Anita Mäkelä
Anita spent one summer in Ohio State, USA when she was 16 years old and after that she was a huge fan of American cars, her first one being a Pontiac Trans Am. That brought American Car Shows, Cruising evenings and Drag Racing into her life and at one Street race the fastest lady got a special award, which she won. Anita says that left a spark in her soul, which is still there today.
In 1987 her friend was working at an FHRA race office and she overheard Rune Grönlund saying his Competition dragster was for sale. She asked Simo Patoharju to become her crew chief and form a team with her. She won the last race of the year at Motopark, Finland, a great start to her career.
She then heard there was one more race that year at Santa Pod. On Sunday she ran against Tony Morris and won, but the chutes didn’t open immediately after the finish line and she ended up rolling in the field. She was OK, but sore, and her new dragster was in pieces. The team built a new competition dragster and won the Finnish Championship in ´88 and ´89.
Anita decided to step up to Pro Comp and bought a Top Alcohol Dragster from Ken Murray and Brian Hansell in Canada. She went to the USA to make a deal with them and got her licence at Bakersfield. Jarmo Pulkkinen was a huge help to the team.
The rivalry between her Sega-dragster and Tony Donges’ Nintendo-dragster was legendary and Anita finished in the top three in the European Championship from ’92 to ’96, gained two Championship titles and held the record for the quickest ET and fastest speed several times over this period.
Returning home on the ferry in 1996, as …
Wild Bunch
The idea for UK drag racing’s Wild Bunch first saw the light of day in 1994. After many years competing separately at hot rod events, nostalgia enthusiasts Roy Wilding and John Guthrie both had visions in forming a class to cater for those slingshot dragsters and competition altered owners who were racing for fun on a budget. Towards the end of the season Roy and John presented the idea to then Avon Park Raceway promoters Goodguys UK and the class with an invited eight car field was given a chance at the season ending Night of Fire.
A partial season of events for the club was run exclusively at Avon Park the following year, which led to more new and historic cars joining the club. The first full season came in 1996 with an ambitious series of events taking place at the club’s home at Long Marston Airfield. Averaging around 15 to 20 teams at any one event, the inaugural series win went to Roy Wilding and his ‘Chariot of Fire’ slingshot.
For the first nine years the club ran its events within the track’s run what ya brung meetings but this then grew, as many wanted to also run at RAC/MSA level and at rounds held at the newly renamed Shakespeare County and Santa Pod Raceways. At these races, instead of running to the club’s traditional time trial format, teams would race in bracket-style eliminations at MSA events.
In the 1990s the nostalgia scene in UK drag racing was evolving with events like the Hot Rod Drags and the Nostalgia Nationals. The Wild Bunch committee constantly came up with fresh ideas to make their class more appealing. One such idea arose from a letter written by Roy to the ‘King of the Dragsters’, Don Garlits, to have an annual …
eurodragster.com
Can anyone imagine a Drag Racing world without the presence of Eurodragster.com? It is in the nature of institutions that they are taken for granted – the very word ‘institution’ implies an immutable foundation built on rock. Yet Eurodragster.com confounds that perception. It is an institution that hangs by a thread, existing solely on the dedication of a handful of fellows who devote time and energy to the revelation of our sport in all its glories across the continent of Europe. Snap that thread and a pillar of the sport crumbles into an institutional-sized sinkhole which no social media outlet could hope to fill.
Eurodragster.com never sleeps. To the casual enthusiast, it provides an almost-daily journal of the comings and goings, happenings and proceedings of the sport – “all the news that’s fit to print”, to borrow the New York Times’ motto. To the serious student, perhaps engaged in chronicling the sport for a purpose – say, compiling programme notes for a race – it is a vital tool, a treasury of facts and data stretching back over two decades. Need to follow the round-by-round developments in a big race in another country? Eurodragster.com takes you there. (Try following a race which Eurodragster.com is not covering and you’ll notice the difference!) Need to double-check a record performance? Eurodragster.com will likely satisfy your quest. Want to discover who qualified low in Pro Stock Bike at Gardermoen in 2002? (Vesa Rautio, to spare you a search). There’s a goldmine of information concealed in the microscopic red print running down the left side of Eurodragster.com’s homepage, and its value grows more evident the more it is used.
Eurodragster.com was conceived in 1997 and published its first news item in February 1998. Lest we forget, the internet was in its infancy and one …
Ian Lloyd
Ian was always a car enthusiast, superbly turned out, highly engineered fast cars were his passion. His first project, which took over ten years to complete, was the restoration and rebuilding of a Mk 1 Ford Zodiac. Sporting a finely tuned 6-cylinder motor, finished in red and running on wire wheels, it was quite a head-turning street racer in the sixties.
The sport of Drag Racing seemed to fit the bill for a young man who was keen to go faster in safety and when the owner of the garage where Ian worked asked him to work on his Vauxhall Ventora to bring it up to the standard of the one Ian had just sold, the opportunity arose for him to produce a race car. He fitted the car with a Rover VB and went on to win the PDRC Street Racer Championships with it. The car also became an early race car for Dave Warne when it was eventually sold.
The quest for quicker times had begun! It took Ian only 6 weeks to build the Rover V8 powered Dutton that was a real threat in both Super Comp at York Raceway and the Rover VB Challenge rounds. First outing for the car was a meet at the old US Air Force base at Burtonwood, organised by the newly formed PDRC, where he raced the red kit car against all comers, including Pip Higham on his bikes. Having broken the gearbox, he consoled himself by doing burnouts for the crowd……..in reverse!
It was 1968 that the birth of an idea to build a state-of-the-art Competition Altered saw Ian and a friend fly over to Detroit armed with a bundle of cash to buy the parts needed. Ian’s plan was that only the best would be good enough for what …
McCoy Dynamics
One of the important areas of Drag Racing to acknowledge is innovation – and thinking outside the box. In the mid 1970s, three bike racers got together to form a racing team, known as McCoy Dynamics. All three made their mark on the sport and set world records at Elvington, with spectacular performances on two – and sometimes 3 wheels.
Angus ‘Ag’ MacPhail is someone who is definitely able to think laterally. After a spell riding a miniature Ariel two-stroke, he built his version of a three wheeler, which featured the Triumph engine and gearbox positioned between the rider and passenger. He next built a novel Ford powered three wheeler, which featured the rider prone, in front of the engine. When three wheelers were banned from competition – due in no small part to the performance of Ag, he remodelled the bike as a two wheeler, with wide slick, to mutterings that it would never work. It did!
The McCoy machine was effectively a test bed for the unforgettable Jade Warrior, boasting a monocoque chassis, one-off 2 litre supercharged motor, torque converter transmission – and a very effective exhaust-driven ground effects system. Helped by Mick, this most unusual machine eventually broke into the seven second zone in 1985, running on straight methanol, which was a brilliant achievement.
Mick Hand was very much at the heart of the group. He and Angus would bounce ideas off each other in the search for ways to advance performance. Mick’s own bike of choice was one of the early Japanese engined entries – a diminutive twin cylinder blown 250 Honda. Small it might have been, but it was the sharpest, noisiest bike on the strip, and set a world record in 1971. With massive boost, the bike eventually got down to 9.08s/158mph after extensive …