A woman in a pit crew uniform strides up the stairs of the drag-strip timing tower, staking out a spot where she can both watch over the race car queue in the staging lanes and monitor Saturday night’s final session of Top Fuel qualifying. In her hand is a slip of paper listing the elapsed times of dragsters that have run in earlier sessions. Of particular interest is the status of the Virginia-based Great Expectations III, now sitting precariously in the No. 8 qualifying spot with a 5.90 elapsed time, in imminent danger of being bumped from the field.
The woman is Alison Lee. She and her husband, Jim, have been drag-racing for 55 years and then some. Anyone who went to major NHRA events on the East Coast in the 1960s and ’70s knows the name—and indeed, they would recognize Alison, ever-present as successive Great Expectations cars circulated through drivers. Today she has the same cloud of dark hair, and she still stalks the staging lanes and pitches in on the wrenching with timeless energy. She climbs the tower stairs without grabbing the handrail.
The main difference in 2018 is that the yellow-and-blue race car is a Nostalgia Top Fuel entry, a front-engine rail built to modern safety standards but otherwise teleported back to a 1971 time frame. Its driver is third-generation drag racer, her and Jim’s grandson, 28-year-old Tyler Hilton.
Alison Lee is one face of the NHRA Heritage Drag Racing Series, but not the only one.
A long hike through the Auto Club Raceway Famoso pit area, past the food concessions, throwback tow rigs, vintage-style Funny Cars, Tri-Five gassers and all-engine AA/Fuel Altereds brings one to the blur of spinning wrenches and intensely focused mechanics prepping the High Speed Motorsports dragster driven by Mendy Fry. She is the No. 1 Top Fuel qualifier here with a 5.59 blast, and she has already clinched the 2018 nostalgia series championship. But her resolve to win the closing race of the season has not slacked one bit.
A West Coast racer and a relative youngster at 49, Fry wouldn’t seem to have the same grounding in the sport as Lee, but assumptions are thin ice. She grew up test-driving the creations of her father’s chassis shop, and she has competed in NHRA Super Street, Econo Dragster and Top Alcohol Dragster. Friendly and accommodating despite the immediate pressures, she patiently coaches a fan snaking into the seat of her race car. That polite atmosphere permeates the entire pit area—never mind the maintenance requirements on par with the Tony Schumacher-level of competition, including a pistons-out rebuild after a run. Spectator-halting ropes and barriers of major NHRA meets are unseen. The only thing that chases crowds away are engine warmups rich in a nitromethane assault on
eyes and ears.
Indeed, the 27th California Hot Rod Reunion is as much celebration as competition, an homage to what fans—many graying boomers but plenty of young ones as well—consider the sport’s glory days. The Bakersfield paddock seems to stretch forever with swap meet stalls full of vintage parts and replicas of classic T-shirts. One cohort is drawn to the spectacle of the Cacklefest, a gaggle of fuelers—some authentic period pieces no longer safety-certified to race, others that are replicas—assembling on the strip for a deafening demo of vintage horsepower. The names are familiar, if distantly, and the faces are recognizable—there’s Tommy Ivo!—despite the passing of years.
As the late October evening fades and darkness envelops this stretch of Central Valley flatlands, the Nostalgia Top Fuel qualifying pairs attack the quarter-mile. Most runs are full-length passes, illuminated by steady flames from the header pipes but completed without lurid displays of tire smoke seen in old photos, though several are punctuated by dramatic engine failures. The Lee car can’t improve on its best run, and it’s pushed to No. 9 in an eight-car field.
The notion of retro seeps into the weekend even before sniffing the nitro or hearing open headers. The drive up from LA is in perhaps the most perfect modern car for this event: a Challenger Hellcat Redeye, all 797 hp of it. Once over the Grapevine and splitting off from I-5 onto California Highway 99, the agricultural bounty of the Valley is remembered. Tacking east to the track through the tawny hills pocked with pump jacks wresting oil from the ground, you may as well be on the other side of World War II.
The track has been upgraded in a multitude of ways since I last raced there 40 years ago, but it’s not a made-for-TV showcase with glass-enclosed sponsor suites. Spectators carry film cameras. Race cars have names that are sponsor signboards—Dadgum Dart, Strip Tripper, Outer Limits, Pure Hell. Bottom line: It’s
just right.
