CharlieBang50YearsofRacing

Fast cars and loud engines are two of the things that draw every little boy to the sport of drag racing. It was no different for Charles Bang, a longtime resident of Elliott County, Kentucky.

While many racers may claim to know the ins and outs of drag racing, few actually know its history. Bang, who celebrated his 50th year of racing in 2007, may be one of the few. In fact, he was trying to get involved in the sport before he even had a driver's license.

Growing up in North Avondale, just outside of Cincinnati, Bang had access to like-minded people. One of the original NHRA clubs, Cam Lifters, was located in a Cincinnati police building, and one of Bang's earliest memories is heading downtown with his older brother Jim for a meeting at the club. After filling out applications, they were told that neither of them was old enough to get in.

The thrill, however, was not just limited to racing. The thrill also came from the construction and modification of the race cars. At fourteen and still in high school, Bang was busy replacing a weak 4 cylinder engine with a high output V-8 motor for a Model A - a car one would not think of as going fast unless it was pushed over a hill. It was with these types of cars that he began drag racing.

Bang quickly found that dragsters were easier to build and went much faster. Although dragsters were easier, it was still a lot of work. They were heavy, hard to work on, and one had to climb in and out of them to sit atop the rear end between tires no more than a shoulder width apart when racing. As with anything else, Bang sometimes made mistakes and had to back up. But in the late 1950s, it was fun. Drag racing was still new. It was something that all the kids liked to do, and dragsters, at the time, were scarce.

Dragsters were not all that Bang helped to build. In 1955, he helped create the first track in Cincinnati, Beechmont Dragway, and was there when it was in full swing. Bang was also around to hear of its closing. Although history claims that the track was shut down due to noise ordinances, many think it was closed when a racer traveling over one hundred miles per hour flipped his car and was killed there.

Though, according to Bang, not much scared him about the cars then, he would be afraid to get back in one now. "A rod'd break in the motor and throw that oil and gasoline out. You'd get a big fire for a few seconds."

Bang says, "I don't know how we all survived it."

Some of them didn't. Mixed in with the excitement, the accomplishments, the competition, and the amusing tales are other stories. These stories are ones of broken bodies - cars and people alike.

In 1960, Bang was match racing. Two cars were paired up as closely as possible, based on aspects such as weight and horsepower, and one was eliminated. By this point, flagmen were no longer starting cars off. The first Christmas tree (the light dropping and signaling a racer to take off) was introduced at the 1962 nationals, five yellow lights and one green. Racers were already gathering around discussing theories about how to gain an advantage with the tree - a practice that is still commonplace today.

In 1962, Bang was at Dragway 42, in West Salem, Ohio, racing an All American (AA was the early equivalent of Top Fuel) dragster that he had helped Jim Booker build. During the time of the NHRA outlaw on nitromethane due to its dangers, gas dragsters were still running in the mid-eight second range at 175 to 180 miles per hour at the quarter mile mark. Bang, along with Booker, held the top ten AA gas record in the United States around this time. During his run in West Salem, Bang wrecked and was thrown from his dragster. He was laid up for five months before he returned to work. Bang learned that sometimes you go to a place to have a little fun and it turns your life upside down.

It did not take Bang much time to spring back. By 1965, he had built more cars. Three were built in the space of a year or so. Only one, a slingshot style dragster with a flathead Ford V8 with Offenhauser heads that he had begun building in 1963, was for himself. In less than a year, he was holding the D class quarter mile record at 10.32 seconds.

In the 1970s, Bang switched from racing the AA to running the flathead as a nostalgic class. During this time, he raced all over the country. According to Bang, "There was always a race somewhere. If a track got rained out, we'd load up and go somewhere else." Somewhere else was sometimes hundreds of miles away.

When it came to racecars, Bang did not just limit himself to dragsters. In the 1980s, he was commissioned to restore a 1953 Allard J2R LeMans race car, Chassis 3404, that had once belonged to General Curtis LeMay, head of the strategic air command in the 1950s. This car was one of six ever built. Dean Butler, founder and creator of the Lens Crafters chain, owned the car, and in 2004, would also commission Bang to recreate a painstaking piece by piece replica of the 1965 flathead slingshot dragster that he saw Bang pull from his tobacco barn. "The Charlie Bang Special" would later be ran by Bang in England at a race called the flathead meltdown, where he would set a record in his class.

In 1987, Bang brought back the dragster he had built in 1963, updated it with a Chevrolet V8 motor, automatic transmission, a good rear end and began racing it at sand drags. In 1998, while racing Johnny Tucker in Danville, Kentucky, Bang suffered another crash. Fortunately his car did what it was supposed to do - breaking away at certain points, separating the cockpit, the engine, and the rest of the car, which allows the driver to stay relatively safe during a crash. Never wanting to be near another front engine slingshot dragster, Tucker abandoned the car he was building. Bang ended up in the hospital with no memory of the event.

That wreck, however, did not stop Bang either. In January 2000, he began building a new dragster from scratch and finished it by August of the same year. He placed the engine in the rear, using the same motor, transmission and rear end from his wrecked car, changing only the tires and the chassis. Not only was the car faster, it was also safer. Bang could see where he was going and see the ground when he stopped. Before he could only see the back of the motor.

This lesson was five decades in coming. Others took longer, and some still haven't been learned. Speeds have increased over 150 miles per hour, E.T.s have gone down to less than four seconds at a quarter of a mile, and racing parts are better, but when it comes to bracket racing, you're still racing yourself when you go down the track. The biggest lesson of all, perhaps, is that despite the loss of money that comes from building and repairing vehicles, wins that do not quite cover the cost of expenses, and risks associated with the sport, in the end, it is still, according to Charles Bang, "a lot of fun."