The photo attached to this drag racing quiz isn’t a random stock shot — it’s a tribute to one of Super Stock drag racing’s most storied nameplates. Before testing your knowledge, get the real story: the rare factory aluminum heads and the roughly 800-horsepower HEMI build behind it.
Can You Pass the Test?
Test your Drag Racing knowledge with this very short test. No one has aced it yet.
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The car pictured next to this quiz isn’t just set dressing — it’s one of the most recognizable names in early Super Stock drag racing, and the story behind it involves a father-son build team, a rare set of factory aluminum heads, and a nickname that stuck for half a century. Most quiz-takers will breeze past the photo without a second look. That’s a mistake, because the details baked into this particular car matter more than any trivia question that follows.
The Name Behind ‘Color Me Gone’
‘Color Me Gone’ traces back to Super Stock cars built and campaigned during drag racing’s most experimental era, when factory-backed teams pushed lightweight bodies and massive engines to the ragged edge of what NHRA rules allowed. The name became shorthand for a car that left the competition in the dust, and it’s been resurrected on tribute builds ever since because of how much weight it still carries with drag racing purists.
What’s Actually Under the Hood
Tribute builds carrying this name are typically powered by a 426 cubic-inch HEMI V8 built on a NASCAR-spec block and fitted with rare 1965 A990 aluminum cylinder heads — the same lightweight heads factory teams specced to shed pounds off the nose of the car. Properly built to period Super Stock specifications, engines like this can produce close to 800 horsepower, numbers that would have been almost unimaginable on a factory drag package in period.
Why Purists Still Chase This Build
What separates a genuine tribute from a generic hot rod is attention to detail most casual builders skip entirely — NHRA-certified chassis work, period-correct aluminum heads, and paint schemes lifted directly from period photographs. Builds done to this standard aren’t just fast; they’re rolling history lessons, which is exactly why cars carrying this name keep showing up at nostalgia drag events decades after the originals retired.
The Coronet Underneath the Paint
The photo tied to this quiz shows a white 1965 Dodge Coronet, a car that on paper looks like an ordinary mid-size sedan but became one of Chrysler’s most important early drag racing platforms once the factory started dropping serious performance hardware into it. The Coronet’s relatively light, boxy body made it a favorite starting point for exactly the kind of Super Stock builds that made cars like this one famous.
Factory Match Race Wars of the Mid-1960s
By the mid-1960s, Ford, Chevrolet, and Chrysler were all quietly funding factory-backed drag racing programs, feeding lightweight, big-engine specials to favored racers who’d tour the country running match races against each other at local strips. That factory backing is exactly what allowed builds like the original “Color Me Gone” cars to exist in the first place — money and engineering resources no privateer racer could have matched on their own.
What NHRA Certification Actually Requires
Cars running quick enough elapsed times at NHRA-sanctioned events are legally required to carry a certified roll cage and chassis work inspected against strict safety standards, a rule that exists specifically because of how violent a high-speed crash can be in a car built for straight-line speed rather than cornering or crash absorption. A tribute build done to the standard described in the existing content isn’t just for show — that certification is a real prerequisite for racing the car competitively today.
Why Nostalgia Drag Racing Keeps Growing
Nostalgia drag racing events, where period-correct and tribute Super Stock cars run exhibition passes rather than modern competition classes, have grown steadily as a way for builders to actually use cars like this rather than leaving them as static show pieces. That “actually race it” ethos separates nostalgia drag culture from a lot of other collector car communities, where a car’s value can sometimes discourage owners from ever really driving it hard.
Testing Trivia Knowledge Against Real History
A quiz built around genuine drag racing trivia works precisely because the subject matter has decades of documented, verifiable history behind it — real cars, real records, real rivalries between factory teams — giving quiz-writers plenty of legitimate material to draw questions from without needing to embellish anything.
Reading the Livery on a Period Drag Car
The lettering, paint scheme, and sponsor decals on a Super Stock-era drag car weren’t just decoration — they identified which factory program and which racer campaigned that specific chassis, and enthusiasts today can often trace a tribute build’s paint scheme back to a specific, documented original car by matching those details against period photographs.
Aluminum Heads Were a Genuine Engineering Breakthrough
Swapping cast iron cylinder heads for aluminum ones might sound like a minor material choice, but on a drag car built to launch as hard and fast as possible, shedding weight from the nose of the car measurably improves weight transfer and traction off the line. Factory teams pursuing every possible edge in the 1960s treated lightweight aluminum components as a serious competitive advantage, not just a nice-to-have upgrade.
Why Some Trivia Questions Stump Even Serious Fans
Drag racing trivia can trip up even dedicated enthusiasts specifically because so much of the era’s history lives in scattered period photographs, old racing magazines, and word-of-mouth stories passed down through car clubs, rather than in a single consolidated record anyone can easily search. That scattered documentation is part of what makes a well-researched quiz genuinely challenging rather than trivially easy.
No One Aces It on the First Try
A quiz claiming nobody has aced it yet sets a genuinely high bar, and given how deep and scattered real drag racing history actually is, that claim is more believable here than it would be for most trivial internet quizzes.
Test Your Knowledge, Then Compare Notes
Whatever score the quiz returns, the real value is in what it prompts afterward — comparing notes with other commenters about which questions tripped everyone up, and maybe learning a genuine piece of drag racing history in the process.
Share your thoughts in the comments below.
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