|
Throughout the annals of the Old West, there have been many famous
match races noted in the yellowing pages of drag racing history. The
old Drag News Invitationals of the middle 1950s in Southern California,
the UDRA Meets in the same area, the Travel-Ons races in Washington,
the Northern California Championship races in Fremont, Bakersfield and
others, are storehouses of racing lore and performance.
There was a time, and very briefly, where regional areas occasionally
took each other on, and this where the Texas vs. California races emerged.
Back then, there was no corporate involvement and the "My state can
beat your state" mentality was one of the off-springs of this economic
and political freedom. The Texas vs. California race at Amarillo Dragway
was probably the best known of these interstate rivalries, even though
there was never a case where an event featured strictly Texas and California
cars. Neighboring states were always involved somehow as these "wild
west types" battled it out.
Say what you want, but in the decade of the 1960s, the states with
the biggest hot car populations (dragsters, roadsters, altereds) were
these two. The Great Lakes area is not a state. Positively, hot beds
like Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana produced great cars, but
taken alone they would have a hard time standing up to these two in
quality and quantity. Texas and California were just bigger, so like
.. uh .. nobody's fault and no great state chauvinism.
Still, for some reason known only to the drag racing gods, there were
very few interstate rivalries depicted on drag racing marquees of either
the West or East. However, one that did transpire and captured the fancy
of the drag racing fandom was the first Texas vs. California Challenge,
which was not even called the Texas vs. California Challenge in its
maiden appearance.
THE SERIES BEGINS
On May 27-30, 1960, Memorial Day Weekend, Amarillo Dragway owner Ernie
Walker, the Texas Panhandle Racing Association, and NHRA South Central
Division Director Dale Ham hosted the first California-Ohio versus Texas-Oklahoma
National Records Run Challenge Meet.
"I had met Ernie at the (NHRA) Nationals in Oklahoma City a few years
earlier," said Ham. "I remember he drove a D/Stock Pontiac at that race
and we hit it off pretty good. He was a stock broker, owned a boots
and jeans shop and a gas station in Amarillo, and decided he wanted
to build a dragstrip. And he did.
"A year earlier, (NHRA Division 7 Director) Bernie Partridge gave us
an idea for what would be the first big race at Amarillo Dragway. He
had run a Texas vs. California race at Inyokern in California and it
really worked out great. I think Jim Nelson in the Dragmaster (actually
Jack Chrisman) won it, but we had a good turnout of Texas Top Eliminator
cars, A/Roadsters, gas coupes and the like, and we both thought, why
not hold a meet like that at Amarillo."
The first event really reflected drag races of the pioneer era. Even
as late as 1960, there was a large spillover from the street race scene
to the dragstrip. There were stars such as Glenn Ward in the Howard
Cam Spl., Jack Moss, Dode Martin, Raymond Godman's "Tennessee Bo Weevil,"
and Bruce Norman's "Bald Iggle" entered, but Amarillo's excursion into
the big time still carried a lot of the "giving the little guy a place
to race," attitude.
|
|
