History Dode Martin and Jim Nelson. The Dragmaster story.

From all I have read they were two of the nicest guys in the business and quite successful.

All photos and caption from here: https://www.hotrod.com/articles/dode-jim-dragmaster-nicest-guys-drag-racing/.

Some of these photos have been posted on the Hamb in various threads in various sizes but are presented here as they were in the article.

The first few things I will be posting have some reading but they are great stories worth reading. In later posting there will be more photos.


This is a story of a lifelong personal and business relationship. Two Southern California young men, Jim Nelson and Dode Martin, each with slightly different personalities and talents, partnered to form what would become a legendary drag racing and chassis building team: Dragmaster.

Like so many hotrodding pioneers, they both volunteered for military service during WWII. Following the war, Nelson and his buddies in the Carlsbad area formed the Oilers car club and raced at El Mirage, where he met and formed a long-lasting friendship with Wally Parks. His family's turkey ranch was the Oilers' hangout. Nelson got a job at Master's Auto Supply. Martin worked in Camp Pendleton as a construction contractor and belonged to the Shafters club based in Fallbrook.

In 1959, the Dragmaster team ran both the Dragliner and this new Dragmaster car. Seen here in the pits, the Nelson brothers—Jim on the far side and Tom near (both sporting flattop haircuts)—are checking the valve lash while another crewmember adds fuel under Dode Martin's watchful eye. Tom Nelson was the silent member of the Dragmaster business, a one-third partner who was an excellent engine builder and the sharpest dresser of the team. Note the white buck shoes he's wearing that were so popular in 1959.



As many Southern California hot-rodders soon realized, a once-monthly trip up to the desert to do a couple of passes down the dry lake was unfulfilling. And those in the San Diego area had double the slog to get there. Occasional street races were becoming more popular and unpopular with average citizens. The next logical step was to get the hot-rodders off the street and onto a dragstrip.

In 1950, Santa Ana became the first dragstrip in the country. Competitors were able to run more often even race head-to-head against their friends and it was close to home. Other dragstrips soon opened all around Los Angeles; and in San Diego, Paradise Mesa opened its doors. It was an abandoned WWII Navy outlying field in the heart of San Diego used only for aviation emergencies during the war.

Jim Nelson at El Mirage with his A/V8 roadster. It had the classic look, with the perfect stance, filled Deuce shell, smooth hood, and cut-off frame horns. Master's Auto Supply, where Nelson worked, sponsored him. He ran SCTA events as a member of the Oilers club from Carlsbad, California.




The San Diego Timing Association (SDTA) was formed and rules were written. If you were to look at an original SDTA rule book, you'd see it was the template for the NHRA's rule book. With both of our main protagonists in San Diego, their business would flourish. Initially, they set up shop in Fallbrook in 1954. They were only there a couple of years, because it was very remote, and getting parts or shipping anything was difficult. That led to the move to Carlsbad in 1957. California's major north-south highway that ran down to San Diego was the 101, and their shop was only a couple of blocks away.

Their Mission
Dragmaster's mission was to build race cars and dragsters for the rapidly expanding drag racing community. To promote their business, and to have fun racing, they built the Master's Dragliner, a streamlined Chevy-powered dragster. In 1957, that car won the C/Dragster class at the NHRA Nationals and the Best Engineered award. In 1958, they returned to the Nationals with the Master's Dragliner and the first of the famous Dragmaster dragster chassis, the Master's Dragmaster, which opened a floodgate of demand for the Dragmaster cars.


The NHRA's fuel ban contributed to a trend in the '60s of increasing horsepower in a dragster by adding a second engine. Dragmaster joined in with its Two Thing. A standard Dragmaster chassis was modified to accept two small-block Chevy engines that were joined at the flywheels. An additional ring gear was added to each flywheel and welded for security. The left engine had a specially ground cam that allowed it to run in the opposite direction. Each engine had a crank-mounted blower with a single injector feeding both blowers.

