Why Drag Racing Erased the Incredible Story of Nitro Nellie Goins | Nellie Goins

Video Description from YouTube:

Nellie Goins never wanted to be a race car driver. She was a munitions plant supervisor and steelworker’s wife raising four kids in Gary, Indiana when her husband Otis’s diabetes disqualified him from driving the nitro Funny Car they’d scrimped and saved to build — so she got behind the wheel instead. What followed became one of the most quietly remarkable stories in nineteen seventies drag racing history: an unsponsored, self-funded husband-and-wife team running a Plymouth Barracuda, a Dodge-bodied car, and finally a Chrysler Hemi–powered Ford Mustang Mach 1 built by U.S. Nationals-winning tuner Kenny Hirata, on the Midwest match race circuit at tracks like U.S. 30 Dragway and Bristol Dragway, with almost no institutional backing and almost no press coverage beyond a single 1971 Ebony magazine feature.

This documentary traces the full, verified story of “Nitro Nellie” Goins — her background in Gary, Indiana, the family-funded build of her nitro Funny Cars, the Ebony magazine feature that remains nearly her only period documentation, the career-ending Bristol Dragway crash, and the thirty years the car sat parked before a modern restoration and a 2014 Hall of Fame induction finally brought her story back into the light. Along the way we dig into why drag racing’s official record — built on N.H.R.A. and A.H.R.A. national events, sponsor dollars, and trade press coverage — never captured her, and how that compares to contemporaries like Shirley Muldowney, Della Woods, Paula Murphy, and Malcolm Durham, each of whom left a very different kind of paper trail.

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#DragRacing #NitroNellie #FunnyCar #NHRAHistory #DragRacingHistory #BlackMotorsportsHistory #MotorsportsHistory #VintageDragRacing