Anyone got stories from some "back in the day" Racers? Lets hear em!

I was talking to my Pal Larry today. He's a Ford racer and one of those waaaaaaaaay smart mechanic/machinists that we all wish we can be. Absolutley no ego trip either. Anyway, He's been racing forever. He's even owned some super rare ones, Like a 427 Hi Rise 64 Galaxie, and a 67 Fairlane R code. So while talking about real racing back when, he mentions he rolled the R code. I asked what happened. This happen at Quaker city were our Nats are. So way back when, he launches and shears the lugs of the driver side rear wheel right after the launch. It stays on the hub nicely till he powershifts the Top Loader into third. Then he feels the car act squirrley, and outta the corner of eye he sees his rear wheel pass by him!!! After that he recalls some spins (No rail back then) and finally an endo!!! I asked what he did, and he said he scrunched down in the seat as best he couldd. No rollcage required!! His injurys where mostly glass fragments in the elbows. His helmet had scrapes on the top from the compressed roof! So while in the ambulance being checked over, one of his pals brings him his rear wheel..........and the 12.36 timeslip it recorded all by itself!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :laugh:

I tried not to laugh to hard, but geez, is this good vintage drag stories or what? To bad it was a R code 427, but at least it met its demise were it belonged,....On the Strip!

SO for all of youns fortunate enough to know an old time drag racer, what stories have you got?

 

This wasn't on a drag strip but on the highway.

Back in 1983, my dad had just bought brand new 1983 Volkswagen Rabbit GTI. There was a certain off-ramp from a highway in Chicago that he took frequently. It is sorta' odd as it goes from two lanes down to only one. So It made for a game of "chicken" for two cars. As my dad is heading towards the ramp he spots a BMW that wants to play. So being in a performance vehicle himself he joins in. While racing up the ramp in the seperate lanes the become neck and neck. (the road was clear) Right as the two lanes form into one my dad guns it :3gears: And pulls ahead by about half a car length, then hammers into 3rd and pulls ahead of the BMW completely. There still side-by-side and the lane in narrowing quickly. The BMW has to either go behind my dads GTI or hit the wall. He chose not to back down and sideswept the wall pretty good. One of the many stories of my father. There more from when he had a Pinto and Galaxie.

 

in 1978,79,80 while i was in high school
they had days set aside at road america race track for us to run our cars against each other
it was like one saturday a month
anyway i would alway show up with my 65 wildcat, it had the big nailhead and the old stack fuel injection that the mods ran back then
ran off of airplane fuel (bought it by the 55 gallon drum back then
anyways
i was lined up with a 69 mock one for mustang
nice car
stick shift
351 clevland motor
me in my rusty 65 with the stacks
guy looked over kind of smiled and reved her up alot
i just sat there
guy came up made sure we had our helmets on, looked at the tires and that was pretty much the inspection fase of it
went out front with the flag
flashed it down
the guy just sat there while i went away
it turned out after i went around he had it in high gear instead of first and killed the motor
all i could tell him when i got back was
dume ---, learn how to drive
that big old cat took second that day
lost to a 66 pony car
big old cat held up nice though
Greg

 

Mn Dragway-

Well-here's another variation. Back years ago I used to race my '65 Pont GP at Minnesota Dragway. It was a 421 w/thm400 and did pretty well for having 2.73 gears(didn't get out of second). The military and draft was lurking and I was gone from Mn for 4 years. I came back to find the track closed.
Fast forward 25 years and I'm at a 'show and go' at Brainerd raceway and see an older couple sitting near a nice '65 GP. I mentioned that I'd had one and had actually drag raced that boat at mndragway around '69-70-they smiled and said they had been the track owners! They had had their GP many years and had raced it down the BIR track before it had even been paved. A fun coincidence. Sadly they both died a few years ago from monoxide poisoning at their lake place-

 

I'll take a shot at it...

I'm trying to think of the best ones (I'll start slow and work my way up):

We used to run the Stanton (aka "McBrides") dragway back in 1955 when it was grass. The starting line was concrete for about 300 feet and then you would run right off into the grass.

It was also a small airfield and so occasionally they would stop racing long enough to let the planes land.

It is now known as the "Mid Michigan Motorplex" and we still race there.

 

Speaking of Stanton -

Some of you are probably familiar with the famous "jet car" racer Art Arfons (of "Green Monster") fame.

They used to book him for exhibition runs fairly regularly at Stanton. There used to be a big beautiful pecan tree right at the end of the staging lanes behind the starting line.

Well, you guess it: Art fired up that big Pratt & Whitney jet engine and got ready to make a pass. He launched and caught the tree on fire! They were able to put it out but it killed half the tree.

He came back the next year and killed the other half.

Meanwhile, Wyman Road crosses behind the starting line (perpendicular to the track) and spectators were lining up all along the road. It became obvious to the track management that they needed to put up some kind of fence, so they ended up installing a picket type fence (with planks). The only problem was that they nailed the boards up from the street side of the structure (rather than the track side). The first pass Art made the next year he blew all those planks off the fence and into the potato field across the road.

