The sounds of powerful engines began to rip and stutter through the sky as drivers moved their cars into the lineup along the runway. Mel Stultz watched, barefoot, a bemused grin on his face. Stultz, a member of the Oilers Car and Motorcycle Club, which co-founded the National Hot Rod Association back in 1951, started running the Race of Gentlemen, in 2012. He had grown bored with traditional classic-car shows, with vehicles parked and admired. “I wanted to create a moving history of cars,” he said. His inaugural drag race, on the beach at Asbury Park, New Jersey, was a huge success, just days before Hurricane Sandy made landfall. Near home base in Wildwood, New Jersey, TROG’s annual September Hot Rod Races attract up to twenty-five thousand people.
In 2016 and 2019, TROG held events in Pismo Beach and Santa Barbara, California, but December, 2022, was the first time the event came to historic Flabob Airport, near the Santa Ana River, lined with sycamore and willow trees, and Mt. Rubidoux, covered in swaths of yellow wildflowers. Antique biplanes and historic aircraft were parked along the tarmac.
This is old-school heaven. I came in December with my ex-husband, Dwayne Sims. We’ve loved cars since high school, too. We met as freshmen. I was fourteen, he was fifteen, and we had no car for a date. In 1976, his father bought a 1961 Cadillac with fins, primer brown, a bullet hole in the passenger window from the recent demise of the former owner, and Dwayne finally picked me up. At that first Flabob race, we stayed all day, and saw our favorite drivers: Diana Branch in Honey Dew, and Sherry Martin, out of San Bernardino, with a lavender jalopy sporting a bamboo roof. Diana and Sherry kept winning their heats going away, and as Robert Ruiz, Sherry’s husband, said, grinning, “It’s the Race of Gentlemen, but the women were kicking ass.”
Sunday at the Drag Strip
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