Here is Part 2 of the Chinatown Confidential series, where the Gassers of Chinatown are the stars. And if you are just joining us, and wonder what the hell we are talking about, you need to read below and watch the first episode using the link below as well. If you are joining us for Part 2, then thanks for tuning in and check out this next great installment. It’s awesome.
I grew up in northern California, in and around the heart of Silicon Valley in what folks call the Bay Area. The Bay is the San Francisco Bay, and while southern California is considered the West Coast’s home of hot rodding, there is no doubt that racing and hot rodding have a very strong history and heritage up north as well. Growing up in the Bay Area, I can tell you that the street racing scene was very active in the 1980s and 1990s, but there were lots of folks who had been racing for decades before and had stories from “the old days” all over the bay area as well. And we had multiple dragstrips in the area, with lots of famous racers coming from the area. The number of firsts, and historically significant racer cars, is pretty stout up there.
But there is one particular legend, about gassers in San Francisco’s Chinatown, that deserves some investigation and that’s just what our friend Dan Stoner from Hemmings thought as well. Check out the second of a four part series below.
CLICK HERE IF YOU MISSED THE FIRST EPISODE!
Video Description:
Eating, drinking, and walking through the streets of the oldest Chinatown in America starts to pay off in Stoner’s quest to find the mysterious “Underdog” ’56 Chevy Gasser: word starts to spread that he’s poking around and the American Born Chinese who built, raced, and lived their lives in straight-axle Gassers come out of the shadows to reveal their stories.
He also finds the hotrodder whose shop put the axles under these cars and gets a nuts-n-bolts lesson on how a gasser was built for the street when everything was built, not bought.
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This Motor Underground episode – Chinatown Confidential Street Gassers – is the second of four episodes in this series.
