(Photos Courtesy of Hall family archive) – While Dale Hall’s may not be a household name in many dwellings across this country, he’s a guy that has a life and a career that was 100% BangShift approved. One of the most well known and fearsome Pro Comp drag racers of the 1970s, he had a low dollar approach that relied more on the brains of he and a small talented crew than it did on budgets. His cars were always minimalist. They had no splashy sponsors and his most successful car, an almost wholly naked slingshot dragster lacked lots in the pizzaz department but laid out guys like Joe Amato and even Dale Armstrong among others in competition. This was all done with blown small block Chevy engines built off of production 010 blocks. The engine shown in the lead photo above was among his most interesting and we’ll get to all that in a minute.

To understand Dale Hall’s success, one must understand the NHRA’s late Pro Comp category. The class was designed to provide a step between the sportsman ranks and the fully blown professional classes and it debuted in 1973. Remember, this was long before there was such a thing as a dedicated top alcohol funny car class or top alcohol dragster class (although they would later sprout from pro comp to stand on their own). Dragsters, altereds, and funny cars of varying engine combos, induction systems, and fuels ran against each other, handicapped off of the national records of each combination. Hall’s first national event win came in 1974 running his familiar slingshot dragster. At this time the car was injected and running as a B/FD (B/Fuel Dragster). Hall defeated Dave Mack in the final round of that race and it was actually a historically significant moment that still stands to this day. Why? Dale Hall is the only man to win an NHRA national event driving a B/FD.

Here’s the S&W dragster in its injected days:

Forging a path with that car and the small block engines he was building in his Connecticut machine shop, Hall raced on the local and national level, continuing to refine and better his combo. He was locking horns with legends like Ken Veney, Dale Armstrong, Joe Amato, and a host of others who are among the most talented and innovating racers the sport has ever seen. All the while winning races, collecting the 1978 NHRA Division One Pro Comp championship and setting himself up for a season he’d long be remembered for: 1979. During that season he won the Summernationals at Englishtown, New Jersey by defeating Joe Amato and then at the next race, the long defunct Molson Le Grandnational at Sanair he beat Dale Armstrong in the final round. Hall got the better of Amato again that year during a points meet at New England Dragway just a couple weeks after Indy. He was thumping rear engine, hemi powered dragsters with small block Chevys that ran iron blocks, aluminum heads, and absolutely nothing exotic.

Hall, his crew, and his car gained such notoriety at that time that they were referred to as a (then) modern version of the famed Surfers team from California that won top fuel races in the 1960s with no money, lots of brains and guile. Perhaps the highest compliment paid to hall and company was a massive feature in Popular Hot Rodding Magazine where they had him go through all of his “secrets” in terms of building what were likely the most powerful stock block Chevy engines in the world for that era.

These were 10,500 rpm engines with stock length aluminum rods, 9.8:1 compression pistons in them, and a forged Chevy 350 crank that was offset ground, turned down to accept 283 bearings, and a Chrysler sized billet snout that he would install over the end of the crank. The camshaft was 296-degree duration piece that had .675 lift, and a 112-degree lobe separation angle. How about the heads. Buckle up because these will blow you away. They were Brownfield aluminum pieces with 2.02 intake and 1.60 exhaust valves. Seriously. We told you that there was no exotica happening here…yet. The blower was a Bowers 6-71 that was run at a 14% overdrive and spun with a Cragar drive. The ignition was a Vertex magneto with timing locked at 35-degrees. Yes, this is what was taking on 540ci hemi engine and cleaning their clocks.

Yes, the small block cars were able to run at a better weight 3.9lbs per cubic inch but the trade off is that they had to be worked so hard that very few people were able to make them survive. Hall was one of those people and his craziest iteration was just around the corner.

When the NHRA splintered off top alcohol dragster and alcohol funny car into their own classes during the early 1980s, Hall trooped on. It was during this time that he developed the craziest small block Chevy of his career. One that would carry him to elapsed times in the 6.20s and ultimately to a national event final round in 1986 at Maple Grove and a national event victory in 1987 at Sanair, Canada. The engine was temperamental and certainly had a reputation for spitting the bit at the wrong time but boy when it was on…it was ON.

Using a set of Barnes aluminum heads developed for use on sprint cars and a truly crazy cast aluminum tunnel ram intake manifold. The engine made huge power but it also had a blower belt that was eleventeen feet long and prone to breaking at the exact wrong times. Because of the unique length of the belt, they were hard to come by at first but eventually Hall had spares in the trailer and was able to get the engine sorted to the point of being legitimately competitive and bringing him a national event victory.

Yes, Hall did eventually abandon the slingshot dragster for a more modern rear engine piece that was artfully called The Nutmegger honoring the team’s Connecticut roots. The photo above is awesome because you can see Hall’s head pinned to the back of the roll cage as the car leaves with the wheels up at Gainesville so many years ago. In 1987 Hall made the quickest run in the history of Top Alcohol Dragster with this car and engine combo, recording a 6.284/212.46mph time slip at the Keystone Nationals.

Overall, Dale Hall appeared in 12 NHRA final rounds and won four of them. He did it in a class where some of the biggest names of the coming decades in the sport competed. He did it in a class where there were a collection of great thinkers and better than that, great thinkers that could apply their ideas and go faster. Hall was one of those men and at times, the best of those men. Named as one of the 20 greatest alcohol racers in NHRA history, a member of the New England Hot Rod Hall of Fame, and perhaps most importantly known as a great dad to his kids and a great husband to his wife, Dale Hall was a racer’s racer and good person.

His legacy lives on today through his son Scott Hall. Scott works for Moroso and better than that is as hard running a drag racer as his dad was. Competing in the Top Dragster category, Hall is running in the same elapsed time area as his father did and amazingly his dad’s hard work is more than just a fond memory for Scott. The dragster that Scott is finishing will be powered by the same Dart Buick headed, screw blown small block that powered his father’s final top alcohol dragster entry in the 1990s and the chassis? Yes, the chassis is the same one as well! If there is a finer way to honor the legacy of your dad than that, we’re not aware of it.

So like we said, you may not have known of Dale Hall before you started reading but you do now and we’re guessing you’re as impressed as we are with his brains and accomplishments.