THE GAS ERA LIVES ON

These vintage race cars chart the evolution of technology in the early days of drag racing.

- TONY THACKER

Soichiro Honda apparently coined the phrase "Racing improves the breed," and this was never more evident than when we parked the Dos Palmas Machine Spl. alongside the Mooneyes dragster at the Mooneyes New Year’s Party. Though separated by little more than a year, the difference between these two Gas dragsters was amazing. Wait—Gas dragsters? Who cares about Gas dragsters?

According to National Dragster (and this is no joke), “On April 1, 1957, a consortium of SoCal tracks—including Santa Ana, Lions, Pomona, San Gabriel, Kingdon, and others—voted to ban the use of exotic fuels and called for NHRA to support it, which President Wally Parks did. The so-called ‘fuel ban’ officially lasted until the end of the 1963 season, although NHRA experimented with its return at the 1963 Winternationals but ran that year’s Nationals in Indy on gas only. The 1964 Winternationals marked the official end of the ban.”

As a result of the fuel ban, there was a huge interest in gas dragsters, these two being important examples. But let’s back up to the immediate post-WWII era, when Jim and brother Tom Nelson from Carlsbad, California, and their buds formed the Carlsbad Oilers car club and raced the dry lake at El Mirage. There were no freeways then, and the lake was a long way up Highway 395 over the Cajon Pass. There had to be something better, and there was: drag racing. You didn’t need a dry lake for drag racing, you just needed and old airstrip such as Paradise Mesa, an abandoned WWII Navy emergency field in the heart of San Diego.