Soichiro Honda apparently coined the phrase "Racing improves the breed," and this was never more evident than when we parked the Dos Palmas Machine Spl. alongside the Mooneyes dragster at the Mooneyes New Year’s Party. Though separated by little more than a year, the difference between these two Gas dragsters was amazing. Wait—Gas dragsters? Who cares about Gas dragsters?
According to National Dragster (and this is no joke), “On April 1, 1957, a consortium of SoCal tracks—including Santa Ana, Lions, Pomona, San Gabriel, Kingdon, and others—voted to ban the use of exotic fuels and called for NHRA to support it, which President Wally Parks did. The so-called ‘fuel ban’ officially lasted until the end of the 1963 season, although NHRA experimented with its return at the 1963 Winternationals but ran that year’s Nationals in Indy on gas only. The 1964 Winternationals marked the official end of the ban.”
As a result of the fuel ban, there was a huge interest in gas dragsters, these two being important examples. But let’s back up to the immediate post-WWII era, when Jim and brother Tom Nelson from Carlsbad, California, and their buds formed the Carlsbad Oilers car club and raced
