Sitting here in the East Coast BangShift World HQ, I’m still trying to wipe the perma-grin off my face from our weekend broadcast of the 2010 NHRA California Hot Rod Reunion. Tens of thousands of people from all over the globe tuned in and spent their weekends glued to the computer screen watching some of the best nostalgia drag racing you’ll see anywhere in the world. The proof that BangShifting is an international language came in the from of the guys and girls watching every ounce of the coverage from points in Europe, the African continent, and all the way over in Australia. I’m pretty sure a few people were awake for 72 hours straight! It struck me very early in the coverage that we’re spoiled rotten. The “we” I speak of refers to fans of nostalgia drag racing today.  

For the entirety of my life, which has been 30 fun-filled years, drag racing has been a sport whose history has been alive. My sons will not have that same experience. In recent years, many of the heavies from years past have begun to leave us at a regular clip, but the titans who are still alive and participating in the sport make events like the CHRR all the more special. I wonder what the course will be for nostalgia drag racing once we get to a point where the only thing we have are the memories. 

As many regular readers already know, I am a certified drag racing history dork. For whatever reason, I really became obsessed about learning everything possible about the sport from a pretty young age. One of the thrills I get in my work both here at BangShift.com and in doing freelance print magazine stories, is having access to some of the people who really had an impact in one way or another on drag racing. The fact that one can pick up the phone and talk to Don Garlits, Vance Hunt, Jon Lundberg, EJ Potter, and on and on really throttles me. Recording the history that these men made seems far less like work and far more like a public service.

To some level, the powers that control “big time” drag racing probably look forward to the days when they have none of the old timers to contend with. Their perspective and experience often provides less than stellar marks on the direction of the sport and the decision making prowess of those steering it. When the voices of history are silenced, they are free to do as they please with nary a soul to answer to.

It seems once that founding generation finally leaves the picture, things turn for the weird. One need look no farther than what happened in the world of open wheel racing and the current course of NASCAR to see that. They have altered and “enhanced” their respective worlds so far that the public has begun to vacate in droves. While drag racing certainly isn’t breaking attendance or ratings records this season, their trends are far more favorable that both stock car racing and open wheel competition.

So once again we get back to the point. A world-wide audience tuned in last weekend to see cars tuned by Roland Leong, driven by Dale Pulde, announced by Jon Lundberg, and raced on a drag strip that was first opened in the 1950s. They saw the Winged Express, wheeled by Mike Boyd, swap lanes on a burnout, drive around his opponent, back up to the starting line and win the match. They cheered when Adam Sorokin clinched the 2010 Top Fuel championship, and gasped when a rail wrecked hard. They conversed, joked, and wondered just how many sets of pistons the nitro cars went through all weekend. Long story short, they experienced, from their own home what a drag race in the late 1960s would have looked and felt like in Southern California with many of the original players involved. We didn’t broadcast a race, we broke the time-space continuum. 

Like I said, we’re spoiled rotten. 

Thanks for reading,

Brian