Today on QuarantinePiece Theater we are taking you back in time and showing you one of the coolest drag racing films ever made, “Big Numbers”. All the usual suspects are accounted for and an added bonus is the narration by legendary the legendary voice of Keith Jackson. This film was likely paid for by Chrysler as it focuses a lot on Sox and Martin as well as other Mopar racers.
Keith Jackson’s deep voice was a staple on the American sports landscape for decades and decades. Best known as one of the premier football announcers ever, he was actually a pretty damned good drag racing guy as well and he was a staple of early TV broadcasts of the sport from the US Nationals to stuff like the videos shown below.
Lots of people claim that the 1960s were the height of drag racing’s popularity and while I have no numbers to back up the majority of my own opinion. I am not sure. There is more drag racing media available instantly from every angle of the sport today, there are as many tracks open right now as there were in the 1960s (which is a fact) and those tracks are by and large, larger and seat more people. Once the season starts again here will be live drag racing on the FOX network and when you combine the number of people watching all of the streaming coverage of various races every week on various platforms and over all the various forms of the sport, there’s a LOT of fans out there.
Jackson takes us through the early days of the sport with footage we have never seen before. There are some really neat old cars shown during those segments. We’re talking history from the dry lake beds and the salt flats. The video they have of that stuff is incredible.
Ultimately we end up with a recap of the 1966 season and corresponding footage. Guys like Jere Stahl are given lots of love, which is cool as the sportsman racer is no longer covered in this light anymore. We’ll stop yapping now and just tell you to sit back and kill a half our watching these two vintage videos!
I really enjoyed watching those early years of drag racing. tks
They only showed footage of bill Jenkins once other then that it was a good video