Shop Tour - Hardcore Drag Racing

  Ida is cool and confident behind the wheel of her Top Fuel Dragster, in her first FIA event of 2022 she set a new European record of 3.782 seconds making her the first team to make a 3.7 second pass in Europe.     Ida Zterström is from Aland Islands, Finland and even though she is under 30 years old she already has had an amazing career. This is her twentieth year competing in a Drag Racing category, as she was licensed to race junior dragsters at just eight years old.   When Ida was only three weeks old she would travel with her family to different race tracks. She grew up in her fathers workshop and at the racetrack. Her father raced in Pro-Stock and Pro-Modified and also worked with other race teams.  He was her biggest influence and encouraged her to race. When Ida was ready, he built her first JR Dragster.   I recently had the chance to have a Q&A session with her, to learn more about her racing background and to share it with our readers.   ST    Can you tell me wh

   Richard Bays has spent a lifetime in motorsports,and he is widely known as being part of the Drag Racing Fuel team Bays & Rupert. Richard’s thirst for racing came in 1966 when he was running a foreign car repair shop, he was in his early 20’s at the time.  He worked mainly on Volkswagen's and he was one of the pioneers of VW performance. At night he was street racing his own home built Hot Rod and gained quite a reputation in the tuning department. What started out as his daily driver soon turned into a Drag Strip terror. Richard started with a 1958 Fiat 600 that needed an engine. He made adapters and installed a Porsche engine. Why not, his shop was full of go fast parts. He said he chose that combination because it was different. Bays won so many street races with it, that the spectators would make side bets and they would frequently win betting on him.     He called the car a street sleeper and a Corvette killer. In 1966 he also raced it in ET brackets at Lions Dr

* Exhibition Cars *   An exhibition car could be any vehicle that doesn't fit in any class at a sanctioned event. It could also mean it was built just to get crowds excited between rounds. When a racer has a new idea that they want to try and it is not considered mainstream the race event staff might call it an exhibition run or a test session.  Most vehicles were built to run the quarter mile on the just rear wheels. The first official wheel stander was the Dodge A100 pick-up truck built by Dodge to show off their new 426 HEMI race engine & their new compact A100 pick-up truck. The Little Red Wagon pick-up truck was introduced in 1965,and was the first wheel standing truck and was the world's fastest truck at that time. The vehicle was not originally intended to perform wheel-stands. The slight rearward weight bias caused the nose to lift in the air for nearly the entire quarter-mile run. Its first drag strip run netted a mid-11 second quarter mile at 120 mph on just th