Walking on the hallowed patch ground that is Famoso Raceway it becomes easy to see why the March Meet is now in its 52nd year. People like this stuff. In our case a rekindled interest in drag racing and hot rodding started again around 15 years ago with a wiff of nitromethane and a flashback to the Coca-Cola Funny Car Cavalcade of Stars tossing up fiberglass down a seventies-soaked New England Dragway. Move the pointer to 2010, and the anachronism that is vintage drag racing is still largely intact. Freeze time around 1978, add a few thousand gallons of nitromethane, and never forget the associated junk and iconography. The first stop at every March Meet is always the swap meet at the top end of the race track. Exposure to all this goofball stuff started as a kid seeing a Funny Car supercharger bouncing on fire down the grass in front of the grandstands, liberated from its hemi thanks to the horrors of nitro. This of course led to launching the Mongoose and Snake Hot Wheels down what seemed like five miles of orange plastic track. And though we occasionally used to race down an actual drag strip with a ’67 Plymouth Barracuda later in life, it was all the stuff that came before moved moved us in that direction in the first place. The exquisite junk that is still with us all.
For LIVE video coverage of March Meet drag racing action head to BANGShift.com