What is Pro Street
The term "Pro Street" is used rather loosely today, but the one constant is that the car has big rear tires and looks like it was built for the drag strip.
Pro Street is a style of street-legal custom car popular in the 1980s, usually built to imitate a Pro Stock class drag car. Pro Street cars appear to be more at home on the drag strip than the street, while remaining street legal and not gutted like a Race Car or Bracket Race car.
Cars of this type typically feature two of the following three modifications:
- A highly modified engine.
- A narrowed rear axle coupled with oversized rear wheels & at least a 14" wide x 5+” sidewalls tire (located within the wheel wells) for maximum grip and wheelie bars
- A roll cage.
Jeff Smith, an editor of Car Craft and later Hot Rod during the peak of the Pro Street era, defines a Pro Street car as one with oversize, fat tires in the rear with wheel tubs to allow the car to sit right. He writes... "Does it need a blower sticking through the hood? Many will say yes and we chose those cars for the cover of the magazine and inside because they were dramatic." But realistically, Jeff writes, the blower through the hood is not safe for street use. And, being street legal is a requirement for a real Pro Street car.
WICKEDVW does not have wheel tubs. The rear fiberglass fenders are each 4" wider than stock to allow Nitto NT05 P235/45/R17 street/strip rear tires to replace the stock 165SR15 tire (width 6.5").
To be fair, WICKEDVW is probably not a true Pro Street by definition (it has a tube chassis). But there is no question that it has those big (for a bug) rear tires, a roll cage, and it looks like it belongs on a drag strip, so I will take some liberty.
