There’s only one thing that can match the manic excitement of drag racing in the ’60s: the radio commercials. Just listen.
The audio leaps out of the radio speaker at you with the energy level pegged at 10. Ray Charles is beating out the opening riff of “What’d I Say” on an electric piano…and then suddenly, a pair of announcers are screaming in your face: “SATURDAY! SATURDAY NIGHT AT DETROIT DRAGWAY! A GRAND OPENING SATURDAY NIGHT SPECTACULAR!”
If that won’t get your attention and make you aware there’s a drag racing event coming up, it’s hard to know what will. Subtle it wasn’t. Jan Gabriel at U.S. 30 Dragway in Gary, Indiana is usually credited with originating the shrieking “Sunday, Sunday, SUNDAY!” drag racing commercial, but most every strip in America eventually ran roughly the same ads.
The Detroit Dragway spots were performed by two local disc jockeys, Joel Sebastian and Rube Weiss, and broadcast relentlessly on the region’s major teen station, CKLW, the 50,000-watt blowtorch across the Detroit River in Windsor, Ontario. Kids as far away as Erie, Pennsylvania tuned in to the Big 8, as the station was known in those days.
This radio ad from 1966 touts a match race between Chevy partisan Pete Seaton versus the Motor City’s Dodge heroes, the Ramchargers, with the Hurst Hairy Olds exhibition racer also making an appearance. Detroit Dragway! SIbley at Dix! Saturday!
Thanks, that was wonderful. Living in Indiana we had those commercials, then my family moved to Florida and we heard basically the same thing. I was bummed, I thought we were special!
“Take Telegraph Road to Sibley, drive one mile East to Dix!”
Yup, grew up in Detroit in the 60’s, remember these commercials oh so well! I had a 63 Dodge 426 wedge set up by Jay Howell and I remember well the first time I took it down to the drags………….what a blast!
We had those as well, with the 2 guys yammering at each other, “Sunday, Sunday, Sunday, Great Lakes Dragaway, Union Grove, Wisconsin”. I’m a huge Simpson’s fan (not the new ones), but in a couple of episodes, they pick fun at those. In “Homer the Smithers”, Mr. Smithers takes a job as a drag race announcer and asks (over the loudspeaker)”Do we have to keep badgering these people like this?”