High Performance: The Culture and Technology of Drag Racing, 1950–1990 by Robert C. Post

Abstract

1024 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Friedel is really looking at is the way social forces can collide and collude to create a space for a device that soon ceases to seem novel. Where he is best is in tracking the way the zipper came to inhabit a mental and spiritual role as well as a commercial one. He quotes Erica Jong and Lyndon Johnson, traces the social overtones of the zipper in Aldous Huxley and the sexual ones in Tom Robbins—“little alliga­ tors of ecstasy,” Robbins calls zippers. There is more Friedel could have said—about the way, for instance, that decoratively zippered jeans and jackets showed up in Wal-Marts, a half-century after “Schiap’s zips,” or the return of the button to the jean fly as an element of nostalgia. (Oddly, the hippie’s jeans with retro buttons took on some of the same sexuality the zipper had made its own.) Friedel pulls the different fabrics of this story together the way the zipper itself draws clothing together: not just efficiently and inge­ niously, but in a way that lends readers a certain odd and undefinable trill, fillip, frisson—well, zip—of satisfaction. Phil Patton Mr. Patton is the author of Made in U.S.A.: The Secret Histories of the Things That Made America (New York, 1992). High Performance: The Culture and Technology of Drag Racing, 1950— 1990. By Robert C. Post. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Pp. xxiii + 416; illustrations, notes, appendixes, bibliog­ raphy, index. $35.95. “A scholarly monograph on drag racing? You’ve got to be kidding!” If that sums up your reaction to the publication of Robert Post’s addition to the Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology edited by Merritt Roe Smith, suspend disbelief for a moment and read on. Yes, drag racing ¿5 a serious enterprise, involving thousands of competitors and backers willing to sink hundreds of thousands of dollars into the design and construction of high-performance ma­ chines and operate them at serious risk to life and limb, and millions of spectators annually, not to mention television audiences and major commercial endorsements. Moreover, drag racing is a serious matter technologically. Drag racers, first in the United States and then in Canada and Australia, have pressed a bewildering array of materials, control devices, and fuels to their absolute limits—and on occasion beyond. Moreover, drag racing is big business, and thus of interest to students of social and economic history. While technology pushed to the limit is the heart of drag racing, the process takes place within parameters shaped by culture, not least of all because drag racing is entertainment (the title is a double entendre). Finally, the dictates of safety have exercised a constraining influence on the sport, for some of the most promising ways of trying “to get from here to there before TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 1025 anything else” (p. 28) proved to be inherently dangerous. In showing how these conflicting factors shaped the sport, Robert Post tells a compelling human, technological, and cultural story. It begins with the semilegendary “first drag race” near Goleta, Cali­ fornia, in 1949 in which a machine burning a mixture of methanol and nitromethane, “fuel” as it came to be called, beat a supercharged car running on pump gasoline. Some competition restricted to cars burning pump gas continued, and indeed continues, but nitrometh­ ane was what made the sport, for engines burning “fuel” produce far more power than equivalent gasoline engines, but at an awesome cost in fuel consumption, longevity, and noise, a matter of considerable theatrical importance. And the results are awe-inspiring technologi­ cally as well as theatrically: today’s top-fuel dragsters can turn a quar­ ter-mile in less than five seconds from a standing start and cross the finish line at over 300 mph. Drag-strip owners and sanctioning bodies would ban fuel from time to time, but its superior performance and crowd appeal could not be denied. Post tracks drag racing’s development in successive, overlapping phases. In the first, an offshoot of informal (and generally illegal) street races, racers built and drove their own machines using modified...