This post is one of a series that I'm calling "2009 Rewind." I'm marking time until the racing season gets going in my part of the country by looking at some of my favorite stories from last year. This particular episode, however, is also "2008 Rewind," "2007 Rewind," and even "2003 Rewind." That's because, for the last few years, I've been working on a book that I'm calling Drag Racing: The Democracy of Speed.
I could just as easily have called it Why I Like Drag Racing.
Eastside Speedway, Waynesboro, Virginia. (All photos copyright John Edwin Mason, 2002-2009.)
Sure, I like it for some of the same reasons as anyone else -- loud, fast, dangerous cars, driven by men and women who do amazing things with them.
But I also like it because drag racing is -- by race, by ethnicity, and by gender -- the most diverse motor sport in the United States. It's the most diverse by a lot, not a little. And it's been that way ever since it's birth in southern California, over 60 years ago.
Eastside Speedway, Waynesboro, Virginia. (Click directly on any of these photos to see larger versions.)
There are a variety of reasons for drag racing's openness to blacks, Asians, and Latinos, and to women of all races and colors.
Early hot-rodders were often rebels, who prided themselves on marching to a different drummer. If mainstream society in the '40s and '50s thought that the races ought to be segregated and that women were to weak to handle a fast car, that was reason enough for many early drag racers to go in the opposite direction. After all, what mattered most was the quickness of the car and the skill of the driver.
Eastside Speedway, Waynesboro, Virginia.
The National Hot Rod Association [NHRA], the organization that did by far the most to make drag racing a national sport, also played an important role. Open-mindedness was a matter of formal NHRA policy. In 1952, it told its members, in no uncertain terms, that were no color or gender barriers to membership. It spread its policies through its proselytizing wing, the Drag Safari (later called the Safety Safari). Beginning in 1954, members of the Safari annually left their home base in southern California and traveled the country, from coast to coast, organizing car clubs and races and spreading its drag racing gospel.
The results of drag racing's gospel of inclusiveness were plain to see. In the '50s and '60s, at any given event in southern California, you were likely to run into the Bean Bandits -- a popular and highly successful team composed primarily of Latino drivers, but which included Asians and African Americans, as well. The multi-racial team of Stone, Woods, and Cook might have been on hand with its legendary '41 Willys Gasser.
Bunny Burkett, right, in her souvenir stand. Eastside Speedway, Waynesboro, Virginia.
By the end of the '50s, women drag racers, like Shirley Shahan, were winning major national events. Many other women followed. In 1977, Shirley Muldowney won the first of her three NHRA Top Fuel championships (the drag racing equivalent of the heavyweight boxing crown). By that time, Bunny Burkett, seen above, was one of the most popular -- and one of the most competitive -- racers on the east coast. In 1986, she won a championship of her own, in the International Hot Rod Association's [IHRA] Alcohol Funny Car class.
Bunny Burkett's team prepares her car for a trip down the track. Eastside Speedway, Waynesboro, Virginia.
Today, black, Latino, and female racers, such as Antron Brown, Cruz and Tony Pedregon, Ashley Force Hood, and Melanie Troxel, compete at drag racing's highest level. All have won multiple times. Both of the Pedragon brothers are former champions.
At the grassroots, drag racing also remains true to its culture of inclusiveness, as you can see in these photos.
No other form of motor sports even comes close to matching this record. No woman has ever started a race in Formula 1. Danica Patrick is the only woman to have won a race in IndyCar racing, and she's won only once. No women have won in any of Nascar's top levels; the last African American to do so was Wendell Scott, in 1963. (Nascar has historically not been inclusive, to say the least. Its Drive for Diversity program may be changing things, however.)
You can see many other photos from Democracy of Speed in its photo gallery. Click here or on the link at the top of the page.
I've written more about diversity in motor sports on my main website. You can find those thoughts, here.