Gasser Class: Ten Shirts, Front Ends High, and It Starts With the '58 Galaxy
Some cars sit pretty. Gassers sit with their noses in the air, like they're already halfway down the track. That stance is the whole attitude of a time when drag racing was loud and homemade, and it's why we built our newest series around it.
Meet Gasser Class: ten shirts, ten cars, all front ends high. Number one launches this week.
What's a Gasser?
Back in the 1950s and '60s, drag racing sorted cars into classes. The cars running on regular pump gasoline, not alcohol or nitro, ran in the gas classes. That's where the name comes from: gassers.
What made them stand out was the look. Racers bolted in a straight front axle, often a beam axle borrowed off an old truck or a vintage Ford, and jacked the front end way up. The idea was to shift weight to the back tires when the car launched, so the slicks would hook. Whether the physics worked as well as everyone said is still argued in parking lots. What nobody argues is that it looked mean.
A typical gasser was a regular street body, often a tri-five Chevy, a Willys or an Anglia, with a big engine, a raised nose and fat tires out back. A lot of them had a blower sticking out of the hood. Many were built in home garages and driven to the strip on the weekend.
Why Gassers Are a Detroit Story
Gassers took factory cars from the big automakers and made them faster, louder and stranger than anyone in an office ever planned. That's Detroit in a nutshell: the city builds the steel, and the people who love it build something new from it. The Gasser Class series is our salute to that, and to the guys still running these cars at the strip.
#1: The '58 Galaxie
The series opens with a burgundy, straight-axle 1958 Ford Galaxie wearing #58. Its nose is high and its front wheels are hanging, and the Detroit smokestacks are falling behind it. A bold DETROIT ROD & CUSTOM / Gasser Class banner runs over the top.
A big '58 Ford isn't the first car most people think of as a gasser, and that's the point. It's a big, proud, chrome-trimmed Detroit sedan doing a drag car's job.
It comes two ways:
- 58 Galaxie Gasser Dickies Work Shirt is a real Dickies short-sleeve work shirt. It's wrinkle resistant and has a pencil slot in the pocket, so it's made for the pits, the shop floor and Saturday at the strip.
- 58 Gasser Raglan Tee is a classic three-quarter-sleeve raglan for car show days.
#2: The '55 Chevy (Coming Next)
Next up is a black '55 Chevy with a blower out of the hood and the front end up. Look at the windows: they're tinted red. Plenty of old drag cars ran tinted safety glass in red, blue or green, and we put it in the art because that's how they really looked.
Collect All Ten
Every Gasser Class shirt gets the same treatment: one car, nose up, Detroit behind it, and a number that tells you where it falls in the series. We'll drop them one at a time, so check back or follow along to catch each one when it lands.
Wear them to the strip. Wear them in the garage. Wear them to the next cruise when somebody asks, "What's a gasser?" Then you get to tell them.
Built With Heart. Driven By History.