BANGIN’ GEARS
LIFE’S A GASSER!
E
verybody loves a gasser. Young
or old, there’s something about
the look and style of one of these
old-school drag machines that gets
the blood pumping. You could be from
Mars and take your first look at a gas-
ser and tell that it’s something very
special and exciting. I first saw gassers
as a kid in magazines, as model-kit box
art, and in the Donruss series of Odd
Rod trading cards that were drawn in
the style of Ed Roth by artist and musi-
cian Bob Taylor.
Growing up at the tail end of the
baby boom made guys my age hungry
for all car-related stuff, and gassers pro-
vided a lot of daydream material. The
thing about my love affair with gassers
is that by the time Donruss came out
with Odd Rod trading cards in 1969, the
gassers had begun their exodus from
drag racing. I always wondered why
there were cool muscle cars on the
road, but there was never anything that
looked remotely like a gasser. By the
time the Pro Street style emerged, it
was so significantly different that even
we youngsters knew they weren’t the
same thing—we just didn’t know why.
The “why” was because the technol-
ogy of racing, engine building, tires, and
chassis design were on a meteoric rise.
The look of the gasser—fat pie-crust
slicks sticking out from bodywork,
skinny front-runners, solid front axles,
belching fenderwell headers, mile-high
front stance, induction through the
hood, and wheelie bars were the recipe
every kid used to draw a hot car, and
it was gasser all the way. Bob Taylor
and Donruss knew this. But race teams
wanted to win, and when that meantchanging the car’s design to take
advantage of new developments—
such as better tires, more power, and
good suspensions—the look of com-
petitive race cars changed.
By 1968, gassers were on the way
out, and by 1970, Pro Stock had taken
over, changing forever the look of the
fastest gasoline-powered, production-
based drag racers. Gone were the
sky-high frontends with the top-heavy
look, now replaced with sleek ground-
hugging bodies over enclosed wheels.
Driven by technology, the look of com-
petitive door-slammers—now called
Pro Stock—changed overnight, but I
never got over my love of gassers.
The funny thing is, gassers look like
they do for a reason, and it’s because
the racers of the era did whatever they
could within the rules (and sometimes
beyond) to gain an advantage. That
meant shifting the weight balance
of the car and optimizing everything
for traction. Those tricks might not
be cutting-edge today, but the rules
of physics are still the same, so they
still work. Consequentially, solid front
axles, ladder-bar suspensions, radiused
wheelwells, fenderwell headers, and
lightweight fiberglass body panels are
the stock and trade of the gasser look.
For that reason, Car Craft has com-
bined forces with Speedway Motors
of Lincoln, Nebraska, to build a gasser-
themed project later this summer. It’s
a dream come true for me, as all these
years have passed and I’ve never put
hands on a real one. We’ll be bringing
you all the action of the buildup and
completion of a Chevy Nova gasser in
a special Week To Wicked presentation
that takes place at the Car Craft techcenter the week of August 12. (Make
sure to check us out at CarCraft.com
and SpeedwayMotors.com.)
Speedway Motors has been proac-
tive bringing to market a dizzying array
of suspension kits, engines, and other
parts for the gasser throwback move-
ment, and the folks there want all of
you to know what can be done afford-
ably without access to a fabrication
shop and a staff of chassis builders. As
builders of race cars themselves, the
team at Speedway has taken a lot of
the “experimentation” out of the equa-
tion that happened back in the day,
creating a range of kits with assistance
from powerful CAD programs and real-
world testing.
We’ll be building a Chevy II gas-
ser with Speedway Motors using its
Chevy II gasser kit and other supplies,
but our strategy will be one of com-
promise; we’ll be fully acknowledging
the fact that many projects start out
as heirlooms and rare vintage finds
that would be ruined if the same tact
was taken as in 1960, so we’ll be stop-
ping short of altering the wheelbase
or slicing up the factory sheetmetal.
The entire transformation from stock
to gasser will happen in a week’s time,
but prior to that, we’ll be bringing you
the assembly of a gasser-centric big-
block Chevy we’re stuffing between
those narrow fenders.
This is shaping up to be an amazing
summer! —Johnny Hunkins4 CAR CRAFT NOVEMBER 2019
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Car Craft Mag
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