Yahoo Autos Aaron Robinson: Nostalgia Meets and Cacklefests Fill Drag Racing's Need to Stop Time
"It’s like one of those things you give away at parties,” says Don Prieto, waving his fist in a small circle as he stands next to his 1960s slingshot dragster, a raunchy fang of fiberglass and rubber called the “Hustler VI.”
“You take it out, spin it around to make some noise, and then put it away.”
So, you don’t actually race it? Prieto, who drove widow-makers like this back in the day and lived to stretch the tales, looks at me as if I’m stupid. “No.”
Four vintage rails are gathered in the courtyard of Prieto’s shop in Torrance, California, about to burn up a couple hundred bucks’ worth of nitromethane for a crowd of nostalgia junkies. It’s a “cacklefest,” as these loud reunions of old dragsters are called.
If you haven’t been to one, they go like this: Old engines are started; they make ungodly, antisocial noise while blowing out ghostly flame puffs and tear-gas clouds of partially burned nitromethane; and then the cars go . . . nowhere. Well, sometimes they coast down a track in a 35-mph parade for fans but no quicker; it’s in the rules.
Everybody seems happy with that. In the good old days, engines blew in a spray of shrapnel and flame. Clutches exploded, cutting cars and occasionally their drivers in half. Brakes failed. Cars hit each other or plowed through the hay bales and wood posts lining the track and into whatever or whomever was beyond. People (and especially insurance-company people) like reliving the past but not necessarily its mayhem.
Each of the cars in Prieto’s yard has a towering supercharged Hemi slung in a spider’s silk of absurdly thin steel tubing. The driver sits in back, legs straddling the rear axle, crotch hard against the differential housing. Nothing about it looks healthy.
Prieto slides a hefty electric starter fitted with a hand grip into the blower pulley, squirts some alcohol past the butterflies, and presses the button. The concussive clapping from the eight pipes of the idling, 414-cubic-inch Hemi lasts for a couple of minutes. When it’s over, the crowd hoots its approval.
One of them is “TV” Tommy Ivo, the child actor now most famous for his dual- and quad-engined monstrosities that personified the no-rules ingenuity of 1960s drag racing. “There was the motor sitting right in front of you, with two pillars of flame coming out of it and the colors going up into the smoke,” says Ivo, now 76 and still beaming that triangular Haywood Botts grin that paid the bills.
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