Drag Racing Essay

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Drag racing Drag racing's start is somewhat unknown but people say it's been around since the beginning of the creation of the automobile, Two people would pull up with their hot rods and ask if they wanna race. Since then there has been a few associations that have set up rules and have specified certain tracks, even though there still is illegal street races all the time with people and their modified cars. Drag racing is an acceleration contest from a standing start between two vehicles covering a measured distance(Roger Chapman). Born on the backroads of america in post ww2 years, drag racing was for the most part started on the dry lake beds like Muroc in California's Mojave Desert, where hot rodders had congregated since the early 1930s and speeds first topped 100 mph (NHRA). The surge of WW2 vets returning home, most whom could afford a vehicle and had a sense of adventure as well as a desire to test the performance of their machines, gave to the rise of street racing or "Hot Rodding." As a legal and commercially organized sport, it began on Sunday, June 19, 1950. The first organized drag race was held at Santa Ana, California (Roger Chapman). The first legal dragstrip, the Santa Ana, begun on an airfield in Southern California, and quickly gained popularity among the Muroc crowd because of it's revolutionary computerized speed clocks. Drag meets in the US are sanctioned by associations like the NHRA (National Hot Rod Association), AHRA (American Hot Rod Association), and the IHRA (International Hot Rod Association). These associations established and enforced contest safety rules (Roger Chapman). The NHRA held it's first official race in April 1953, on a slice of the Los Angeles county fair grounds parking lot in Ponoma, California. Four decades later, that track has undergone a six million dollar expansion and renovation and hosts the NHRA

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