This exciting collection of photography by award winning photographer Ted Soqui documents the visual, white heat and sensed audible intensity of professional drag racing. The Famoso drag strip, Bakersfield, is one of the few major track venues that host the full 1/4 mile and features the cars from the golden age (the fastest cars can turn speeds of over 250 mph and cover the 1/4 mile in 51/2 seconds). The March Meet is considered to be one of the last great independent events in drag racing, often out drawing modern professional drag racing venues. The track also features a "cacklefest" held once a year at night, nostalgia cars are lined up on the track and fired-up revving their engines with fire shooting from the exhaust pipes. The sound can be deafening with over 100 nitro vehicles pushing their throttles. For drag racing purists, it's a living history of nitro and drag racing.
Ted Soqui is a Los Angeles-based freelance photojournalist with over 30
years of shooting experience. His editorial clients include LA Weekly, NY
Times, The Guardian, and Time. His art prints can also be found at the Robert
Berman Gallery and the Autry Museum of the West as part of their permanent
collection. Cole Coonce (born 1961) is an author and literary journalist.
Coonce started writing for automotive and drag-racing magazines in the 1990s,
with a series of "new journalism"-type features published by Super Stock &
Drag Illustrated, Full Throttle News, Popular Hot Rodding, Gearhead, and Hot
Rod Magazine. During that period, he penned Infinity Over Zero, a history of
the land speed record that is the only non-partisan account of how Andy Green
and the Thrust SSC jet car broke the sound barrier while setting the only
supersonic Land Speed Record. The publication of Infinity Over Zero
solidified Coonce's reputation as hot rodding's definitive gonzo-type
journalist, as evidenced by the book review in AutoWeek asking the reader to
"imagine Dennis Hopper from Apocalypse Now writing a history of the Land
Speed Record."