This is the same roadster Nelson ran on the lakes, now in street trim and sporting a chopped Deuce shell. Looking very unnatural are the highly placed headlights. Back then, hot rods could run sans front brakes, with no fenders and chopped tops, but the CHP would carry yardsticks to ensure a car's headlights were the proper distance from the pavement. Nelson is wearing his satin Oilers club jacket.




At the 1960 Nationals in Detroit, the Two Thing was awarded Best Engineered and set top speed of the meet at 171.10 mph. When asked about driving it while looking through the center stacks, Martin said, "It's actually fine, especially watching the blue flame rise higher and higher as you go faster at night." He also commented that one downside of having two engines connected is if one lets go, the other one keeps it spinning and thrashing the living daylights out of it. (There is a video from a vintage live KTLA TV broadcast of Martin running the Two Thing at Lions []. In that video, one of the engines detonates in a shower of sparks as it reaches the top end.)

Drag racers quickly found out that doubling the horsepower without having tires capable of handling that power didn't provide any major advantage over single-engine cars, making it a short-lived fad.

Nelson and Martin returned to their bread and butter: their single-engine Dragmaster chassis. Their reputation for building great cars, and as two of the easiest-going guys in racing, was a perfect combination for success. They built four different single-engine Dragmaster chassis: the Mark I with a 96-inch wheelbase, the Mark II with a 98-inch wheelbase, the Straight Arrow, and the soon-to-follow Dart chassis, both with 124-inch wheelbases. Notables who raced Dragmaster chassis included Pete Robinson, Mickey Thompson, Roland Leong, Jack Chrisman, and many others. While usually fitted with a small-block Chevy, the chassis was adaptable for any engine.

Nelson ran this '34 coupe at the lakes. This was a competition-only car and not street driven. Like so many of Nelson's cars, it was sponsored by Master's Auto Supply and sported a nod to the Oilers club on the hood's side panel.



Dragmaster also gave Roland Leong his start in racing. Teddy Leong, Roland's mom, fully supported Roland's dream to get into racing. She struck a deal with Dragmaster to have Roland come over to the Carlsbad shop and learn the trade at Dragmaster as an apprentice. "Roland stayed at our house for three months," says Dirk Nelson, Jim's son. "I got kicked out of my bedroom so he had a place to sleep." Leong's first Hawaiian dragster was built on a Mark I Dragmaster chassis.


In 1962, the Dragmaster team once again shot into the limelight with a Winternationals win thanks to its Dragmaster Dart, a Dart chassis powered by a Dodge wedge engine. This was the first major win for Dodge in any dragster class with one of its wedge engines. The marriage of Dodge and Dragmaster came about with a nudge from Wally Parks. In 1961, Dodge approached him for a recommendation for someone on the West Coast to help with its racing program. Dragmaster was the answer. Soon, truckloads of Dodge engines, transmissions, and rearends were being shipped to the Carlsbad shop—so many that a second, 6,000-square-foot building was required to store them all.

That was also the year Jim Nelson stopped driving dragsters. The turning point happened at Santa Ana dragstrip, when the brakes failed on his dragster. The track had one of the shortest shutdown areas of any dragstrip. Nelson once said with a laugh, "I even tried putting my hands on the rear tires to try and slow it down." He crashed at the end of the track and broke his back.


That's it for today more to come

 

I went to a couple of Dode Martin's birthday parties that he held at his house years back.
Very nice guy, easy going, had time for people that he didn't even know (me !). Great layout for a backyard.

Mike

 

Loudbang,

Thanks for sharing this with us brother. Very much appreciated!

