Having returned to this website and added a bit more of my racing history I realised that many people may not know too much about the early drag racing scene. Obviously it was heavily influenced by the "Drag Fests" when several Americans came over with their cars to spread the word and show us how to drag race.
However, for most aspiring racers, US speed equipment and even V8 engines, were very rare and expensive. Thus various classes of cars were devised to give more even racing. These were based on capacity and weight. There were also sub divisions based on Production, Modified or more extreme, Street Altereds. These were then put into Top, Middle or Junior divisions. There were similar rules for Competion Altereds and Dragster classes.
To ease the pit organisation the various groups pitted together and so you rapidly got to know who your competitors in the class were. Thus friendships were created, often we would help each other out with tools, parts or advice - before going out to race each other.
This gave rise to much creativity with the smaller British/European engines being developed to ever greater power outputs and skilful engineering to reduce weight and increase the performance.
However more and more US equipment was being imported and there was a steady change to "Bracket" racing where cars of similar performance raced together - 8 to 9 seconds, 9 to 10.5 etc or the fastest 8 then second fastest 8. This fostered the move to bigger capacity, imported V8 engines as they could give more HP and so race in the quicker brackets. Another change was for some "Handicap" racing, where slower cars were given a headstart to produce close finishes - this favoured consistency rather than ever improving performance.
This did mean that the close friendships in the pits was lost to an extent.
There were exceptions with the Super Gas, Pro -Mod, Street Rover and Pro-Rover etc.
Thus I started in the Junior street car ranks, moved to Junior Comp Altered, then Comp 2 or 3. Then I restarted with the Rover V8 class, which divided into Street Rover and Pro Rover.
So 20 years of very happy times, never the quickest in the class times, but racing within my budget and getting a lot of satisfaction.....as did many others in those times.