K

 

Speaking of exhibition racers -

There was a guy here in Michigan by the name of EJ Potter (the original "Motor City Madman"). He was famous for racing motorcycles with small block Chevys or Allison V12 aircraft engines in them (and later for tractor pulling tractors). He would crash these things with amazing regularity.

He was booked to make three passes at Ubly dragway one time and sure enough on the second pass he layed it down in the lights at well over 100 mph.

He came back up to the tower after that, with hands and legs all swabbed with Vaseline and wrapped up in clean cloths, and said "well, I'll be back next week". The track owner questioned him as to what he was talking about and he said "well, you paid me for three passes and you'll get three passes".

Sure enough, he put the bike back together and made that third pass the following week.

K

 

Speaking of crashes -

"Wild Willie" Borsch used to drive the "Winged Express" AA/Fuel Altered. He was famous for driving this ill mannered beast with one hand, his left hand resting comfortably on the side of the body above the door. I have a picture on my desk as we speak with that bad boy completely sideways on the starting line, smoke billowing from behind and the "Moon Eyes" decal on the wing looking downtrack for some way of escape!!

Anyway, he came to "Tri City Dragway" one time when I was still quite small, probably 6 or 7 or 8 years old. He saw me standing there looking at the car and he picked me up into his arms. On the "turtle deck" portion (the back portion of the body of a Model "T") they had a map painted and next to certain locations there were little "flames" shooting up. He explained that each of the little flamed spots were places they had crashed the car. He finished his speech by slamming me down into the cockpit and letting me sit there while they finished prepping the car for the next round.

Made quite an impression on me, as you might imagine....

K

 

A man of his word! slightly crazy? But a man of his word!

 

Ramchargers, part I

We used to run a class car back in the mid 60s (typically B/S or B/MP) and our arch rival here in Southeast Michigan was the Ramchargers team, led by Jim Thornton. They were obviously a full factory backed team, as were we, but not so obviously: we ran a full factory sponsored Pontiac but ran the designated "sleeper" car. No stickers, no lettering, no fancy paint, no external clues. In all honesty the cars were pretty closely matched but that's probably what made Thornton so mad when we beat them.

We ran for the class win one time and beat the Ramchargers car but it was close enough that Jim wanted to rerun (grudge style). When we beat them again, they protested and wanted us to tear the engine down. We stalled for a while, bartering that we would tell them everywhere we cheated if they would share everywhere they were cheating. No deal. They tore us all the way down to the block and measured every component, including setting "V" blocks up on the tailgate of their MOPAR wagon (everybody towed with station wagons back then) and measuring the cam WITH A DEGREE WHEEL right there at the track. They couldn't find anything wrong so we left with the win, their protest money, the trophy, and a trunk full of engine parts that we had to put together for the next week.

To reciprocate, the next time we saw them we protested. Made them take the "spare tire" out. We knew we were onto something when it took four burly Chrysler engineers to unload the spare: it was full of cement for ballast.

K

PS - by the way, the camshaft was as bogus as could be. It was a special grind that Harvey Crane had done for us and stamped the regular production part numbers into. They didn't find it....

 

Ramchargers, Part II

If you look in the old "Hot Rod" magazines you will find a photo sequence of the time the Ramchargers flipped their "Candymatic" altered wheelbase funny car.

It had been raining and after it quit the track was not in that great of shape (track prep was not what it is today). The shoulder of the track and the pit area were way muddy. We had a '63 Catalina at the time, one of two "HO" 421s with the aluminum front end, doors and decklid (like the "Swiss Cheese" cars but on a regular frame). We had a favorite parking spot right by the fence about two-thirds of the way down the track. I think you can see where this is heading.

Sure enough, Thornton got squirrelly and dropped one tire off the side of the track. The car got crossways and started rolling, slinging mud everywhere and heading right straight for our parking spot and our '63 Cat. We took off out of there figuring that old Candymatic could have our car and anything else in its way. It continued to roll and got up on top of the chain link fence and when it finally stopped................it was inches away from the car and NEVER TOUCHED IT.

We won the class that day and if you look in the photos you can see that there is mud all over the front of the car.

K

 

Life with a flagman -

Back in the old days, before there were electronics, any race worth running was started with a flagman. This could be a huge advantage, particularly if you knew the flagman and his mannerisms. For example, one guy might nod his head at you, turn and nod his head at your competitor and then immediately wave the flag. Obviously, if you knew this, you could begin the process of launching your car when he nodded his head the second time and be well on your way before the other guy knew what hit him.

Handicapping in those days took place with "car lengths". Naturally, this is not very scientific. One of the things you could do was negotiate the number of car lengths but then line up with your car slightly closer that what was decided. Or, better yet, if all the "spectators" were lined up ahead of you with your competitor, you could actually start by discretely rolling forward and then, when the flag flew, nail the throttle. Nobody way upstream even knew because the front end didn't fly up until the flagman started the race.

The Christmas tree timer was introduced at the 1963 Winternationals, I believe. As you might expect the electronics were not very good back then. Dad reports that on several occasions he actually launched the car and the red light came on, flickered and then turned back off. He was credited with "wins" for those passes.

