The dream of owning a Nitro Funny Car is one had by many a drag racing tragic, but it has taken the advent of nostalgia racing and more recently Graeme Cowin’s Aeroflow Outlaw Nitro Funny Car Series to make this dream a reality for more Australians.

Daniel Basukoski’s 1956 Chev has been a rare sight in recent years but a massive rebuild has now been completed and he is ready to go radial tyre drag racing in a (literally) big way.

Drag racing is a sport all about time, and the distance one person might travel given a few seconds of it. On the strip time passes intensely, away from the track it passes with subtlety – yet still no less rapid in our minds. And this is how we end up with people who were toddlers when Sydney Dragway opened, such as Britney Olive, now racing fully fledged drag machines.

Innovation driven through need has been the defining trait of the Sainty family, a team that has near enough to three decades of Top Fuel experience. They wanted to be out there, badly, and with imagination and engineering brilliance they found ways to be on the track that no other active Top Fuel team in the world is capable of, or willing to do.

Simon Richards remembers his first experience of drag racing vividly. He was a 12-year-old boy who was into motocross and was competing at a junior state title round in Adelaide.

If it wasn’t for bad surf, Matthew Grubisa might have never gone drag racing.

Craig Hewitt has become one of many drag racers making the switch to radial tyre competition in Australia, taking his beautiful Pro Street Monaro from slicks to stiff sidewalls.