Shop Tour - Hardcore Drag Racing

                                                       Brad McBride is the builder and driver of this 1963 Type 3 Fastback, known as Blitzkrieg. Photo credit Jason Reiss/PDRA   Brad McBride is the builder and driver of this super cool and fast Type 3 Volkswagen. Brad has been around racing his whole life. His father owned land that's now the pit area beside Piedmont Dragway in North Carolina. His father raced a roadster and later raced a top alcohol funny car called the Starr Rider well into the 1990's. So you could say it was in Brad's DNA that he was destined to be a drag racer. We asked Brad how he started racing and what his earliest memories were. He stated the first thing he raced was 20" Schwinn 5-speed bike when he was 12 or 13 years old.  Even early on he was a fabricator and equipped the bike with wheeli...

   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 ...