In 2004, Bill Pitts published a story on oldrace.com about a trip to Italy in search of Roland Leong’s 1965-’66 Championship winning Hawaiian Top Fuel dragster. I was intrigued as I’d seen the forlorn dragster in Turin’s Carlo Biscaretti di Ruffia museum and wondered what it was doing there.

“Then it was time for it to go to a body shop where it sat for a year and a half with nothing done to it. Then we took it to another shop and they went out of business and said, ‘come get your car.’ Well, the convertible top frame, the fenders, the hood and many of the other one-year only parts had just disappeared.

Geoff Stilwell is your quintessential Brit. He’s a gentleman, he loves motor sports, and he drives an Aston Martin. He’s James Bond in Bermuda shorts and like many Brits he’s into land speed racing because it’s part of their motor sports DNA.

Despite living on a small, damp island in the North Sea, the Brits enjoy a healthy appetite for motorsports of all kinds being the leading proponents of Formula One and holding the land speed record but there has always been the lure of racing in the USA perhaps it’s those vast, open spaces.

Herb Adams may not be a name that springs instantly to mind, especially if you didn’t grow up immersed in the muscle cars of the sixties.