Old Stock class guides, pre 1960

[Dwight Southerland]

Originally Posted by amxron

Dwight S.
NHRA had all these guides and misplaced (?) them years ago. Why wouldn't
they accept a copy of their own guides?
Strangely enough 55 up chev's are still in their copies.....Every other brand is gone.
I remember my first Jr Stock Elim loss was to a 52 Olds called Tokyo Rose. (in 1962)

Ron.

I doubt is they misplaced them. I suspect the major reason they eliminated so many of the listings is because of the inability to support the tech side of things. When Jr Stock was begun, it was class guide only, no tech bulletins. The tech bulletins came later as racers began to get serious and the need was great to root out cheaters. It's one thing to classify someone's daily street car or family car driven off the street, but when people began building purpose built race cars the verification becomes much more involved. Think about it, there were no hot rod parts directed toward stockers. Even the first rate of lift camshafts did not come along until the mid 1960s. NHRA didn't build a good technical information base until the mid 1960s. When the current Stock Eliminator was begun in 1971, part of the change was the limitation to the set of technical information they had. There are some leftover remnants of that move that can be noted in the fact that there are Oldsmobile tech sheets back to 1949, but the classification guide stops for Oldsmobile in 1960. Also, Cadillac has classification sheets back to 1955, but no tech specs until 1977. To expect NHRA to do the work (read that as spend the money) to fill out there technical specs to meet all of American auto production since 1950 is unrealistic; they don't support what they have now very well.