Steve

 

Back in '62, I lived in McMinnville, Oregon. NHRA sanctioned a Divisional Meet at our local strip. It was a 2 day affair and we could only afford to attend on Sunday. However on Saturday night we went to town to check out the race cars parked at the motels. The newest and by far the nicest, was the Safari. There was quite a selection, including the Reath Automotive Fiat, and others from California. Parked center stage in a "V" formation was the Dart and Earl Poage's Dragmasters, pretty exciting stuff for a 13 year old gearhead. On Sunday, Jim Nelson took top honors in the Dart @ around 180. In 2002, at the CHHR we took the newly restored Coleman Bros Chassis Research Fl-44 rear engined Dragster, I was able to meet Jim and Dode, 2 of my lifelong Heroes ! Here are a couple of Earl's car from 1965, Jim Cooper photos.

 

I had the opportunity to meet them at the Drag-master Shop. Great folks.

 

Thanks for keeping history alive, these guys and their cars were everywhere. Looking forward to 'the rest of the story'.

 

I had a chance to ask one of them a question a few years back.

I asked him where he came up with the 96" wheelbase on the original Dragmaster chassis. He said "That's how long exhaust tubing sticks were". I swear he said that....

 

Met Dode a couple of times at the Track at Barona when they were running the flathead rail.Super nice guy!

 

Cool....thanks for posting !

 

Part 2

Before Nelson teamed up with Martin, he and Dick Dunham, another Oilers member, raced together. Here they accept a trophy from the trophy queen at San Diego's Paradise Mesa dragstrip.



Carlsbad Raceway opened in 1963. Both Nelson and Martin were heavily involved in its construction and operations, with Nelson as the manager and Martin initially laying the pavement and then doing tech inspections of dragsters. Like Lions, Carlsbad was a favorite of racers, almost at sea level and close to the cool, dense air the engines loved.

Dode Martin never raced on the lakes always on the dragstrip. This may have been his first dragster at speed. You gotta love his forward lean in the seat. While crude by today's standards, this was the state of the dragster art in the early '50s.




Hanging It Up
When Top Fuel dragsters were again allowed to run at NHRA events in 1965, Nelson and Martin hung up their helmets and goggles and stopped making Dragmaster dragster chassis. Fuel racers were looking for other chassis that better suited the fuel-racing trends. Top Fuel racing meant higher speeds and much higher costs—another good reason to retire. By this point, Dragmaster had built somewhere between 200 and 300 chassis.

This was also a time when domestic life took over for both Nelson and Martin. The business was making $200,000 a year, but racing was costing $300,000. The bleeding had to stop, and that's when Nelson's wife, Martha, came in to run Dragmaster as a business.

To satisfy their car-building itch, Dragmaster started to build a hot rod kit car called the Streetster. The kits featured a tube chassis, a Kellison fiberglass T-roadster or T-roadster pickup body, a basic small-block Ford or Chevy engine, and a slick set of Dragmaster-built chrome headers. The base kit sold for about $2,500, but many options were offered, including a completely finished car. This was a fun, but short-lived project. As the muscle car era blossomed at this time, hot rods faded a bit in popularity.


One of Martin's first frames: two rails, a front crossmember, a rear crossmember, and a motor plate, all freshly painted white. And what would a hot-rodder's garage be without a couple Deuce shells hanging on the wall.




Dragmaster continued to transition from a race shop to an automotive repair facility. Martin had his corner of the shop with his machinery, and Nelson was always seen in the shop with a red shop rag in his rear pocket walking around carrying a coffee cup. He was the sharpest mechanic in the shop, almost an engine whisperer. Ralph Straesser, one of the mechanics who worked at Dragmaster for 15 years, recalls struggling with an engine with a faint miss. Even with the engine on the scope, he couldn't find the miss. "Jim walked up, listened for a couple of seconds, and looked at the scope," Straesser recalls. "He then said, 'It's number six,' and pointed at a very small blip on the scope." Straesser and Nelson became good friends outside of the shop. They worked together on the NHRA Safety Safari for 15 years, and Straesser was a member of Jim's weekly poker game.

