A friend offered comment highlighting the tribal aspect of the sport of drag racing.  There’s no debate about the machismo inscribed in the passion for automobiles designed and constructed as a competition weapon.  Also race cars are a symbol of a concrete alliance of a owner and crew members — a long term commitment to explore the possibilities, to share the successes, and inevitable unanticipated failures of the effort to find one more tenth second of acceleration… 

Any “door-slammer” car that is able to cross the quarter mile finish line with a single digit time, is quick, a testimony to the artful application of the laws of physics.  Additionally the feat is evidence of a community of “friends” dedicated to making the accomplishment come to pass.

Some of the Pro-Modified cars in the photographs have recorded elapsed times in the high five seconds.  Money, WORK, and above all love; nothing less than love for the staccato note of a precisely tuned engine, love for the wordless beauty of colorful paint and clean body lines, and love for the camaraderie of work together in the pit, and the commotion of pre-launch prep on the starting line, is called for.

So yes, drag racing is embedded in the Post WWII cultural emphasis on the role of males.  Yet as old Heraclitus of Ephesus observed — “all is change.”  Talent, work ethic, a love-of-life that is only satisfied by the touch of tools to achieve excellence, will always be sought at the drag strip, from male and female.