There’s been some suggestion the first drag race anywhere actually happened in Australia in 1930, when a Mrs. J. Jones set an official time of 18.25 seconds for the standing start quarter-mile in her supercharged Alfa at Bondi Beach near Sydney. That predates the Americans by at least twenty years, but the only competition was against the clock that day. The sport emerged, as we know it now, in America during the fifties. It came to Australia around a decade later, with events held on airstrips and closed public roads, and the first Australian Nationals event was run in 1965 at Riverside near Melbourne, close to where the West Gate Bridge now stands.