Hot Rodding

Hot rod racing is popular among those who modify their classic cars to create a stronger more defined model. With the amount of time and effort it takes to properly restore a car, it is only natural that people want to head out to the hot rod race track to see what it can do.

Many people practice hotrod racing in a drag style, but some people simply hit the tracks or abandoned areas to test how high of speeds their modified cars are capable to reach. Regardless of the reason, hot rod racing is very common across the US, UK, and Sweden where hot rod modifications are very popular.

Hot rod racing actually became popular back in the fifties when the end of WWII left plenty of the smaller military airports empty and easily accessible to hot rod racers.  Given that there were plenty of straight empty cement runways hot rod racers could use for drag racing, the sport grew as people took to the abandoned airports to see what their cars were capable of pulling off.  Due to the fact that they were only airport landing strips, most of the original runways and thus hot rod tracks were, and still are, only about a mile long.

Of course, eventually the airport turned race tracks became too small for the amount of people who wanted to race their hot rods even though many could support drag races of up to four lanes.  In response people begin to race their hot rods on the streets which of course made the presence of hot rod racing even more dramatic, although it also brought a negative connation to the popular sport as people began to view hot rod racing as an unsafe ‘geezers’ sport which needed to be remedied which is why organizations catering to hot rodders started building tracks to take racers off the street.

One of the most influential figures in this transition was American Wally Parks who worked hard to create the US National Hot Rod Association and brought hot rod racing onto race tracks instead of the streets.

Rules were created by the organization to make the sport more entertaining and at the same time to keep everyone safe; these rules have since been taken up around the world. After its inception in the 1950s most hot rod racing has remained off of the streets, at least for organized hot rodders, and many tracks have sprung up globally across areas where hot rod racing is practiced.