Hubert Platt’s Ford Drag Team Mustang Georgia Shaker was born in the Myrtle Beach area of South Carolina in 1931. Not exactly drag race central for someone with Hubert’s skills but in the mid-1950s, there was as much demand for fast cars and good drivers as there was plenty of bootleg liquor to be transported. […]

Kroona & Sandberg Hailing from St. Paul, Minnesota, the team of Bruce Crandall, Dave Sandberg, and Dave Kroona took their drag racing seriously. Crandall and Sandberg partnered in the early 1960s and campaigned a number of Modified Production Chevys before Kroona joined the show. It wasn’t until 1967 that the guys really got serious about […]

Grumpy’s Toy XI 1974 Vega Bill “Grumpy” Jenkins was a true drag racing legend whose reputation for winning long preceded Grumpy’s Toy XI. He fi rst gained fame in the early 1960s building winning Mopars, Junior Stockers, and the Old Reliable Chevys for Dave Strickler. Between 1961 and 1963, the Old Reliables, I through IV, […]

Don Tognotti’s Bushwacker The term “cookie cutter” used in the context of the automobile has come to mean multiple cars built in the same manner. It would be easy to say that today’s cars fit this description. With the rules and regulations in place today, it is difficult to break free of the mold. Ingenuity […]

The tracks that managed to survive through the toughest times of drag racing history still have a tough row to hoe, because politics, safety, and the economy still determine the livelihood of most tracks. Large or small, drag strip owners are sitting on pins and needles because of all the rules and regulations required to […]

During the drag racing boom of the 1950s and 1960s, drag strips popped up all over the place. Big cities, suburban areas, and tiny towns had their own drag strips, so it was possible for racers to compete at a variety of tracks without traveling very far. I’ll call it a “drag racing hub,” where […]

Of the four major regions showcased in this book, the South is arguably packed with the most creative minds in the drag racing world. Granted, being creative doesn’t always equal success, but it makes for an interesting experience—the Southern folks always put on a great show. This ingenuity was evident in the cars that raced […]

As we continue eastward on our trek to find the coolest abandoned drag strips in the country, the terrain becomes a little rougher, and it’s easy to see why it was more popular to build tracks out West. The hilly lands of Pennsylvania, and many of its neighboring states to the north, cost additional time […]

There are folks who say hot rodding originated on the West Coast, and while those folks have a good point, it doesn’t mean gearheads in other parts of the country didn’t have a few ideas of their own. Drag racing certainly had its hotspot in Southern California, but other states had plenty to offer as […]

Believe it or not, there was once a time when a guy on the East Coast didn’t have direct access to the best speed parts of the era. There was no Internet, no lightningfast shipping capabilities, and no parts warehouses with millions of components on the shelf, ready to ship. Getting parts from California carried […]