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.
Ben Branch has had his work featured on CNN, Popular Mechanics, the official Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, 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 millions of readers around the world and hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
This documentary about the history of BMW covers everything from the earliest days of the company from 1916 onwards when they were in the business of making aircraft engines. BMW would famously begin making motorcycles…
The Ferrari 275 GTB was a critically important model for Ferrari, it heralded the Italian automaker’s shift from live rear axles in their 250 GT series road cars to fully independent suspension with a rear…
The Aston Martin Lagonda Series 4 was the final iteration of what was almost certainly the British automaker’s most controversial production vehicle, and one of the most controversial wedge-shaped production cars of all time. The…
This is one of the original cars built for the 2000 film Gone in 60 Seconds, a car famously nicknamed “Eleanor” by Nicholas Cage’s character Randall “Memphis” Raines. Eleanor, Chip Foose, and The Dream Car…
The Holden Dealer Team, commonly known as HDT, is a legendary racing team in Australia that fielded some of the country’s greatest racing drivers from the late 1960s through the ’70s and well into the ’80s…
The races held at the Mount Panorama street circuit in Bathurst in New South Wales, Australia have become globally renowned as some of the best racing in the southern hemisphere. The circuit itself has changed…
