I had a friend that was a crew chief on Danny Miller's AFXers/Funny Cars back in the '60s. He had some cool stories to tell. (His garage is still full of first gen Hemis
)
Back in the '60s/early'70s the St Louis Missouri area was a cornerstone of drag racing. There were strips all over the area.
There was a professional photographer in ST Louis that was a drag racer back then and took thousands of photos. He's also figured somewhat prominently in a book or two on the '60s Altereds and Gassers, name of Wayne Arteaga (
http://gassermadness.com/arteaga/). I had the pleasure a couple of times of looking thru some of his scrapbooks at his studio. He once took us (girlfriend & I) to a back room and set us down in front of a big pile of photo albums and said "take your time, just come on out when you're done". I think we stayed over three hours (gf was ready to leave or I probably would have stayed another three hrs
).
The cars were just so much cooler then!! Nothing looked the same. And to top it off, Wayne detuned his cars and was running then on the street until he passed away a few years ago!
Nowadays it's hard to tell who's who without the fancy paintjobs. Plus how cool is it to watch an old Altered running down the track sideways!!!!!!!! Used to see it at one of the old tracks here that just closed about ten years ago. That track (Mid America Raceway) used to run nostalgia events before they were popular. So I was able to see Big Daddy, Ronnie Sox, K S Pittman, the Stone, Woods & Cook cars and many big other names of the '60s and '70s there before they were re-discovered.