Wally Parks NHRA Motorsports Museum

Drag racing in America was largely an illegal street sport until Wally Parks decided to fix that. In nineteen fifty-one, Parks founded the National Hot Rod Association to give the sport a rulebook, a safety culture, and a home on proper drag strips instead of public roads. He had spent years editing Hot Rod Magazine and understood that the sport needed legitimacy to survive.

Parks organized Safety Safaris, touring exhibitions that demonstrated controlled drag racing in cities across the country. By the nineteen nineties he was lobbying for a permanent museum, and in nineteen ninety-eight the Wally Parks NHRA Motorsports Museum opened in a historic Works Progress Administration building at the Los Angeles County Fairplex in Pomona. The Pomona strip has hosted NHRA national events for decades, making it one of the sport's most storied venues, and the museum next door holds the machines and stories that explain why.