The NHRA or National Hot Rod Association was founded by Wally Parks in 1951, he wanted to get drag racing off the streets and onto safer, professional level tracks and in doing so he doubtless saved a lot of young men’s lives throughout the 50’s and 60’s.
This great 10:00 minute film covers the first ever national scale NHRA drag racing event in 1955, it’s Super-8 footage so sadly there’s no audio but it’s still well worth a watch.
Some of the cars featured are so unique that I was a a little frustrated that so little information is available on them, it seems that quite a strong cottage-industry had built up around drag racing and hand-built, one-off cars were a fairly common sight at the strip.
Articles that Ben Branch has written have been covered on CNN, Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, Autoweek Magazine, Wired Magazine, Autoblog, Gear Patrol, Jalopnik, The Verge, and many more.
Silodrome was founded by Ben back in 2010, in the years since the site has grown to become a world leader in the alternative and vintage motoring sector, with well over a million monthly readers from around the world and many hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
