy bringing out his mom's bone stock car

01:22 But pretty quickly those cars got hopped up to the point where it was obvious there needed to be another class that was a little

01:29 Bit higher and faster and that was known as gas those are the cars that are really popular today known as

01:35 Gassers and in the very beginning it was a weight per cubic inch class, but the cars were ostensibly street legal

01:41 They had to carry headlights turn signal horns things like that

01:44 But once again as the years went on those gassers became more and more radical to the point in

01:50 1970 where many aficionados think that the gasser class was just ruined because the cars were

01:57 essentially small flip-top funny cars

01:59 In the mid 60s when the muscle cars were booming the stock classes in NHRA and

02:06 AHRA were really popular and they quickly grew into super stock

02:10 But then expanded once again way beyond anything that was really like a true street car when

02:17 factory experimental came out and supercharged factory experimental and wheelbases started becoming radically altered and

02:24 Eventually the class turned into flip-top funny cars

02:27 Which by the way were invented by Fran Hernandez the same guy who won that first drag race in 1949

02:34 Another diversion out of the stock categories was pro stock which was first contested by the NHRA at the February

02:41 1970 Winter Nationals now those cars at the time really weren't streetable at all

02:47 But they still had the guise of a car that you could buy off the showroom floor. They had big tires

02:52 They were tubbed big wheel stands huge crowd favorite. But again very quickly it got out of control and by

02:59 1972 grumpy Jenkins had introduced the first all-tube chassis pro stock car

03:05 Throughout the 70s and 80s it became obvious that NHRA was really about professional drag racing

03:12 There was nothing street legal about it anymore

03:14 But the fans still had that craving of what's parked in my garage and can I go beat the other guy and there was a huge

03:21 Street racing underground especially around Chicago and Detroit

03:25 Indianapolis and Hot Rod magazine in

03:27 1992 spotted this trend going on and decided to launch an event that really became

03:33 Seminal in the whole street car racing world

03:35 It was called the Hot Rod

03:37 Fastest streetcar shootout and it went down in Memphis, Tennessee in conjunction with the National Muscle Car Association and at the time

03:44 Nobody had seen anything like what we had going on there

03:48 Street legal cars that were blasting in the high 8 second range in the quarter mile

03:53 It was just unheard of Max Carter and his Nova was the first winner of that competition

03:58 And that was a tube chassis car

04:00 But ostensibly street legal the fastest streetcar shootout boomed into an entire industry

04:06 It just exploded with multiple sanctioning bodies the NMCA and the outlaw streetcar

04:11 Association a bunch of little organizations in the Midwest and it turned into a speed parts industry that was huge as well

04:18 Fastest streetcar racing was here to stay and they still do it with the National Muscle Car Association

04:22 Today, but as Hot Rod magazine saw its own fastest streetcar shootout

04:27 Once again expand to the point where none of the cars that competed in it were streetable at all

04:33 We decided to reel it in again and in 2004 Hot Rod came up with the pump gas drags

04:40 Again held in Memphis, Tennessee

04:42 This competition required the race cars to drive 30 miles from comp cams in Memphis all the way to the drag strip

04:49 And we made them run on rocket brand 91 octane fuel each car would have to hot lap

04:55 Three consecutive passes and the one with the lowest average ET would win

04:59 While the pump gas drags were a good step towards bringing streetability back to the streetcar racing world

05:06 We felt that it really wasn't enough and that's when we came up with the final step in the evolution Hot Rod drag week

05:35 The core of drag week is really driving street cars on the street and on the highway

05:40 And so what we did is we set up five days of drag racing

05:44 Where the competitors had to drive their cars from track to track a thousand plus miles along the way and in each class the car

05:52 That averaged the lowest ET over five days would win

05:55 Not only must competitors drive their race cars on the highway

06:01 But they cannot be followed by support vehicles they can tow a trailer on their race car

06:07 But they can never put their race car on a trailer

06:10 That is the real core of what drag week is all about it is as if these cars are just on a road trip

