New experience and a potential source of income
A few days after Mom sold my Corvette, my history teacher announced that we were going to be assigned a term paper. I was in the 10th grade. We were studying WWII, and I planned to do something involving aviation during the war. That evening the phone rang, and an older friend named Vic wanted to come by and talk about something. I said okay.
Vic showed up in a gold-colored 1969 Plymouth 440 GTX, a car I had not seen him drive before. I soon learned what he wanted. He was going street racing that night and wanted me to come along. It sounded like it might be fun, until he added these words: “Bring your .44.”
Vic explained that there was money involved, sometimes big money, and almost every racer had an “enforcer,” someone he brought along to make sure the other guy didn’t try to back out of paying after losing, and to generally watch his back.
This struck me as a REALLY bad proposition. The right guy for this kind of job would be a very large, physically imposing person. I was neither. I hadn’t even started shaving yet. What did Vic expect me to do, threaten to shoot somebody over a $50 debt that wasn’t even owed to me? I told Vic he’d been watching too many bad movies.
Vic kept after me and I finally agreed that I’d come along and see what this was all about. I’d watch his back and make sure no one hurt him but I was absolutely not going to get involved over purely financial disputes. He seemed okay with that.
That evening I got an education. We went to one of the local Steak ‘n’ Shakes and there were all kinds of guys standing around the parking lot, scoping out each other’s vehicles. Most of the guys were white, but a few black men had come to race. Most of the cars were mid-size bodies, like Chevelles, Roadrunners, and Fairlanes, with first-gen Camaros and some Mustangs thrown in the mix. I noticed that no one had a Corvette. The behavior of the guys would have given a drama teacher material for a year.
I have never played poker, but I know a little about how it’s done. These guys had similar strategy. They all acted completely nonchalant, but they guarded their engine compartments like Fort Knox. About half the cars had hood pins with padlocks through the posts.
Vic pointed out some of the cars he had seen race. I soon realized that this was a very different kind of racing than I was familiar with, as it involved betting. Everyone was here to hustle everyone else for money, like in a pool hall. You might agree to a $50 bet with another guy, with the intention of sandbagging (not going full throttle to let him win) so as to give your car the appearance that it was slower than it really was, thereby inducing the next guy to race you to bet more heavily.
Except maybe the first guy you raced had been sandbagging you a little bit, too…
Watching the dance between the drivers got me to thinking about the best kind of car for this type of competition. As I looked over the vehicles in the parking lot, it struck me that many owners had spent a fair amount of money on things that wouldn’t make their cars any more competitive. I saw little point in beautiful paint jobs, polished aluminum, and lots of chrome. Then I wondered if that was part of the strategy—look like a showboat but then surprise them with a killer motor. Then there were the beaters: ratty-looking cars that may or may not have had some serious driveline work done. I decided I’d pay close attention to them all.
After a good 40 minutes of jawing back and forth, the drivers started leaving for the spot where they’d race. It was standard protocol for the two cars who had agreed to race each other to follow each other closely to the race site. This was because there was a story (which may have been an urban legend) about a Dodge engineer in Detroit who showed up with a VERY stock vehicle, and on the way to the race site, had switched it for an identical-appearing car with a full-on engine under the hood.
People will do things like that when there’s money involved…
We went across the Mississippi River into Illinois to a stretch of rural road near East St. Louis that was known locally (at that time) as “****** Slicks.” I was never sure if the East St. Louis Police Department didn’t have the manpower to patrol the area, or if someone had been paid off. In any event, we didn’t see any cops around there, that night or any other.
Vic had paired up with a guy in a 1968 428 Cobra Jet Mustang. Vic said he thought the guy had a stock motor and had only added glasspacks (straight-through mufflers), which might give the car a few more horsepower but mostly just made it louder.
“How much is on the line?” I asked.
“A hundred fifty.”
“He’s at least 700 pounds lighter—have you got the motor to make up for that?”
“I think so. But here’s the main thing: I’ve never seen this guy before and aside from the mufflers, he’s bone stock. His car’s a 4-speed. I’m betting he can’t shift as fast as this built TorqFlite,” he told me, patting the lever growing up out of the transmission tunnel.
Turned out he was right. When our turn came and Vic nailed the throttle from a 5 MPH rolling start, the lighter Mustang pulled ahead by half a length to about 60 MPH, when the driver missed a shift just as the GTX’s automatic banged into Second and chirped the tires on its way to over 100.
The Mustang driver paid Vic the $150 without complaint. Vic handed me a twenty and thanked me for coming along. All the way back to the house I was thinking about how to build a fast car that looked slow on a budget of about $2500, the money I had from Mom selling my Corvette. I was thinking of what racer/engineer Mark Donohue often said: that he was always looking for an “unfair advantage.”
So was I. I just didn’t expect to find it in a high school history class…
More later
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Originally Posted by redneckdan