Nostalgia races are hardly new at drag strips, but it wasn’t until 2009 that the NHRA officially put its imprimatur on the concept with the formation of the Hot Rod Heritage Racing Series. The movement had been building momentum, a reflection of fans’ desire to resurface a fondly recalled era of the sport and racers’ desires to step back from the exhausting drill of the professional circuit and enjoy a less costly form of competition.
Compared with NHRA’s national-event competition—the “big show” to this crowd—it’s loosely organized: Not all of the classes run at every event and independently organized categories not in the rulebook, like AA/Fuel Altered and Factory Experimental, are sometimes invited to join meets like the California Hot Rod Reunion. The cornerstones are Nostalgia Top Fuel and Funny Car; another 11 classes are run either as single-class heads-up eliminators or with a handicap start on a driver’s-choice dial-in.
Front-engine Top Fuel racing was doomed largely by the 1970 clutch explosion at Lions Drag Strip that sliced Don Garlits’ car in pieces. While recovering, Garlits conceived a rear-engine layout—moving the driver ahead of the engine, out of harm’s way—and won the opening national event of the 1971 season. Racers switched en masse.
The Nostalgia Top Fuel cars rewind the class rules to approximately the sunset of the front-engine era in the late 1960s or early ’70s. Chassis must meet the latest safety spec, but engines are restricted to 470 cubic inches with a GMC 6-71-spec supercharger running at a maximum 14 percent overdrive. An approved tire, 13 inches wide with a stiff sidewall, must be fitted. Other details (the blower case length and rotor twist angle, rear gear ratio, flow of the fuel-injection pumps) are tightly regulated. A veteran of the nostalgia movement, Ken Gentry is the enforcer, logging tire serial numbers and sending injection pumps out for validation. “I don’t want a single qualifying spot or round win going to anyone who doesn’t deserve it,” Gentry makes clear.
Other restrictions are aimed at keeping the cars simple and the racing cost-effective. Clutches are limited to three discs; electronic management devices are not permitted, though data acquisition is. Wheelbase is capped at 225 inches—current rear-engine NHRA Top Fuelers run 300—and high wings are verboten. That’s not to say that performance is locked down at levels of four decades ago: Every qualifier ran quicker than the class-best ETs their predecessors ever achieved. It’s not a steampunk put-on, it’s real racing.
Steve Torrence crowned 2018 NHRA Top Fuel champion
Richie Crampton, whose daily job is building cars at Morgan Lucas Racing, gave Steve Torrence a quick, fast, and cooperative Capco Contractors Dragster this year. And during their semifinal match-up …
The Nostalgia Funny Cars, fitted with bodies of models from no later than 1979, are crowd-pleasers of similar devotion. The engines, also resembling production powerplants, are slightly larger, a maximum of 500 cubic inches. A two-speed transmission is permitted, as are wider slicks. To allow outdated “big show” cars into the heritage program, the popular 40-inch front overhang of recent years is allowed. The wide age span of the cars brings an unusual circumstance, though. “We’re almost at a point where we’ve got nostalgia of nostalgia,” Gentry says.
This doesn’t limit the appeal of what is a “reunion first and a race second,” according to Larry Fisher, executive director of the Wally Parks NHRA Motorsports Museum, which organizes the race. For this final race of 2018, there are 430 entries, and 20,000 spectators are anticipated, Fisher says. The action is live-streamed and available on NHRA D3TV.
It turns out that the drag-racing deities were smiling on Alison Lee and team. A racer entered in both the Top Fuel and Funny Car classes hurt his dragster engine and decided to withdraw it in order to focus on the Funny Car. That put Tyler Hilton into Sunday’s finals.
Preparation for the main event draws in every team member. Mendy Fry, who cut the clutch discs back at the Los Angeles shop, has already packed the parachute and is mixing the nitro before the car heads for the lanes. It’s not busywork: “The maintenance program is where the race is won,” she says, minimizing her own role as driver.
Her coolness this race day may reflect the relief of having already locked down the championship, but the emotions were not so restrained when she learned that her lead in the points chase had sealed the season’s title when the Tulsa race was rained out. She learned of this at her office, where co-workers barely knew she raced. “I broke into tears,” she declares plainly, then turns back to readying for the next run.
The reprieve granted to the Great Expectations team doesn’t last long. Hilton lost to Fry, 5.58 to 6.30, in the first round of final eliminations. The long cross-country tow home to the Virginia farm will start soon, and not long after arriving, plans for a new season will begin to take shape.
–Norman Mayersohn
This story originally appeared in the November 19 issue of Autoweek. Subscribe here.