Featured Links You May Have Missed

Don Ewald's

(click on a picture for a larger, clearer image)
Being the age I am, which is, uh, not all that young, if you asked me which images defined drag racing for me, I'd probably come up with about three. One would be two '41 Willys gassers, high and mighty, aerodynamics be damned, staging for a race. Another one would be an early A/FX, pre-altered wheelbase, a Super Stocker on really bad drugs. And one, maybe the one that burned the deepest into my car-crazed, Midwestern adolescent psyche, would be a hemi-powered, front-engined, blown fuel dragster, almost insignificant chassis tubes exposed, with nothing but a fuel tank and some motorcycle wire wheels out front, and a driver and the grace of God out back. Pretty much exactly like the picture at the upper right, in fact. Well, gentle reader, Unc has found Fuel Dragster Heaven - or at least that portion of it accessible with a modem. Don Ewald, in association with David Barrow, has created a site with more than 2000 front-engined dragster shots; rare, medium, well done, undone, up, down, sideways, backwards, the famous, infamous, and nearly invisible. Black & white, color, action, at rest, close-up, detail, being worked on, being crashed, and just plain being. Oh, yes, and 1320-foot burnout passes on tires you'd  hesitate to put under a competition big block anything these days. Open-face helmets maybe five feet behind a blown fuel motor. Smoke. Fire. More smoke. More fire. 2000 ******* pictures! Finally, a good reason to have unlimited Internet access!	17k
	46k
	30k
Editorial Note: Lest you think this is yet another installment in an ongoing "Gee, you should have been there" deal, some perspective is in order here. Permit me to let you in on a little secret: part of the point of "nostalgia" for what used to be in drag racing, at least for some of the people my age, is not only a fondness for the equipment and the people who owned and operated it, but also, for want of a better word, for the "accessibility" drag racing offered. On many of the pictures on Don's site, you'll see two, three, and even sometimes four names attached to a car. They owned it, and one (or more) of them drove it. You see, back when, you could own one, perhaps even drive one. No, they weren't cheap, far from it. But they were affordable to the committed, through partnerships, a few friendly parts deals, and a lot of hard work. You, not some managerial wizard with an agent, an airplane, and multi-million dollar connections to people with big decals, you could have won Top Fuel at a big race. People just like you and me and the guy down the street with that neat Camaro did win Top Fuel. That's what you missed out on, not some pieces of steel and aluminum and magnesium, but the chance, however slight, to be and do at almost any level you might want, rather than just observe it. And that, I think, is part of the point of Don's site, and perhaps all of the point of the title "We Did It For  Love." Yea, you might have missed it - life is like that. But a lot of people didn't, and "Fuel Dragsters" shows a bunch of them doing what they loved to do. Whatever your age, you owe it to yourself to see how and what they did, and what they did it with, so take a look at Don's site - you won't be disappointed.
Pete Millar logo illustration and photos courtesy of "Don Ewald's Fuel Dragsters"
go to "Fuel Dragsters - We Did It For Love"

Jim Sorenson's
(click on a picture for a larger, clearer image)

	21k		31k
			23k
I'm not sure exactly how old I was the first time I saw a real Fuel Altered make a pass, but it was old enough to figure out that driving one wasn't one of my preferred career paths. Before our little friends in Glendora decided that drag racing needed to become the "Snarling Wombat Tools Presents The East Gerbil Nationals," and gave us the sanitized, homogenized circus we now think of as "drag racing," AA/Fuel Altereds provided honest-to-God, no-*** DRAG RACING!!! in			12k
a manner that had to be seen to be believed. Imagine: the wheelbase of an old Honda Civic, about 1500-1800 horsepower, old-style slicks, no magic lockup clutches, the aerodynamics of your bathroom sink, wings - maybe - with about as much downforce as you get sticking your hand out of your car window. Now clock that sucker in the mid-high '6s at about 205 mph, and figure the run took at least 1400 feet of driving from side to side of the track. Impressive, scary, awesome, frightening, and simply the most entertaining things with wheels you've ever seen. In case you missed out on the action (and shame on you for being born too late), Jim Sorenson's "Awful, Awful Fuel Altereds" - a early-era nickname for the cars - can help fill that void. Hundreds of pictures of Fuel Altereds doing the exciting and bizarre things Fuel Altereds usually did. As you can see from some of the sample illustrations from Jim's site, above, AA/FAs handled ever so well (no, that is not a crash picture) and provided the driver with exquisite protection in the event of an engine mishap. Easy to navigate and organized by team/name reference (e.g., "the Mob" and "Rat  Trap, etc.," above right, "Awful, Awful Fuel Altereds" can fill those gaps in your drag racing education. Or, if you're my age, bring back those memories of wondering whether to watch in sheer amazement or flee in abject terror every time an AA/FA made a pass. Either way, worth the visit.
logo illustration courtesy of "Awful, Awful Fuel Altereds" - photos (photographers unknown) courtesy of Jim Sorenson
go to "Awful, Awful Fuel Altereds"

Byron Stack's
(sorry - these pictures are not "clickable" to enlarge)

I first featured Byron's wonderful Gasser site more than a year ago, quite some time before it occurred to me to "archive" editorial copy on something I knew would change every so many months. Which means, much to your relief, that the deathless prose that accompanied at least two of these pictures is lost forever. Shame on me. You, however, have no excuse for not having visited this wonderful collection of static and action shots already. In "Gasser Madness," Byron has assembled an outstanding collection of weird and wonderful cars from the past,
as well as maintaining a large collection of pictures the Gasser concept updated in the modern "idiom." Whether you were there at the start, the end, or not at all, it's really hard not to be a fan of Gassers. If you are, it's a must see. If you're not, well, a visit to "Gasser Madness" might just change your mind.
Pete Millar logo illustration and photos courtesy of Byron Stack's "Gasser Madness."
go to "Gasser Madness!"

return to home page  |  return to links page  |  current featured automotive/racing link