- Formula Racing
- Sports Car Racing
- Stock Car Racing
- Rallying
- Drag Racing
- Off-Road Racing
Drag racing
Drag racing is probably the simplest type of car racing that there is. It is a race in a straight line from a standing start. Traditionally drag races have been run over distances of a quarter mile but tracks that are an eighth of a mile long are becoming popular. The race is an elimination event in which two competitors will race against each other with the winner moving on to the next round. The over all winner of the event being who ever wins the last round.
Drag racing started to become popular in the United States in the days after the Second World War. As the soldiers were returning home they were finding that new cars were not available since it they had been out of production during the war years and it was going to take time to get production started again. The result was that most returning soldiers started to soup up the older cars that they were able to get their hands on. This lead to start of the hot rod culture that existed in America throughout the fifties. A lot of young men with hot rods inevitably led to them deciding to race them to prove whose was fastest.
Fortunately racing hot rods proved to be a fairly simple task in the United States in the days after the Second World War. Hundreds of airstrips that had been built during the war fell out of use which provided an ideal place for racing. This is where the quarter mile that has become traditional came in, it was about the distance that you could go on most runways and still get stopped before the end.
As drag racing started to become popular cars started to be built for the express purpose of racing them. These cars were designed for one thing and one thing only and they were very fast. The top of line cars when it comes to drag racing are top fuel cars which are capable of reaching speeds in excess of three hundred miles per hour. There are drag racing classes that can accommodate virtually any car which has made it a popular option for amateur racers. A lot of tracks also offer open days when anybody can show up and run the quarter mile in their car, this is to discourage people from racing on the streets.
While drag racing has been popular in the United States it has not really caught on anywhere else. This is largely because the hot rod culture never really appeared anywhere else so there was no real need for a way to race the cars. Even in the United States drag racing has lost some of its popularity. In large part this is because the huge popularity of NASCAR has very much overtaken drag racing.