Night of the living drags: meet the latest retro phenomenon - vintage drag racing - at the California Hot Rod Reunion

摘要

The proud old dragsters parade down the return road in a measured, macabre procession, their exhaust headers spitting out ghostly flames and filling the nighttime air with enough nitromethane to bring tears to a dead man's eyes. Addict, Scorpion, Samurai, Freight Train, Swamp Fox, Poison Ivy- thirty-seven cars roll past, each a gloriously evocative artifact of the golden age of drag-racing. Most of them are packing blown hemis mounted in front of the drivers, where God and Wally Parks intended, and the racket is so deafening and percussive that it sounds more like artillery than automobile engines. The cars swing onto the drag strip and park diagonally on the median in front of thousands of cheering fans. The engines snap, crackle, and pop as they idle, enveloped in a heady haze of heat, smoke, and nostalgia. Periodically, the drivers whack the throttles, and as the willowy chassis contort spasmodically, the crisp but wicked exhaust notes echo off the grandstands, setting up an eardrum-rattling call-and-response dynamic. Say amen, brothers and sisters, and welcome to the Church of the Heavenly Horsepower, where nitro, alcohol, and gasoline are the Holy Trinity and hell is life in a Japanese four-banger. Tonight's sermon is called Cacklefest, and it's the unlikely emotional centerpiece of the California Hot Rod Reunion.