By Scooter Brothers
Guest Columnist

I was bitten by the racing bug while in high school in the early 1960s.  Things were quite different then, as I remember finding some transmission gears out of a police car transmission and replacing the ones in my ’57 Ford so I could use the power I had found in the 312-cubic-inch engine. 
That’s about the best there was then, and you had to do anything you could to find a way around, over or through every obstacle standing in the way of ultimate performance.
There were not many choices, and the few visionaries such as Smokey Yunick and Harvey Crane began making parts that really made a difference.  There were a few before that, but they were mainly concentrated on the West Coast, and we were lucky in the middle of the country to even read about what they did. Not racing was out of the question, so we had to improvise as best we could.
Throughout the 1970s, racing and technology leveled off. There were all kinds of economic and fuel-shortage issues and high performance lost its way. There was even some concern that racing would be legislated out.
But somewhere around the beginning of the next decade, racing was reborn.  Computers, CNC machines and the explosive growth of NASCAR fueled a passion for motorsports that enabled everything high performance to grow exponentially. 
The money generated from collectibles, sponsorships and television funded an incredible development process that enabled the everyday racer and enthusiast to associate himself with the most successful racers of the time.  Now that envious want-to-be racer in the middle of the country could actually obtain those exotic parts and play an important part in the development of the racing engine he was only able to read about a few years earlier.
About this time at Racing Head Service, I began building engines for local dirt sprint-car and late-model racers. The main thing that helped this project was the introduction of the computerized dyno.  Finally, we had a scientific, repeatable, affordable piece to develop engines. 
The Superflow dyno, was one of the first key pieces of the current high-performance puzzle. 
Now, all of a sudden, most local engine shops had the ability to test their engines on a dyno and better yet, they knew exactly where they stood relative to the competition. And probably just as important is the fact that the people spending the money had access to that information as well. Finally, some of the magic and mistruths about engine performance were uncovered.
Now that it was possible to accurately and repeatably test the parts, it became obvious that better parts were necessary. One of the major areas uncovered by this testing was airflow. Enter the age of CNC-ported cylinder heads and manifolds. 
It was now possible to develop a port and maximize power, then duplicate that shape — precisely and with minimal labor — over and over again. We still needed the hands-on porting guys, but mainly for development. Not only did the performance level of the heads stabilize, but so did the price.  These parts could be duplicated fairly inexpensively and were available to everyone.
I used to have to wait months for pistons and rods. Now even custom designs are available in days. Special cams are done in hours. CNC blocks, brand-new designs, electronic fuel injection, programmable ignition systems, application-specific valve springs and many other parts are common. In most cases the prices have not increased accordingly. 
The bottom line is that the future is exciting for racing. I see no end in the development of technology, and that will drive the quality levels and the availability of race parts to new levels.
The future for racing and race parts is strong. Stay tuned and hang on.