After selling Dragmaster in 1995, Nelson went to work at the Legoland amusement park in Carlsbad, where he was named the employee of the year and won a trip to Europe. Martin worked in his home shop, where he built and restored cars and mentored several young men interested in building cars. Every year, Martin hosted an open house where he displayed his latest creation, vintage dragsters, and his racing memorabilia. In attendance were hot-rodders from all parts of Southern California and former Dragmaster employees. It wasn't unusual to see Prudhomme, Leong, and other racers of note there, too.


The Flea Farm Oilers club members gravitated to Jim Nelson's parents' turkey farm, also known as the "flea farm" because of the abundance of fleas the turkeys attracted. Nelson (at far right in the tub) hated turkeys.






More to come a lot more photos.

 

I'm enjoying this, thank you for the effort!

 

When I moved to Carlsbad, I needed two locals to sign my library card application; Jim and Dode to the rescue! They ran a one inch ad in HOT ROD offering a catalog of parts for fifty cents. Mail response was so heavy, they ran the envelopes over a light table to make sure there was money before opening them. They built a prototype Volksrod double tube frame that I got and then traded it to Bruce Crower. Jim also worked on a lot of boats in the Oceanside Marina. A lot of Dodge projects went through their shop and were tested at nearby Carlsbad Raceway.

 

Don't forget the Dodge Chargers in next installment, probably their most photographed and lasting build.

 

Sorry Bad news they were included in the article BUT something happened and they are the ONLY photos that no longer work.

 

Today is all DodgeChargers.

In 1964, Dragmaster was contracted to build three special Dodge sedans. Dodge shipped them a trio of 330 Max Wedge lightweight cars. The team built three 480ci supercharged Max Wedge engines backed by TorqueFlite transmissions. Customizer Dean Jeffries added rolled aluminum pans front and rear; radius'd the rear wheel openings; and added the custom white, blue, and candy red paint. Lettered on the side was the name Dodge Chargers, which Dodge would capitalize on two years later as the name of a new production model.

These cars were designed to be promotional cars rather than race cars. They were only meant to compete against each other, and the cars had to resemble passenger cars, so no engine relocation or wheelbase changes were allowed. Labeled as S/FX for the (fictitious) Supercharger Factory Experimental class, they ran e.t. 's in the mid-10-second range at 130 mph.

EDIT: the photos in the listed article do NOT work anymore so I went back in the SuperStock thread and the Altered Wheel base threads. Most posted by myself way back and a couple from other members.

Some MAY have been the ones from the article but no way of telling.







Posted by Hemi32













Posted by Slayer

 

Thanks loudbang. I have not seen some of those pictures especially the one wirh the two parked in the grass showing the third car without the radius wheel well. That last one was with the only survivor parked in front of my house about 10 years ago. I owned it about 15 years before selling it.

 

Good eye, you know your subject material. I never even noticed the uncut wheel well until you mentioned it.

 

Did you run across any info on the Dodge truck run by a local San Diego DJ and built in the dragmaster shop?

 

Yes a bit of info on it coming up. It was posted by me in the Super Stock thread some time ago and this week (I think) by somebody maybe swi66 in the vintage photo thread.

 

We still run our 62 dragmaster--see my avatar- my son had the honor to meet Dode several years ago, what a great guy.

 

In the Movies
In 1964, Jim Nelson made his big screen debut in The Lively Set, starring James Darren, Doug McClure, and Pamela Tiffin. It featured dragsters, turbine cars, and road racing sedans. The sedans, all '64 fullsize models, were in a race across Death Valley. Nelson recalled that Mickey Thompson (who also recruited Nelson for the movie) obtained the cars, added lettering and numbers on the sides, and also installed rollbars made of exhaust tubing. Nelson said when driving across the desert at high speeds, Mickey was on the radio telling all the drivers to get closer and go faster. All the cars were standard factory cars with no modifications, and making the corners was hairy.

Nelson even had a short line of dialogue in the movie. In one of the garage scenes, a pretty young woman passes him and another mechanic, to which Nelson says, "Boy, that's the only way to fly!" Every time the movie was shown on TV, Nelson got a royalty check for $1.98. Usually, once a year.


