REMEMBERING THE TIME PRO GAS INSPIRED A TRANSFORMATION IN SPORT DRAG RACING

Two cars head to the starting line. One is a 1964 Corvette with a manual transmission and a Doug Nash 4+1 transmission and a heavy flywheel, like a 1970s rotary phone. A 1968 AMX with a big block and an automatic transmission sits in the other lane.

The green light flashes and the wheels are lifted to the start. They are side by side on the drag strip until the AMX passes on the track, recording an elapsed time of 9.90 seconds at 130 miles per hour. No, this wasn’t a Modified Eliminator. Instead, it was one of the first Super Gas races.

Back then, there were little to no electronics, and using nothing more than a mechanical throttle stop was the name of the game when this trend began to make its way onto the national drag racing event scene.

Don Meziere, the driving force behind Meziere Enterprises, was at the forefront of the birth of this drag racing format. Before 9.90 races became Super Gas, they were Pro Gas. They were also run in 9.50 or 9.80, depending on where you raced in California.

“It’s hard to go back to the past,” Meziere said. “We all remember that nostalgic time, and it was a lot of fun. We actually got involved in this in 1980. SoCal Pro-Gas had been around for a few years before that, and we could see it was really going to take off. It was exciting cars, all kinds of different body styles, a great mix of people and very intense competition.”

Pro Gas’s origins date back to the early 1970s, when an impromptu eight-car event at Redding Dragway in Redding, California, ran what are now considered West Coast Pro Modifieds with a 9.50 rating. In the southern part of the state, tracks such as Orange County International Raceway began running similar shows, albeit on a 9.80 rating.

At a time when bracket racing was struggling to provide a cost-effective alternative to class racing, Pro Gas presented a way for bracket racers to compete head-to-head.

Meziere was just 12 years old when he saw his brother Dave enter the Pro Gas arena with a ’62 Corvette he had traded in his 1927 Ford Model T roadster for.

At the time, you had to give it your all to reach the 9.80 index.

“The first SoCal Pro-Gas race he entered, the car was barely running fast enough with a small block, but it was good enough to run,” Meziere recalls.

Unlike many finely refined chassis under class cars, the newcomers to the Pro Gas block had just enough to get by.

“The car was tough, man,” Meziere explained. “It had a fence tube roll cage and stuff like that. It was pretty bad. It would never fly in today’s NHRA, but that’s what we did back then. The cars were a little crude, but right away this car got a chassis underneath and a real roll cage and all that. He actually built it out of a ladder bar initially, and then shortly after that he put a four-link on it because he could see what it was.”

“And at the same time, people were starting to play around with the Trans brakes, and like Pro-Gas, they had a big vote among all the drivers one day, and they went with the short shaft, the pro shaft, which wasn’t very well accepted at the time. Immediately, it became important to have a car that would really start well. We didn’t have Trans brakes. The first thing was the Lamb brake with the drum on the back of the transmission.”

For those wondering what a Lamb brake was. It had a drum at the rear, coming off the transmission, and a band applied. This was a technology created by suspension specialist Roger Lamb.

VIDEO – DISCOVER WHAT SUPER GAS WAS

While some Southern California runners, like Meziere, were doing everything they could to reach the 9.80 rating, it was Northern California runners who were their most prominent critics in trying to push the rating down to a universal 9.50 rating.

Often, cries of “9.80 seconds is for old ladies” echoed through the stands.

“It might have pissed off people in Southern California a little bit,” Meziere said. “Who knows why we got attached to these things? I think they looked at all the cars they had on the road at the time and who could drive them and tried to get as many people as possible. But it was a hot topic: Who was going to pick which clue?”

“Bringing the two associations together was always a problem back in the day. If you wanted to meet in the middle at Bakersfield or something, what index were you going to run on? Usually they had to slow down for the SoCal guys. I think that’s usually how it went. But we actually sponsored a couple of races in the early ’80s, and we called them outlaw races, where we would take the SoCal Pro-Gas Association and challenge them to run on the 9.50 index.”

These provocations led to the introduction of nitrous oxide into some suits to speed them up. Eventually, racers found ways to build more powerful engines, with the challenge of slowing them down.

“Some cars were only .05 or .10 over, and they knew it from the start, everybody knew it, so they were easily covered,” Meziere says. “But a lot of cars were only .05 or .10 over, and they would put a bolt under the carburetor or under the gas pedal and adjust it.”

“My brother did that for a while, but then he started shifting the weight to the back of the car, thinking it was a little more reliable. I think that was true. He also had a good feel for the car. He used a three-speed transmission. Most people used Powerglide, but if he felt like the car wasn’t moving as hard as it should, he’d shift into second or third gear another 200 or 300 rpm and get back what he thought the car had lost.”

Meziere believed that good riders always found a way to the top, citing Sheldon Gecker and Arthur Joe Covert as two examples. Outside of California, Ohio probably featured the toughest riders in the early days of Pro Gas.

The major magazines of the day, Super Stock & Drag Illustrated and Popular Hot Rodding, featured this new style of drag racing on their covers. This growing popularity and the IHRA’s new Hot Rod version (10.50) led to a massive national growth in index racing.

Additionally, Pro Gas found its way onto national television as part of the TV shows CHiP’s and The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo.

“I think it’s the result of an exciting class at the right time,” Meziere said. “The cars had character, which we lost a little bit today. There were Anglias and big ’40 Chevys and ’37 Fords and just all sorts of different body styles. It was also pretty common for cars to have names, and I think we lost a little bit of that in the character of the racing as well.

“Orange County Raceway was on television a number of times, and SS&d DI, Super Stock magazine, was really good at covering that aspect of racing. They did a lot of work on it, and it was good for Pro Gas, which helped get it out across the country. It was exactly the right idea at the right time.”