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ISBN 978-1-59005-480-2
Hardcover, Slipcased, 12 x 15, 60 pages, 26 duotone plates
Limited edition of 350 numbered and signed copies.

In 1964, a young Steve Banks bought one of the most coveted ‘Muscle Cars’ on the market—a Pontiac GTO with a four-speed stick and a Hurst shifter, Tri-Power, and three Rochester 2G carburetors. He then drove Route 66 from Chicago to Los Angeles to begin his new advertising agency job. 

Gassing up one day at Nobo’s Shell station at Beverly and Larchmont, Banks learned that Nobo had previously been head mechanic at the Courtesy Chevrolet dealership, and that his station had become a center for building and tuning street racers. On and off over the next few months, Banks would leave his car at the garage while Nobo fine-tuned the carburetors, replaced the stock tires, torsion, and sway bars, and added Koni shocks and a Sun tachometer. Next, he taught Banks how to ‘speed shift’—while making late night runs up and down Larchmont Boulevard. 

One day, Nobo mentioned he was going to a drag race that Saturday, and that Banks was welcome to come along. Witnessing his first drag race, Steve Banks was immediately hooked. He returned the following Saturday, and the next, and again the next; but this time with with his cameras. Over the course of two years, Banks photographed guys preparing runs, the thundering nitro-burning dragsters launching down the strip at two hundred-plus miles per hour, and everything else that moved. 

Today, fifty years later, the sport of drag racing is a big bucks, corporate-sponsored television broadcast business with the NHRA sporting over two hundred different drag racing classes. However, in a nod to the sport’s modest beginnings, almost every weekend from coast-to-coast one can find ‘nostalgia racing’ events preserving the dragster culture of the 1960s captured here in NITRO, Drag Racing In The Sixties: 1964—1966.