Darren McClure, dragster




Moon Master
Dean Moon's rolling advertisement used an early Dragmaster frame with the optional double-hoop rollbar. Its small-block Chevy was outfitted with Moon's signature valve covers and a Potvin crank-driven blower setup.




Dog Sled
Nelson and Martin went to as many races as possible, towing their race cars on an open trailer and often delivering a chassis along the way. Once, on the way to a race in Texas with race car in tow and a new chassis on the roof of their Chrysler station wagon tow car, they were stopped for speeding. Martin recalled, "We were doing about 80 mph when we were stopped. The officer said with a heavy Texas accent, 'My name is Mr. Wyatt. Why you all driving so fast?' I explained that we were going to a race. He didn't give us a ticket, but he wanted to know what we were doing with a dog sled on the roof of the car. I said, 'Man that's no dog sled, it's a race car!'"


Red
Red was one of the guys who worked for Dragmaster and traveled with them on the road. Red also liked his drink. The night after one race he had too much and fell asleep in the dragster on the trailer. In the morning, the guys could not wake him and headed home, trailer in tow, with Red still in the dragster. After about an hour on the road, Red woke up and had to pee something terrible. He was waving, yelling, and doing everything he could to get the attention of the guys in the tow car, but to no avail. The only way to get them to stop, as Red saw it, was to pull the drag chute. Luckily, it didn't pull the trailer off the hitch, but it gave the occupants of the tow car a mighty lurch and got their attention.


The Master's Dragliner was the first serious attempt by Nelson and Martin at building a world-class dragster. Martin crafted the chassis, and Nelson built the small-block Chevy engine. The streamlined body was a combination of sheet aluminum and fiberglass. The gold and red paint scheme set the standard with the team on all of its future dragsters.

 

Tech Inspector
One of the many jobs Jim Nelson had with the NHRA was as a tech inspector. But, as he admitted, he didn't know everything. At one race where he was officiating, he had to inspect the engine of a stock class winner. To him, with the valve cover off, everything looked normal. One of the other competitors pulled him aside and said, "Those are not the stock valvesprings on that car." Nelson went back, looked under the hood, and told the owner, "Those are not the stock valvesprings! You're disqualified." The competitor didn't say a word and just looked at Jim, amazed he knew the valvesprings were illegal.


Underweight
When asked if the Dragmaster team ever cheated, Nelson thought for a second and said, "We were a little underweight on one of our cars. To solve the problem, we added a weight that fitted inside the injector scoop, and the cover hid it." (In competition, the car is weighed after a run. Typically, competitors would put a cover over the scoop after a run, before going to the scales.)


The small-block Chevy in the Master's Dragliner was fitted with four two-barrel carburetors. It used an aftermarket distributor instead of a magneto. This required a battery, visible at lower left. Small details abound, such as the water temperature gauge on the side of the cowling, just outboard of the battery, which can be read from the outside.




With Martin in the driver seat, Nelson (on the right with the flattop) is helping another crewmember add the Dragliner's canopy. This had to be done just prior to a race to prevent Martin from being parboiled. The push car is pure classic Southern California: a '39 Ford woodie. It also features a competition stripe similar to the Dragliner.



Nelson and Martin took the Dragliner to Oklahoma City for the 1957 NHRA Nationals and came home with a win in C/Dragster, a class record (124.30 mph), and the trophy for Best Engineered Car. Wally Parks handed out the hardware, while Alex Xydias ducked out of the way in the foreground.

 

The Master's Dragliner and what was most likely the first of the Dragmaster series of chassis. Always the innovators, Nelson and Martin used a Latham blower on the small-block Chevy in the new Dragmaster car.



At the 1959 NHRA Nationals, the Dragmaster team set the low e.t. mark at 9.12 seconds. Here, Martin is seen leaving the line wheels up. Tom Nelson has just released the rollbar, keeping the car from rolling forward before the starter flagged it. Jim Nelson is seen in the background to the left in a star-covered sports shirt.



