This video is very, very neat. What you are about to see is a nine-minute clip from a film that was produced in the 1960s called, “A Gathering Of Monsters” that told the whole story of the 1965 Mickey Thompson 200mph Meet at the track then known as Fontana Drag City in California. Thompson was running the track and would later rename it Mickey Thompson International Raceway but when this video was shot it was still Fontana. The litany of legendary cars and drivers shown here cannot be oversold.
Virtually every mid-1960s top fuel hero you can dream of was present and accounted for. From east to west and north to south, all of the serious players showed up, vying for the mondo $5,000 cash prize. There’s rare footage of Ed Pink’s legendary Old Master fueler running with Connie Swingle at the tiller, the Surfers pushing Mike Sorokin up the return road with their famed ’55 Chevy tow car, Mickey Thompson himself peeling off a wad of cash to pay the winners, and a cheesy announcer with cheesy music. It doesn’t get better than this!
(Editor’s note: Thanks to modern day slingshot hero Adam Sorokin for setting me straight on some of the information surrounding this video, which he transferred to digital along with his pal Cory Lee.)
We’re sure this point could be argued to death, but we believe that it was right about this time that dragsters would reach their zenith of popularity in the sport. They couldn’t have possibly predicted how quickly funny cars would explode in popularity and how they’d soon be playing second fiddle to those cars. The reasons that this happened were many but the manufacturer support of the funny car programs, their “production car” appearance, wild paint, and big personalities, all made the nearly identical looking fields of dragsters just seem like old news, even though they were faster.
Balance (to some degree) came to the universe later on and everyone exists on their own ground these days but one need look no further than races like theMarch Meet to see huge fields of floppers and more modest numbers of top fuel dragsters to see that history (even in small isolated pockets) does have a tendency of repeating itself.
This video is spectacular because we see LOTS of competition passes, multiple rounds, and the final which we’re not going to give away! You need to watch this deal to see who wins and we can guarantee you that the results of the race will leave you with a big grin on your face and it’ll also have you looking for the keys to your time machine. Just make sure you pick us up on the way to Fontana!