We've come a long way, baby...

K

 

Racing the tow car -

At one point in time we had a maroon '64 GTO, which was B/S legal (that's B stock to the less informed) with a 389 cu in tripower and a four speed. That was the race car, but we had also been given a maroon '64 Lemans as a tow car but it had a 421 cu in tripower and a four speed. It was actually a pretty cool setup, because you could get out of the tow car and into the race car and already be "comfortable", (ie, same steering wheel, same seat, same clutch pedal, same shifter throw, etc).

As you might expect, the tow car was actually a few ticks quicker than the race car. If anybody gave us a ration of crap we could say, with distain, "shoot, I can stomp you with my TOW CAR..."

It came to that on a couple occasions, and usually we did.

K

In the attachments, the first picture is our Corvair tow car with the GTO behind it; in the second picture the Lemans is the tow car with the '65 GTO behind it. We still have the '65 (more on that later).

 

PS - How many carburetors?

This just popped into my head:

Guess how many carburetors are in the attached picture?

Answer: Seven. The Corvair came with a Weber on each bank, so we added another pad and another carburetor on each side for a total of four. The GTO is, of course, a tripower so 4 + 3 = 7.

K

 

Running "Light" -

Ok, last one (I think).

Our '65 GTO was actually a factory build lightweight. It used thinner-than-production steel sheetmetal for the body, sitting on a lightweight frame; no body sealer or insulation or anything like that. It ends up being around three or four hundred pounds lighter than a production car. As a result, when we would weigh in at the start of an event we would roll across the scales with: (a) the towbar still on (b) the big huge logging "safety chain" still on (can be seen in the previous picture) (c) full tank of fuel (d) slicks in the trunk (e) TOOLBOX in the trunk (they had big trunks back then) and (f) me standing on the scales (all 45 pounds of me), trying to make the minimum weight for B/Stock. Then when we got back to our pit area all this stuff would come flying out of the car.

We would usually make a couple easy time runs, launching hard to make sure the bottom end of the track was ok but rolling through the top end, and then launching soft but running hard on the big end to make sure that was ok (never show your hand, eh?). Anyway, when it got down to the final couple rounds, and we had to make HARD passes all the way through, we could walk through the pit area and see guys taking off the outside rear view mirror, windshield wipers, taking out the floor mats, ANYTHING to try and pick up another few ticks!!

We did get caught light one time. Dad made a pass and pulled up to the time shack, they wouldn't give him his slip. They were waving him across the scales. He replied "I don't want to go across the scales". They said, "you have to, you just set a class record". Dad said "You can keep the record, I don't WANTTOGOACROSSTHESCALES!" They made him go across the scales. They threw us out and I think we had to watch from the sidelines for about two months after that.

Best pass on this car was 12.20 back in 1967 (on a 9" slick). We still have this car, with 4700 original miles on it. It was recently featured in a two part historical perspective in the February and March (and May) 2004 editions of "High Performance Pontiac" magazine.

 

Last one Part II (aka "the Flexible Flyer")

One other thought about the GTO -

It actually is TOO light. The production cars were stiffer, and therefore actually launched better. Our car would flex enough that it rubs the paint off between the right front fender and the passenger door.

In fact, it is SO flexible that one time we made a pass and it twisted enough that the windshield popped right out!! Skittered across the hood and ended up in the grass, all in one piece. The boys from Royal were there and installed it right at the track. It got a couple scratches on it that are still there.

 

Last one Part III (aka "the First Wrinklewalls")

One of the advantages of working with a factory team as that you got to try new parts out, sometimes right on GM property (like the East/West straight at the Milford Proving Ground).

M&H Racemaster approached the Royal Pontiac team looking for some volunteers to try out a new tire they were working on - a super low tire pressure slick with a soft sidewall that would eventually come to be known as "wrinklewalls".

Dad showed up with the GTO and they bolted these puppies on. He made about two passes and they said "Ok, I guess we're done". That's it? He asked what they were going to do with them now that they were done. They said "well, we can't take 'em back. You keep 'em".

And so we did. And so we showed up at Ubly Dragway the next weekend with these bad boys on the car. We had 'em set LOW (probably between 6 and 7 psi) back when a more typical pressure was up around 20 or 25 psi. After making a couple GOOD passes everybody else started letting the air out of their traditional drag tires. It got so bad, with these guys wallowing around in the pit area (and down the track, for that matter) that it really created an unsafe situation. The track owner came over to us and said "you either PUT SOME AIR in those tires or I'M THROWING YOU OUT!"

We did. But we kept them for a long time.

K

 

So how much does it weigh???

 

Cool Stories and pictures keep them coming. :3gears:

Anybody have any cool vintage pics of Kennedy Bell Race Cars.

 

3030 lbs.

It does have some unusual options for a racecar: floor mats, backup lights, IP crash pad and AM radio with reverb (the reverb not functional; it was packed full of lead for ballast).

We didn't spec it out - I suspect it was ordered as a "Marketing" car.

K