Drag Racing’s Rebels, How the AHRA Changed Quarter-Mile Competition
by Doug Boyce
Nineteen-fifty-one saw the formation of the National Hot Rod Association which, seeing the popularity of drag racing, quickly welcomed those competitors.
The NHRA was the brainchild of Wally Parks who owned it and thus ran it as he wished. The rules and regulations Parks set down were essentially a carbon copy of those of the Southern California Timing Association (SCTA) of which he was a member.
Some of the racers had other ideas and desires and when, in the summer of 1956, a man named Walter Mentzer, Jr set up another sanctioning body in which each member held a voting share determining its direction, they jumped ship. Three years later, no less a name than Don Garlits was president of the American Hot Rod Association (AHRA) with another racer named Jim Tice, Sr his vice-president. Tice succeeded Garlits in the top office and then became its executive director as well in 1962. Tice was all business and all about promoting events and AHRA quickly grew.
The NHRA and AHRA were like a couple of little kids trying to one-up the other.
One held its Winter Nationals, the other Winternationals—and they were not one and the same. NHRA put a lock on the event being one word, thus AHRA was relegated to the two- word name. NHRA outlawed nitromethane-laced fuel while AHRA welcomed it—until NHRA realized the error of its way and changed its rules. One wanted jet- or aircraft-engined dragsters banned; the other welcomed them.
This book written by prolific drag racing author brings Doug Boyce’s drag book titles to one shy of twenty! And publisher CarTech’s drag racing titles number thirty, some of which are biographies others, as this one, period histories. We have told you about some of the titles in various reviews. For the full list of available titles, consult Car Tech’s website.
This history of AHRA is a typical Boyce period history as in fast-paced—racing, as the racers did, through the calendar highlighting each year/each competition. The generous fully captioned photos bring life and color to Boyce’s words.
A sidebar vignette is worth noting for there was a third drag sanctioning body, the IHRA which had formed in 1970 “that [its creator Jim] Carrier dreamed would run both the AHRA and the NHRA out of business.” The day told of is one where the leaders of each—Jim Tice, Wally Parks, and Jim Carrier—sat down in the same room. They were there to hear a proposal from the owner of several tracks advocating a one-tire rule, mandating racers use one set of tires for an entire race to reduce costs. Long story short—it didn’t fly, for Parks was “unwilling to go out on a limb” (as he’d done before only to have to reverse himself later) over another potentially controversial or unpopular rule.
That the AHRA didn’t survive to this day as NHRA has done, Boyce attributes to several things not the least of which was Tice’s pancreatic cancer diagnosis early in 1981. Tice fought the terminal diagnosis with the help of the Mayo Clinic outliving the six-month prediction with chemo and experimental surgery. He felt well enough to attend the 1982 Winter Nationals in Tucson even as he and his wife, Ruth, discussed AHRA’s future of which she would become its sole owner once he’d passed which he did as August 1982 drew to a close.
Afterward Ruth did her best to carry on but with their young daughter to raise and care for too, it became too much. In March 1983 she accepted an offer to purchase AHRA. Trouble was the buyer wasn’t a racer and was unknown by the owners of the tracks AHRA had contractual connections with. The upshot was that “after 30 years of racing, innovation, and controversy, the AHRA was done.”
But then Boyce adds an Epilogue noting “in 2008 . . . an old drag racer at heart sought out the AHRA name and trademarked it,” selling it in 2017. He concludes, “The AHRA is a name steeped in drag racing history. Only time will tell where the new AHRA goes.”
Copyright 2025 Helen V Hutchings, SAH (speedreaders.info)
Drag Racing’s Rebels, How the AHRA Changed Quarter-Mile Competition
by Doug Boyce
CarTech, 2023
192 pages, 169 b/w & 259 color images, softcover
appendix, no index
List Price: $34.95
ISBN 13: 978 1 61325 766 1
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