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 first of a four part series below.

Video Description:

Dan Stoner, Hemmings Creative Director, and underground car culture digger, has been hearing a rumor about a mysterious ’56 Chevy gasser called “The Underdog” that ran the streets of Chinatown in San Francisco for as long as he’s lived in the city. But nobody knew where it was or had ever seen the car in person.

So, it was time to put the legend to the test. Was it a real car? Were Chinese kids the first to run gassers on the street 50 years ago? And what was the fate of the Underdog? To answer all these questions, he first must go Underground to understand the most mysterious neighborhood on the West Coast: CHINATOWN…