Nostalgia can take as many forms as the memories that generate it but the word has always had a gently muzzy connotation you might think would have precluded its use in connection with that most explosive form of motorsport: drag racing.
But for a couple of decades now, straight-line racers from the 1950s and 1960s have been fired up to do side-by-side battle once again on drag strips across North America in Nostalgia Drag Racing events.
All types of cars ran in the home-spun sport of drag racing back in the day but fuel-burning "rail jobs" with big front-mounted V-8s ruled - and do so once again. They didn't call these '60s-style dragsters "sling-shots" for nothing.
Picture yourself in a thick flameproof suit, cinched by a five-point harness into a seat shell bolted to a vibrating floor pan inches off the pavement, in a narrow, steel tube cockpit.
Your helmeted head is surrounded by a double-barred roll-cage and, if you turn it a bit, you can see the tall fat rear "slicks" mounted tight to the bodywork.
Between your knees is a fabricated "butterfly" steering "wheel" consisting of two vertical crescent-shaped handles about 200 mm apart, looking look like this (-) and trimmed in original worn and scarred wood.
Dip your eyes and they fall on a large red button - more on that in a moment. Just over the Plexiglas windscreen is the business end of a 600-hp, 350-cubic-inch, fuel-injected, small-block Chevy V-8 framed by eight swept-back exhaust stacks emitting a hellacious barking crackle and thin jet streams of hazy-blue, eye-watering burnt alcohol.
Just visible, a long way forward, are two improbably skinny wire wheels flanking an invisible needle-sharp nosepiece.
At this point, you're "staged" in front of the "Christmas tree" starting lights in your tire-rubber-layered lane, with a quarter of a mile of dead-flat pavement stretching out into a narrowing vee before you.
Now, says nostalgia drag racer Dennis Black of Markham, Ont., you push that big red button.
This activates the trans-brake system that locks you in place while you bring the motor up to a cacophonous 4,500 rpm.
Then, when the light turns green, and with a reaction time of maybe 1/500th of a second, you punch the button again along with the throttle.
And then, says Black, "all hell breaks loose. It wrinkles up the tires pretty good and carries the front wheels for about 50-60 feet. And you're riding on the wheelie-bar."
Translation: the tires' soft sidewalls flex as they spin and "grow" taller while gaining traction, the front wheels have lifted off the pavement and a bar extended rearward is preventing you from tipping over.
And, oh yeah, you can't steer - the wheels are in the air, remember.
"You just point it," says Black. "But when I'm hooked up in the groove [the sticky part of the track] and everything goes well it launches dead straight."
And some 8.7 seconds later, he's slicing through the timing "trap" at about 250 km/h. To put that in perspective, Black says it will get to about 200 km/h in a city block.
The current modern quarter-mile top fuel records, incidentally, are an incredible 3.7 seconds for elapsed time and a 517 km/h top speed.
And when you don't get it hooked up in the groove?
"It doesn't go straight at all. It can go all over the place." Initially, he says, you can "kind of" control things a bit by "pedalling" the car - backing off and re-applying the throttle. And when the front wheels come back to earth, they can help too. "But it can be an exciting ride," says Black.
And one that he'd been waiting to experience since childhood chum and now racing partner Jim Barry's father took the pair to their first drag race as young teens. Growing up in the Arnprior, Ont., area, he says the two kids "lived in their cars" during their high school years. "But we never went drag racing."
Barry became an auto mechanic and moved west and Black to Toronto, the pair communicating intermittently, until the former returned to Arnprior where he now operates an automotive repair business. Black, now 57, living in Markham and product manager for hydraulic truck crane maker Atlas Polar, had amused himself with motorcycles over the years and Barry with racing hydroplanes.
But the topic of Nostalgia Drag Racing came up during a telephone conversation in late 2008 and, after trolling various websites, resulted in the pair finding their racer in British Columbia.
It arrived in Barry's shop early last year and, after considerable fettling, Panic Attack Racing - as Black, Barry and their staunch crew of supporters have dubbed themselves - embarked on a novice season dedicated to Barry's father Wes, now deceased, who'd introduced them to the sport.
