Check out all the classic old-school drag cars in this awesome digital scrapbook from Harlingen Air Field circa 1962. 

First, a little housekeeping: This wonderful video scrapbook of vintage drag racing photos is slightly mislabeled as 1960-62. If you watch closely, you’ll catch a few vehicles as new as the 1965 model year. No matter—the photos are all of a piece, all depicting the same special era in drag racing, one that will never be duplicated.

Drag racing at Harlingen in those days was fairly typical of the action across the country. The strip itself was the former Harlingen Air Field just outside Brownsville, Texas, constructed with two giant runways back in 1941 to train pilots and crews for World War II. As the hot rod movement took off, many WWII air bases like this were repurposed as drag strips in an effort to encourage teenagers to keep their racing off the streets.

In this photo collection, we were attracted to the wonderful variety of race cars: There are homebuilt and pro-built dragsters, classic gassers in every body style, straight-up hot rods, and all manner of street cars (check out the custom-bodied Fiat Vignale at 1:41). These YouTube scrapbooks are an enjoyable way to view vintage still  collections, we’ve found. Please push play.