06:17 Drag racing every single day

06:18 This is obviously the most hardcore thing that you can do with a incredibly high horsepower street car Larry Larson

06:26 Who's won five times in a row has run 690s at over 200 miles an hour in a car that he's driven as far as

06:34 1,400 miles in a week the thing about drag week is not just that the cars have to be fast its survival

06:41 It is really a test of man and machine

06:43 Because your car can break down a bunch of times and if you just don't have the guts to keep fixing it and keep going

06:50 Then you are not drag week material

06:53 You

06:55 In

06:58 2013 drag week is in its ninth year and it's become incredibly popular as a matter of fact

07:04 We sold out all 250 of our slots in eight hours this year

07:08 Within those 250 cars are a number of classes that they're running in

07:13 We've got everything from bone stock cars all the way up to the unlimited class

07:18 Which is where they're running in the high six second range of 200 miles an hour

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07:23 In the other classes we break them down by big block or small block

07:35 naturally aspirated or supercharged and by the amount of chassis modifications that the car has and what that does is let all the

07:43 Competitors race against cars that are similar to theirs and there's some brutal classes even in the small block naturally aspirated classes

07:51 You've got guys just going head-to-head on a death match to win this thing

07:55 Another thing that is amazing about drag week is it isn't over till it's over

08:00 You miss one day of racing because your car is broken or you didn't make it in the rain and you are out

08:06 Which means on the last day of drag week any one of the dark horses could win

08:10 Another thing that's really cool is the huge variety of cars that show up because the classes are very liberal

08:17 There aren't a lot of restrictions that tell you what you can do as far as a specific engine or specific body that you can use

08:23 So you get stuff like Tim Reed's little white Pinto that has a turbo GM LS engine in it

08:30 And he brought the thing back a couple of years and actually got this Pinto running in the seven second range in the quarter mile

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08:50 In fact, there's a bunch of guys like that who come year after year improving their performance or even jumping from one class to another

08:56 I'm thinking of Doc McIntyre who runs this red 68 Camaro that he's owned since high school

09:01 And he's just been whittling away on this car in the naturally aspirated Pro Street class and last year finally got his first

09:09 8-second pass

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09:23 You can even look at Larry Larson when he first showed up in his 66 Chevy - it was pink

09:29 It looked like an 80s fairground car and it had a 1471 supercharger sticking through the hood. These days

09:36 The car is gray and silver and has a Mike Moran twin turbo big block in it

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09:53 Then you've got Jeff Lutz who has really been the only hard core contender going after Larry Larson

09:59 And he's got this giant heavy 57 Chevy that has been just getting closer and closer to Larry every year

10:07 He almost won last year just down to the millisecond

10:10 And this is a 57 Chevy that carries the front end off the ground all the way through the quarter-mile lights

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10:52 Now here's the interesting thing that we have to deal with

10:54 Remember how we've been talking how street car racing always gets out of control to the point where the cars just aren't streetable anymore?

11:02 Well Larry Larson has been saying that we're going to let that happen to the Unlimited class of drag week

11:07 Because while his Nova is an all steel original car

11:11 Some guys are entering Unlimited with full on fiberglass or even carbon fiber pro mod cars

11:17 Larry's argument is those just aren't street cars, they never were manufactured by Chevrolet, Dodge, whoever

11:23 But you know what? So far those guys with the pro mod cars haven't been able to survive

11:27 Drag week has been self limiting

11:30 If the car is too radical to drive a thousand miles, then it's not winning drag week

11:35 So we've said that we'll leave the rules alone until 2014

11:38 But what do we do then?

11:40 Should we make it a rule that you can't have a fiberglass car on the street?

11:44 Or should we let the road be the judge?

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11:54 You want to see drag week for yourself?

11:57 You've got the opportunity right here on the Motor Trend channel

12:00 We'll be running a live video feed of the drag strip action every day September 9th through 13th

12:05 You don't want to miss it

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History of Street-Legal Drag Racing, 1949 to 2013 - HOT ROD Unlimited Episode 41

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