NHRA - National Hot Rod Association

If you read last Friday's column, you know that I have a huge trove of drag racing collectibles. I'm sure it’s just a drop in the bucket compared to what some of the actual collectors out there among you have stashed away, but it's a pretty good pile o' stuff, and some things I'm sure are worth a pretty penny.

I've accumulated all of this in my years on the job here, but the first drag racing collectibles of any sort I owned were the Fleer drag racing cards that were available in the early 1970s. I own a partial set of RaceUSA collection (58 of 74, plus those two unopened packs I bragged about) but I didn't realize that the RaceUSA set is actually the third and final set of quarter-mile cards offered by te Philadelphia-based company. Mark Bruederle, who many of you know as one of the Midwest's finest photographers and a regular at Great Lakes Dragaway, was kind enough to scan up some articles written by Geoff Stunkard, one of the pre-eminent experts on drag racing memorabilia. Stunkard wrote about the cards in his Quarter-milestones column in Racing Collectibles Price Guide magazine in early 1993 and was able to track down the details of each of the sets as well as a collection checklist.

The first Fleer set, issued in 1971, was the brainchild of Matt Strong of Racing Media Specialists, who approached Fleer executives and showed them images shot by top era lensmen Jim Kelly and Jon Asher. The 63-card set that resulted was called Official Drag Champs, and, after a successful test sampling in the Midwest and East Coast (though curiously not in the sport's SoCal hotbed), about six million cards were put into circulation in the United States and Canada. The photos in the set -- shot mostly by Kelly and Asher, but also some from Strong -- were taken during the 1970 season and, although AHRA was involved in the cards (its distinctive shield is featured on the back of each card and Kelly was the official AHRA photographer at the time), not all of the images were shot at AHRA tracks, according to Stunkard. The backs of all three sets include biographic and statistical information on the driver (more on that later).

According to the article, the Official Drag Champs set remains the easiest of the three to find, and the Canadian-printed set is slightly more valuable that the U.S. printing. In 1993, the Canadian set was valued a $325.

The success of its initial pass down the drag racing card circuit apparently was successful enough to spawn the two subsequent sets, which featured a larger variety of images (including driver personality photos): The Drag Nationals set consists of 70 cards and features images shot during the 1972 AHRA season at a number of facilities, including at the notorious PRO race in Tulsa staged against NHRA's Nationals and, interestingly, at Lions Drag Strip's Last Drag Race in December 1972 (even though by then Lions had become an NHRA track). The entire 74-card RaceUSA set, meanwhile, was photographed during the 1972 AHRA Winternationals at Beeline Dragway in Arizona (which also later became an NHRA track)

Maybe it's because they're 40 years old, but the photo quality on the RaceUSA set isn’t that great. There's some weird cropping and photo choices, but also some pretty good stuff, which you can see in the galleries at right. (The cards shown here are solely from my RaceUSA collection.)

Being a writer myself, naturally I was interested in the content on the card backs as well, which varied from 60 to 100 or so words, but, all in all, was excellently done. There is a lot of good (and accurate) information on all of them, and the repetition is kept to a minimum. (Believe me, when you’re churning out copy for 74 of anything, it's quite a chore to keep the copy fresh and lively.) The most egregious error is committed on Twig Zeigler's card, where his surname is spelled "Zigler" throughout.

Because the sets are AHRA endorsed (Kelly says that Fleer paid him to shoot the first set and that AHRA paid him for the images for the second), NHRA accomplishments are not included. For example, Steve Carbone's 1972 RaceUSA card lauds his win at the 1971 AHRA Winternationals but fails to mention his monster win against Garlits at the 1971 NHRA Nationals (the famous "burndown"). Paradoxically, Ronnie Martin is credited with his 1970 NHRA Top Fuel championship (though the N-word is not used). Overall, a B-plus for writing.

There seems to be some confusion as to the issue dates and order of release for these final two sets. According to Stunkard, the Drag Nationals set is by far the rarest of the three collections, but also the most poorly produced (including some out of focus images) and may have been prematurely yanked by Fleer and replaced by the RaceUSA set, which to me, with its single-location focus, reeks of "rush job." He quoted collector Joe Kovaks of North Carolina saying that the ratio of cards he could find at memorabilia shows was roughly 20 to 1 for Drag Nationals versus Official Race Champs as about 5 to 1 for RaceUSA versus Official Race Champs.

However, based on a check of the collation of cards found in two unopened 48-pack (five cards per pack) boxes of RaceUSA cards, Kovaks noted that cards 15-28, 52-65, and 72-74 appeared to be in short supply, meaning that those cards may have "short printed". However, of my 16 missing cards -- 1, 5, 13, 14, 17, 29, 33, 34, 38, 39, 42, 45, 46, 47, 51, and 66 -- only one, No. 17, appears in those ranges, so either I'm lucky or the two-box test is too small of a sample to make for empirical data.

Prices (again, from 1993) were $375 for the Drag Nationals, and $260 for RaceUSA. Below are set checklists. As you can see, there are some pretty cool and diverse set of subjects in all of the sets.