Four years ago Kevin Stith wanted to create a calendar to promote the popularity of NHRA Heritage Series and IHRA nitro funny cars, jumping at the opportunity to publish it under his Legends of Nitro T-shirt line.  After all, his company creates the T-shirts for a lot of these racecars and teams.

I’d photographed most of the west coast funny cars, but found that a lot of professional drag racing photographers wanted to volunteer their work and participate in the calendars. Often when their awesome photos get published in stories, here in BANGshift and many others, that’s probably the last time for the usage of current year racing photos.

So I got the job as the photo editor and worked with Stith artist Cary Perez who is responsible for many of the awesome T-shirt designs they sell.

After three successful editions, there were now twenty-four nitro funny car owners and twelve owners of period looking fuel altereds who wanted to participate in the 2018 calendars – and the journey began. The hardest part was to find so many shots that didn’t repeat the angle and would include some crew, some people who make these nitro hot rods run.

Some of the participants this year were 2017 Heritage Series nitro funny car Champion Ryan Hodgson, match race veteran Wally “G-Men” Giavia, the California Hustler, Marc Meadors, “Mr. Explosive” Mark Sanders, multi-event winner “One Bad Texan” John Hale, six-time Champion Jason Rupert, IHRA Champions Mike McIntire and Shawn Bowen, newcomers Matt Bynum and Elaine Sellers – 24 in all in two calendars!

Then some of the hottest and meanest AA/Fuel Altereds graced the third calendar, led by the Winged Express, Pure Hell and Pure Heaven, Nanook, Godzilla, Black Sunshine, the Tramp, the Rat Trap and more. The cover is a tribute to the late fuel altered driver Brett Henry, who passed away at the 26th California Hot Rod Reunion, with a cover photo shot by “Bad” Brad Klaassen.

The really cool part is that you can have all three of these colorful nitro calendars and have them all for FREE, just pay for the postage. In the USA postage is about $8 bucks or if you are in the Carson City, Nevada you can stop by the Stith Printing Legends of Nitro World Headquarters and pick up a set of calendars and you can buy some BANGshift.com swag there too!

Want a set of Calendars? Call (800) 490-8333 with a credit card for the postage and they’ll get em right out to you, they’ll figure it out if the shipping needs to go to another country and the cost.

Hope you like these Legends of Nitro calendars, it’ll always be a project we do with love, you can almost smell the nitro!