Drag Racing

I'm one of those people who had been to a few drag races as a spectator but who had never been involved with the sport.  In 2000, however, at the urging of my neighbor, Jess, and my son, Dan, we finally decided to try it.  Some people would think 54 years old is a little old to start something like this but I didn't.  After all, Warren Johnson, a professional drag racer, was way older than me!

We had a little '63 Nova street car and we put a mildly warmed up small block engine in it, a powerglide tranny behind that, and a pair of 9" slicks and 4.56 gears in the rear.  We didn't have any idea what we had but we went out and tried it.  I was convinced that it would run in the high 11's; low 13's was more like it!  After a torque converter change, it did get down into the mid-12's on a consistent basis.  For you non-racer's, that number is the elapsed time in seconds to run a quarter mile distance.

My first real racing, after several weeks of test and tune, was at the Spring Nationals in Tulsa.  Believe it or not, I won my first two rounds in the No E (no electronics) class and began to believe that I could go all the way.  On the third round, I pulled up to stage and the flagman waved me off, saying I was leaking fluid.  As I got out of the car and headed up there to have a gentlemanly conversation with him, I glanced back at the car and noticed the stream of antifreeze pouring out.  End of conversation!  After tearing the engine down, we discovered porosity in a head which had to be welded and machined.

The Nova had been running hot so we used this as justification to put it on alcohol.  As my engine building buddy said later, "Wait a minute – the engine was running hot so we changed the fuel we are burning instead of addressing the cooling problems?"  Well, why not?

We found out that the learning curve on getting enough alcohol to the carburetor is much steeper than we had imagined.  We spent several weeks, and several hundred dollars, on fuel logs, regulators, pumps, AN fittings and other miscellaneous stuff getting the car to run right.  Meanwhile the season was dwindling away and all I could do was go to test and tune!

Finally, we had the old Nova back to about as quick as it had been on gas.  We then decided that we needed bigger jets.  If a little fuel is good, then more is better, right?  In went the new jets and back to test and tune we went.  In the meantime I should tell you that my son and I had been trading off the driving because we both wanted to drive the car.  Obviously, my reaction times were much better than his because age and wisdom outdoes youth and exuberance any time!  Anyway, the night we went back to test and tune with the bigger jets, my 25 year old daughter, Rachel, who is a mother herself also wanted to drive.

That night, I made two passes, my son made two, and my daughter made five.  Her first one was a 17-something at about 80 miles per hour.  Her last one was a 13.32 at 102 mph.  She was beginning to catch on!  In the meantime, none of the passes any of us made was within a half a second of our old times!  Apparently, the new bigger jets just killed the engine!

Although by now, I had invested considerably more money in drag racing than I had promised my wife I would, I decided to play my hole card.  Telling her that the '63 was unsafe because it didn't have a cage and only had lap belts, I began to shop for a better car.  A friend of mine, Kent the engine builder, gave me a lead on a '71 Nova "roller" which was for sale and I went to look at it.  I knew before I even got out of the truck that I was going to buy this car.  In keeping with the story that I had told Louise, I told the guy who had the car that I didn't really want to go faster; that I was just looking for a safer ride.  He looked me in the eye and said, "You can lie to your wife but don't lie to me!".

Anyway, I wrote him a check and carried the '71 home.  My son and I pulled the motor and tranny out of the '63 and began the task of putting it into the '71.  In the meantime, I had ordered new, smaller jets for the carb.  Remember, the big ones had killed the performance of the engine.  So we were hooking up the throttle linkage in the new car and I told Dan to watch the butterflies to make sure everything worked as I pushed the throttle.  He hollered, "Hey, Dad, the back two barrels aren't opening!"  To make a long story short, when I put the bigger jets in the carb, I had gotten the accelerator pump in a bind and the back two barrels were indeed locked up.  I don't know which feeling was stronger, the one of relief that the problem had been found or the one of stupidity that I had done such a boneheaded stunt! I told Dan that, if he had done something like that, I would have kicked his #@%*.

In spite of all of our trials and tribulations that year, we thoroughly enjoyed drag racing as a participant sport.  One of the neatest things is to meet new people and share experiences with them.  Sometimes I'm tempted..........