As a kid who grew up kind of obsessed with drag racing and who read virtually everything he could get his hands on, I was woefully unaware of the burgeoning world of nostalgia drag racing until the later 1990s. Yeah, I knew they had days at the track where old stuff was present and that nothing new came in the gate but you’ve gotta understand that we didn’t have front engine top fuel cars growing on trees in New England. They did have that situation out west and long before anyone had a nostalgia funny car, those babies ruled the roost.
I stumbled upon an internet worm hole called Nitronic Research which was like a window into a universe I never knew existed but immediately became obsessed with. Many of the guys shown in this video were part of that community and for many years, it was THE place to hang out if you were into the awkwardly named modern nostalgia movement. As a freshman in college I would spend hours on my computer watch guys fling mud, challenge each other to races, and work to top the Nitronic Research Top 10 list. It was pretty bad ass to be honest.
I mention all of this because the video below shows what nostalgia drag racing was like in the 1990s and it was WAY different than what we know now. The stuff was older and slower, the technology involved was far closer to the era nostalgia racing tries to capture than it is today, and the tracks were way more dangerous. There’s a lot of scary guardrail in this video that I know I’d never want to hit.
Dawn Mazi-Hovsepian made this video from footage she collected back in the day at places like Bakersfield and others. It is an amazing window into a now large part of the sport when it was going through an amazing growth period. Like they say, if you want to make an omelette, you have to break some eggs.
Consider these the eggs.
