This web site has been live for a little over a year and has been called BangShift.com for just 10 months. In that time it has grown from an idea into a place that has been visited 900,000 times. It’s hard to believe that, in 2009, pages of this site have been seen 8 million times. We put a lot of thanks for that on our sponsors Ridetech, MSD Ignition, Cherry Bomb, and Aeromotive. We hope the content has something to do with it, too.

Here’s a review of the ten most seen subjects that have been covered by BangShift.com in the past year. We have plenty more of this stuff coming in 2010, so please tell a friend. Better yet, email them a link!

NUMBER 1, CALIFORNIA HOT ROD REUNION: By far the most seen content on the entire site in 2009 was the coverage of the NHRA Museum’s AAA-sponsored California Hot Rod Reunion nostalgia drag race and show held at Famoso Raceway in October. The traffic was mostly due to BangShift.com’s three-day live video feed from the event, and the live-feed window is the single page of the site with the most views ever. We also had many event galleries. You can see an index of all our California Hot Rod Reunion coverage by clicking here.

NUMBER 2, DRAG WEEK: The second most-seen topic was another drag racing event, the Hot Rod magazine Drag Week, where race cars drive on the street 1,000 miles on a trip to five drag-race stops. The cars with the lowest elapsed time as a five-day average is the winner in each class. BangShift Chad still has not recovered from all the video and photo coverage. Click here for an index of all the BangShift.com coverage of the Hot Rod Drag Week 2009.

NUMBER 3, LARRY LARSON VIDEO: BangShift Chad’s video of Larry Larson’s Drag Week winning turbo Nova running 6.93 seconds and then cruising Las Vegas Blvd. an hour later hit message boards everywhere, and viewers came to BangShift by the thousands. Combined with views on YouTube, StreetFire, Vimeo, and other places where it has been embedded, it’s hard to imagine how many people actually have seen this! Click here to watch the BangShift.com video again!

NUMBER 4, NATIONAL HOT ROD REUNION: Chad and I had one of the best trips ever when we went to Kentucky for the NHRA Museum’s Holley National Hot Rod Reunion in Bowling Green, Kentucky. There were lots of views on all the pages from that nostalgia meet, but the one that really hit home for fans everywhere was the video of the Cacklefest starring Don Garlits. Click here to see the Cacklefest at Bowling Green and a list of all the other BangShift.com content from the 2009 National Hot Rod Reunion.

NUMBER 5, LEAF BLOWER SUPERCHARGER: This is just one of those internet things you can’t predict, but when I posted some photos of the leaf-blower supercharger setup arranged by one of my brain-cell-deprived college buddies, the thing went viral and we ended up getting links from all over the place. It wound up as the fifth most viewed topic on the site all year. That tells you that, if you really want to help us out, spread links to anything we have that you find extra entertaining. Click here to relive the leaf blower supercharger.

NUMBER 6, F-BOMB in FAST & FURIOUS: Even though it was just a bad clone of the car appearing for about 9 seconds at the end of a not great movie, the buzz on David Freiburger’s F-Bomb Camaro being seen in the Fast & Furious movie was enough to send traffic to us in droves. Actually, we still get lots of F-Bomb traffic even now, all from searches that start with the movie. Click here to see the original news item.

NUMBER 7, 2009 MARCH MEET: Our first big venture into nostalgia drag racing coverage was daily updates from the 2009 March Meet at Famoso Raceway with both still photos and video. We think this coverage would have generated even more traffic if people knew to expect this from us like they do now. Some of Chad’s video work was really great, so click here to watch dragsters in action and to get a list of all the BangShift.com coverage from the March Meet.

NUMBER 8, the 1932 CHEVY WHEELSTAND: This one went down just last week. Photographer Denis LeBlanc sent us a two-angle photo sequence of this hot rod doing a very serious wheelstand and a more serious landing. We called the car a 1931 Ford at first, but were quickly corrected that it is a 1932 Chevy. Click here to see the action.

NUMBER 9, GM PERFORMANCE DIVISION DISBANDED, OR NOT: Back in February when talk about GM’s bankruptcy was first being taken seriously, word came from inside GM that the Performance Division was being dismantled and the engineers were being placed in other parts of the company. The news item broke big. Of course, far fewer people came hunting for information when it was revealed days later that the news was not as bad as originally reported.

NUMBER 10, IHRA REVISING THE REDLIGHT RULE: Here we got a little bit of information about IHRA top brass changing the redlight rule from "first" to "worst" so that on a double-breakout, the guy who slept the longest would get the  "worst" penalty and lose the round. Click here to see the original news item.

So that’s our top content from 2009. We expect even bigger things in 2010 and hope you’ll be here with us, and bring some friends along as well.