by Cole Coonce (excerpted from Top Fuel Wormhole)
photo by Dave Wallace, Sr.
I remember the whine and the zing of the Top Fuel cars. It was the sound of metallic machinery wound-up to the point of breaking into magnesium quarks and positrons. I’ll never forget my Grandmother cursing the sound of the fuel cars on Sunday afternoons in the 1960s, hearing the blowers spin up into a glorious glissando and then the reverberation vaporizing instantaneously.
I remember playing in the street in San Fernando, catching footballs tossed by my grandfather, spryly huffing and puffing past parked cars and conifer trees, while abruptly pivoting on a buttonhook pattern and catching a spiral in the solar plexus or futilely extending my hands at the denouement of a post pattern in hopes of sticking the pigskin on my fingertips, and hearing the sounds of the nearby drag races— WWWHHHHHHAAAAAHHHHH – UUNNNNDDTTT —every few minutes while I ran back to huddle with my quarterback and we pretended he was Roman Gabriel and I was Jack Snow.
Yes, I knew what all of the high-pitched racket was, the din my grandfather tried to ignore and my grandmother cursed. It took me years to marvel at the irony of my grandfather passing mute judgment on the noise pollution from San Fernando Raceway. He was one of Kelly Johnson’s metallurgists at the Skunk Works adjunct at Lockheed in Burbank, and his role in the development and manufacture of various black-budget supersonic spy planes led to all the sliding glass door windows in the city of San Fernando rattling whenever one of Lockheed’s Cold War babies did one of its faster-than-sound hole punches in the sky…
(These sonic booms would rock the neighborhood fairly frequently… from the kitchen Grandma would curse at them as well as the sounds of the nearby drag races, not really grokking that this noise from above was symbolic of the family’s meal ticket and Grandpa’s employment on classified aircraft. It took her years to realize that some guys parked in the blue Ford sedan who appeared deeply engrossed in the front page section of the L.A. Times were actually G-men spooks whose surveillance was to ensure that Grandma wasn’t one of them military industrial Rosenberg-types…)
But I digress: even though I was younger than my underwear size, I had been to the drag strip enough to decipher the sound of a Top Fuel car under a load, making traction and attaining maximum velocity of 200 mph or so… We were a couple of tacquerias from San Fernando Raceway—say two or three miles from its entrance on Glenoaks and its “spin out area” beyond the Foothill Boulevard bridge over the Pacoima Arroyo.
When my uncle was running his Jr. Gas dragster at “the Pond” (as Fernando was quaintly and derisively referred to, its moniker a diminution of Lions Drag Strip a/k/a “the Beach”), I would hear both fundamental tones of a nitro-burning motor as well as the overtones; the thundering grunt of the combustion chambers as well as the harmonic counterpoint of the blower spinning like a dervish eating serpents and hot coals and hell-bent upon breaking into ecstasy.
But away from the track you could only hear the whine of the blowers…
All of these years, I can’t say I remember the day of the sound of the blower that just wouldn’t quit. On June 16, 1968, Father’s Day, Gary Allen Peterson was driving the Beast From The East Top Fuel dragster out at Fernando. While hauling ass down the drag strip, the throttle linkage hung and the fuel shut-off didn’t seem to work and the damn thing just kept pulling and pulling and pulling and the parachute did not fully deploy.
As the car was still pulling, Peterson attempted to drive through the hole in the bridge; he struck a concrete barrier that catapulted and flipped his fueler into the bridge. The blown Chrysler engine somersaulted the distance of a football field into the so-called “Spin Out” area, wiping out its warning sign.
Seven or eight years ago I rode my bike to the arroyo and just kind of hung out among the remnants of the old San Fernando, the 1/4 mile drag strip that paralleled the wash.
There was a Jiffy Lube adjacent to where the drag strip’s shutdown area used to be. And a coat of blue paint had been slathered on the bottom half of the bridge. But at the time, the tire tracks from Gary Allen Peterson’s impact were still visible.
A couple of Sundays ago, I rode my bike back out there again. I thought of tossed footballs and the whine of blowers. City workers finally slapped another coat of fresh paint on the bridge over the Arroyo again. This time they managed to cover up most of the tire tracks.
While I took pictures, the homeless guys who sleep under the bridge packed up their tarps and their laundry and walked their beater bicycles up into the Sylmar Hills, seeking shade and shelter amidst the scrub brush.
(Originally published in Drag Racing Online, 2005)
