Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #229200 in Books
• Published on: 2007-08-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 240 pages

Review
Road & Track, November 2007
“If you want an insider’s view with detailed, first-person accounts from the independent-thinking, innovative mechanical wizards who turned drag racing into an extreme sport, reading this book is pure heaven. You can almost smell the nitro.”
   
Car Craft, December 2007
“As you read the book it becomes evident that the author isn’t just a reporter – he is also a racer. His years of drag racing experience combined with his own eyewitness accounts of the postwar drag racing boom lends credence to an already well-written book. If you are a drag racer, this is a must-read. If you are a street-machine enthusiast, it might make you a drag racer.”


                                                                                                                                                

Drag News Magazine, September 2007
“Fuel & Guts tells the intimate stories that take you back in time and show you how it all started.”
                                                                                                                     
Hemmings Motor News, December 2007
“It’s comprehensive, anecdotal and occasionally profane, very much in keeping with the outrageous subject matter.”
 


Nitrogeezers.com, September 2007
"Must have for anyone interested in the history of Drag Racing.”
                     
DragRaceCentral.com, Dec. 12, 2007
“This book is wonderful from start to finish and it will make a great addition to any drag racing fans collection.”
 

From the Inside Flap
Top Fuel drivers are the rock stars of drag racing, the acts that put the fans in the seats. Spectators slip out to grab hot dogs and beer during the support classes, but when they hear the Top Fuel engines roar to life, they rush back to their seats.
 
In Top Fuel’s early days, when a nitro-burning monster motor sat in front of the driver’s face, pushing a car to its limit and beyond was called “lighting the 1000-foot fuse.” In other words, if the engine didn’t explode within the strip’s first 1000 feet, then odds were good you’d manage the final 320 feet without meeting your maker. The front-engine, Top Fuel dragster and its West Coast driver defined the evolution of drag racing in the period through the early 1970s.
 
It was a simpler time, not just for drag racing, but for California life in general. Factory support wasn't controlled by accountants, but by builders and engineers with a genuine interest in the sport. Sponsorship came from companies just starting to scratch out names for themselves, not from giant corporations more concerned with image than winning.  Of course, with success came greater expectations.  This is the story of what it was like to race in a more innocent time, and what it was like to see that innocence slip away.
 
Fuel and Guts: The Birth of Top Fuel Drag Racing is the story of how Top Fuel drag racing started in California, told through the words of the men and women who lived it.  Since the sport’s beginning, author Tom Madigan has collected recorded interviews with luminaries such as Mickey Thompson, the late Tony Nancy, Tommy Ivo, and Tom McEwen, to name just a few.  In addition, he has maintained contact with men like engine builder Ed Pink, chassis builder Kent Fuller, and racer Don Prudhomme.  Add Madigan's personal knowledge of the events, and Fuel and Guts gives readers a real sense of what it was like to be part of Top Fuel drag racing in California during the 1950s and 1960s.
 
 

From the Back Cover
Until 1949, there was no such thing as drag racing. There were road races, oval races, dry lakes time trials, even boardtrack races, but nobody had considered sanctioning an event that simply put two cars head to head and sent them down a straight stretch of pavement to see who got to the end first.
 
Luckily, a confluence of events and circumstances combined to create what is arguably the most exciting form of motorsport on the planet today. Young men and women came home from World War II with pockets full of money—and heads full of technical knowledge, which they quickly applied to their cars. Southern California’s mild climate provided them a year-around laboratory in which to experiment. And most importantly, a handful of devoted kids turned what was once an innocent, back streets pastime into today’s multi-billion-dollar drag racing industry. This is their story, and best of all, it’s told in their own words.

Customer Reviews

Fuel and Guts - The Birth of Top Fuel Drag Racing
Bought this for my boyfriend... He loved it. Good for guys/girls that are really into the history of drag racing. Great pictures and lots of information

History of Drag Racing -- California Perspective
I love this book. It takes me back to a time when you could weld some tubes together, drop in an engine , pour in some nitromethane, and run it out. These are the stories of legendary men and women of our time that made history on the asphalt strips of California. There will never be a time again of such pure simplicity of art expressed in men and machines.

The title "Fuel and Guts" says it all. It's all about guys strapped into frame rails, feet against clutch cans, flames from headers, smoking tires and chutes blossoming at top end as told by the heroes themselves.

and now a word from the editor
This was one of the first projects I worked on when I joined the Motorbooks staff. A rather cranky guy named Tom Madigan called me on my first morning, looking for some photographs he had sent with a book proposal about a year earlier. I told him I hadn't been a Motorbooks employee back then, but I'd be happy to see if I could locate the missing pix. When I found them, I immediately took them to my new boss, explained the situation, made him look at the photos, and asked if they weren't some of the coolest old drag racing pictures he'd ever seen. Then, I called Tom back and told him I'd found the photos and could send them back right away, but I'd prefer to keep them because I wanted to do a book with him. Thus began a long, sometimes tedious, but ultimately insanely rewarding journey.

Those of you who have read the first edition (the second edition is being printed as I write this) might have noticed that Kent Fuller's name is mispelled pretty much throughout the book as "Ken Fuller." That was my doing. Before you start thinking I'm an idiot, turn to page 181 in the book and look at the cowl of Roland Leong's "Hawaiian" dragster. What does it say? That's right, it says "Ken." I saw this just before we sent the proofs to the printer. Now, I know that Kent Fuller's name is Kent Fuller, but there it was, right on Roland's car: Ken. I panicked. I thought I must have been wrong all these years. I looked in Dr. Bob Post's seminal book on Top Fuel racing, High Performance, and it reaffirmed what I had thought I knew to be true. Why, though, would Roland have painted the wrong spelling on his car? I called Tom, but he was out of his office. So I made an executive decision. The wrong one, it turned out. Okay, now that you know the whole story, you can go ahead and tell me I'm an idiot. (As an aside to this story, I saw Roland at a book signing Autobooks/Aerobooks in Los Angeles had for Fuel & Guts. I immediately informed him of the trouble he'd caused me. To this day, he maintains that he really thought it was Ken, not Kent. No, Roland wouldn't do anything like mispell somebody's name to get a rise out of the guy, would he? Not Roland! Who, by the way, is one of the nicest people I've ever met. Which either says something about him or the rest of the folk I've encountered in my life.)

So, the basic point I'm making here is that Fuel & Guts is an oral history. There are occasional mistakes, people misremember things (I mean, most of the people in the book are approaching their 200th birthday, for crying out loud), people have axes to grind or they just want to poke fun at their peers -- it's everything a good oral history should be, and it'll give you a really good idea of what it was like to create a brand new form of motorsport. If you couldn't be there yourself, reading these stories is the next best thing. I thoroughly enjoyed every aspect of making this book, from working with Tom Madigan to meeting a few of the drag-racing heroes of my youth. It was a labor of love, and, judging from all the nice reviews, it sure has paid off. Thanks to all of you for making it possible. Now quit reading this stuff and buy the book. You'll like it.