In the late '50s, the accepted theory was a second engine was needed to go faster on the dragstrip. Three different designs were used: inline, side-by-side, and canted side-by-side. The latter was used by the Dragmaster team on its Two Thing (and by Tommy Ivo on his twin-Buick dragster). This required one engine to run in reverse with flywheel gears meshing.

Edit: unlike TV Tommy's buicks this one has all the center pipes pointing up




At the 1960 NHRA Nationals, the Dragmaster Two Thing took Top Speed honors (171.10 mph) as well as the Motor Trend magazine award for Best Engineered. To the right of Motor Trend's necktie-wearing John Lawlor are (right to left): Tom Nelson, Dode Martin, and Jim Nelson.

 

Martin blasts off the line at the 1961 Winternationals, where the Two Thing set an AA/D speed record of 174.92 mph. Because of the configuration of the engines and offset of the differential, Martin sat to the left side of the car. He confessed to one downside of the twin-engine design: If one engine failed, the other would keep it spinning, resulting in total destruction of the broken engine.



Dragmaster made it easy for anyone to build a dragster, and a lot of people accepted the challenge. While designed for a small-block Chevy, almost any V-8 could be added. It was truly a kit car that could be bought with almost all the parts needed to quickly go racing.



Mickey Thompson had an excellent relationship with Dragmaster and used many of its chassis for his race cars. Thompson "invaded" the inaugural Winternationals with no less than five Pontiac-powered dragsters, including blown and unblown versions with four-cylinder Tempest engines (essentially 389ci V-8s cut in half). MT surprised everyone by winning Middle Eliminator against Tom Buky's B/Altered.

 

Great close-ups of the artistic Two Thing and it's superior engineering.

 

The Dragmaster Dart was the final iteration of the team's dragster designs. In 1962, when Dodge wanted to get into all phases of racing, Wally Parks recommended Dragmaster as an excellent drag racing partner. The culmination of their initial teamwork was this Dodge-powered dragster, which Nelson (wearing the large white lei) drove to Top Eliminator at the 1962 Winternationals.



In front of the Dragmaster Dart is Phil Parker's Dragmaster Dartchassis'd B/Gas dragster. It last ran in 1964 with Jess Van Deventer behind the wheel. When brought to the Hot Rod Reunion, it was a perfect time capsule from that era, replete with its 1964 Nationals competition sticker.



Dragmasters' involvement with Dodge included building a Slant Sixpowered, Dart-chassis'd dragster called the Dart 6. It competed at the 1962 Nationals.

 

Here is the DJ truck part.

In 1963, Dragmaster became the unofficial West Coast skunkworks for Dodge. In addition to wrenching on Bill "Maverick" Golden's Super Stock Dodge sedan, the crew built a B/FX Dodge Ram pickup truck. San Diego disk jockey Dick Boynton was the driver and was sponsored by five San Diego area Dodge dealers. Under the fiberglass front end was a 426 Max Wedge engine backed by a TorqueFlite. It ran the quarter in the high- to mid-12-second range at a little more than 110 mph.




Nelson and Martin quit racing when nitro was reintroduced into the dragster classes and shifted their focus to building the Streetster, a low-cost hot rod kit that featured the outstanding engineering for which Dragmaster was famous.




Jim Nelson and Dode Martin were two of the nicest guys in drag racing. After they sold the business, Martin kept working in the shop outside his home, where he restored the Dragmaster Dart and built an accurate reproduction of the Two Thing. Nelson went to work at the newly opened Legoland amusement park, where in his first year he was named employee of the year and given a free trip to Europe. Martin passed away in 2018 at age 92; Nelson in 2012 at age 84.



Well that finishes this story but don't worry I will be looking for more History stories to post.

 

Extremely well done, sir ... thank you for your efforts.

 

A couple of Famoso pit girls joking around with Dode and Jim at a California Hot Rod Reunion. They knew how to enjoy life.