Not Ranked
So, years ago (34 to be exact) I bought my first new car. A 1970 Plymouth Hemi-Cuda. 4.10 gears coupled to an automatic. The car was as much a high then as my Cobra is today. Anyway, here I am parked at the local White Front store late at night on a Saturday watchin' the cars cruise on by, when a kid my age at the time taps on my window and wants to know if I'll race the guy over there in a Boss 429 Mustang. I said sure, as long as he's stock.
Well off goes the caravan of 5 cars to the local Chevron station to load up on premium before heading out to Sycamore Valley Road in the days when it was a deserted country road. The guy pumping gas was surrounded by way cool muscle cars of the day, my Hemi, the Boss 429, a 6 pack Challenger and a 427 Malibu. Since everone wanted to see or know who was going to win, the gas jockey says "I'll give you 10 times stamps if you come back and tell me which of the two cars, mine and the Boss, wins."
Midnight on Sycamoe Valley Road, everyone gets out of their cars to watch. I do a burnout, and back up for the Mustang to ready. No burn out for him, but he gets out of his car and pops the trunk. I'm thinkin' he's got some kind of traction liquid to use or is gonna bolt on a blower real quick. Well, he backs away from the trunk and puts on his nylon Ford Racing jacket!!! Now I'm really intimidated.
So we line up with a guy in the middle of the road to get us started. Off we go in a cloud of smoke and I'm thinkin', since I don't know this Mustang at all that he's going to have me for lunch. I keep hearing tire scratch in each gear from him but I don't see him along side. As I look in the mirror he's gotta be 10 cars BEHIND me. At the end, he says he got a bad jump and wanted race from a role. I said ok. Off we went again with the same result. Got his weenie toasted again. This was starting to be fun now. Anyway, we hurried back to the Chevron station for the Blue Chip stamps award. I told the gas kid I had pounded him, and he was so glad. As he peeled off a 20 foot role of stamps he commented that this Boss 429 kid, who was all of 17-18, was not going to take this defeat easy with his peer group at school. Gotta say, that was the most fun I had for a night in my Hemi Cuda in the summer of 1970.
Hell, I thought my Hemi was hot in 1970 running 13.4 at 106 at the drags in street tires through the muffs. Now I have this Cobra that'll turn high 11's at 120. Still haven't had an opportunity to run the car past 120 in other than a spurt.
Bill
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