Let your brain work here for a hot second, ok? Yes, this is 8mm footage which means that there’s no sound. My suggestion? Open a second tab on your browser and run some bitchin’ music on YouTube under this video as a bed. That’s what we did after the NHRA’s Lewis Bloom told us of its existence.
See, Lewis has a buddy named John Bell and back in the day, Bell was a kid with a film camera who loved drag racing and got to see it all over the place. The good news for us is that he dragged this camera around all over the place and he was handy with it. You are going to see events, runs, and incidents that no one has seen in 40 years…or ever. The span of the video is insane. From Epping to Pomona, you are going to see some stuff.
Bell had a keen eye and a steady hand back then. He captures some of the most famous cars of the period doing incredible things, doing rough things, and every now and again, he captures people piling stuff up. This is a collection of runs and moments that triggered his memory and perhaps that makes it even more fun. A pro stocker spinning a donut at Epping, Raymond Beadle blowing the roof off at Pomona, just timeless stuff that is all right here.
We live in an age where we expect to see every damned thing and when we don’t we get annoyed. This is a window into a different world. A world where when you got to work on Monday you told you buddy stories of the strip and that’s how the information passed. Not on your phone, on YouTube, or anywhere else. The magic in this footage is that we all get to relive these moments with John Bell. We’re thankful that guys like him exist because otherwise they’d only just be stories. Now they’re real history.
