Wow, is this awesome stuff! I happened to stumble upon this 15-minute home video made at the 1972 NHRA Winternationals by a pair of Australian brothers who traveled over to take in the race. Their footage, while sans sound, is almost hypnotic to watch. Within the first couple of minutes you’ll see Wild Willie Borsch chatting in the pits, Don Garlits swapping a motor with people literally breathing down his neck (keep an eye out for the kid that sticks his head basically under Big’s arm pit!), Sox and Martin wrenching on their stuff and a whole lot more.

I am debating on this being the 1972 or 1973 race but in the end I am sticking with ’72. Grumpy Jenkins’ Vega can be seen in a pairing and that places in in the 72/73 time frame before he brought out the 1974 car that really changed pro stock forever (sticklers will note that the 1974 car was a reworked version of a ’72, but you get where I am going). The guys that posted the video said that it was from ’68 but they made an honest mistake. There was no NHRA pro stock in 1968 and the cars pictured in this video are newer than ’68…not to mention the prodigious number of rear engine dragsters featured which were largely non-existent in 1968. That’s my story and I am sticking to it.

Yeah, the footage is grainy and there is no sound of roaring engines of cackling zoomies, but where else are you going to see Ronnie Sox dry hopping, Jr Thompson’s Opel GT gasser launching, the greatest funnies, fuelers, and altereds of their day, and Pomona as it was during the historic golden age of drag racing? Answer? No where but on this old converted celluloid. That’s A-OK in my book. If you can’t watch great stuff like this without mentally inserting the sound, you lack total imagination.

PRESS PLAY BELOW AND TRAVEL BACK IN TIME TO THE 1972 NHRA WINTERNATIONALS!