Quote:
Originally Posted by Anthony
That’s a great story about Ken. It is so sad that Ken, and so many more of those old racers are no longer with us, for us to enjoy their company/stories. There’s a local guy here in the Cleveland area, who purchased new and raced a 1965 dodge coronet Superstock, setting an ahra record at one point. Oh, being around Harm is fantastic. His stories are second to none.
https://www.hotrod.com/articles/gary...-coronet-a990/ |
If you enjoyed that you might get a kick out of this also. My partner and I owned a 1963 light weight front end Max Wedge Plymouth and a 1964 Dodge Coronet with the llight weight Hemi package (fenders, doors, glass etc.). The '63 car won the AHRA Summer Nationals at Gil Kohn's Long Island National Speedway on Woodstock weekend.
Here is a pic of the car at the meet somewhere near the top of first gear,
Sitting still the front wheel well was about midway down the front tire sidewall. We had just put a new small diameter converter in the car for that weekend, that Chrysler had come up with and it was like you added a hundred horsepower. The car would normally run 11.60 to 11.70 at about 120/121 mph. The first pass down track at Long Island it ran an 11.65 at 90 mph shutting off early. We were wowed to say the least.
Saturday evening instead of running Top Stock Eliminator we ran Street Eliminator on an 11.40 break to get a sense of how quick the new converter was. We broke out in the semi-finals against a very good Hiner & Miller Camaro that ran right on their number which I think was 11.20 or so. We didn't feel too bad though because we needed to get a handle on the car's performance for the Top Stock Eliminator on Sunday. We knew we would have a lot of sand bagging to do though because when we broke out we ran an 11.0x (don't remember the "x" number) at 124 or 125mph. Needless to say we were stoked.
Back in those days we would tow the '63 to the track with either my partner Joe's daily driver which was a '66 396/375 Chevelle SS or my daily driver which was a '66 Hemi Satellite. We couldn't afford a trailer! To get to NY we borrowed a converted school bus from one of our racing buddies to transport the car. He had cut the back of the bus off and installed a garage door with ramps on the inside that matched the ramps to get up and in so you could work on the car off the dirt in the pits.
Here's a pic of the car carrier school bus at the AHRA meet;
I can't believe how hard we worked to enjoy racing during those years. Youth is a wonderful time — even if we whern't too smart
Ed