History So all Stockcars were crudely built junk? You better think again!

1959 Super Modified Devils Bowl Texas.

Using a wing for down force in 1959 that completely blows a hole in the theory stock car racers didn't know or care about aerodynamics!

 

Great Photos, thanks

 

And is the car just barely in the picture running on whitewalls?

 

Home built blower set up


Note the square tube home built wishbones


Dead perch and slider

 

Probably recaps.

 

I have had racing recaps that were WW on one side. I had to reverse one and re-scuff it to use on the other side of the car with the WW facing out.

 

First set of 180 degree headers I ever heard was a BBC stuck in a 64 Chevelle body......Dirt car!!
Needless to say....he was protested after the race but....to no avail.
A month later half the pack was running some type of 180* exhaust!!
Talk about reving up the spectators....what-chu-say?!!?
60's WERE the BEST!!!!
6sally6

 

The 1st car I ever built we used water pipe. My buddies dad put in a 100' of new well pipe because it leaked someplace. He gave us the old pipe, we built the roll cage with it. We were broke teenagers. Weren't many chrome-molly cages at our track back then, black pipe was the standard cage building material. Most of the local cars were pretty heavy, but we saw a few light weight traveling cars p*** through. The su****ion back then was the light weight cars had cages built form conduit. My point of view was even the rusty well pipe cage we had was much safer then the conduit cages were.

We didn't see any holes in our well pipe cage back then, but if we wouldn't had killed the car (the cage held up just fine), by this time, there may have been rust holes in it.

 

This is my idea of a Stock Car, Jack McCoy and Les Swayze out Portland Or. They installed an FE engine, reverse rotation, flipped the rearend over, and ran it until they got caught.

 

Got a used Modified in a package deal that had a cage built out of exhaust tubing. PO had even taken the time to weld washers inside the inspection holes.

 

Loved to watch **** Trickle. One of the best.

 

It's not cheating, Marty. It's "interpreting the rules" .

 

We built a cage out of water pipe, only it was thinner stuff. The techs gave us hell until they tested it and it p***ed. Nice when you buy roll cage stock at a s**** yard. I saw a guy pull into the pits with a nice looking Chevelle. It was just finished and the tech guys were crawling over it. The cage was made out of kiddie swing-set tubing. He didn't even bother to paint it, it was still bright green and yellow.

My brother who also drove was having issues with another driver at Islip that had a Challenger. My brother stuffs him in the wall one night and out comes the red flag. The entire front of the cage was made from .050" wall conduit. It folded up like a circus tent in a hurricane. The guy never came back.

The cage in my last car was re-purposed out of a 1960's era coach car. We cut it all apart and fit it to the Nova. That was a mix of DOM steel tube and black pipe.

 

Glad you liked it- unfortunately, that post was deleted as OT late 60's- it's a 68 Fairlane (body), that was probably a rebodied (at least once) earlier Galaxie stock car that became a Sportman car- the point was to highlight a car driven by a pretty famous stock car driver, that has a (somewhat crude) water pipe roll cage, so it seemed to fit in the thread. That car still exists, a friend owned it for a while and drove it in the Historics at Sears Point a while back. Guess they missed the other car driven by a famous driver, with a Vega body- there's also a Pinto in there somewhere lol

 

MeanGene427, I do agree a lot of what appears to be selective picture removal going on here. I guess when you get the wrong person mad, he must look at everything you post to see what he can eliminate.

I can understand it to a point, the last thing I want to do here is look at a bunch of 70s Camaro dirt track cars, even though we know some of them were very crude, but I do think some things can probably be let slide. Its pretty crazy when you have to cover up a wheel in a picture that might be on your car, because someone thinks its off topic.

I did like the Trickle car, but really, it was a long way out of the time frame of this group. The sad part is if the car still had the 64 body on it, it would have flown through.

 

The car with the home-built blower set up, is there any reason for him having bolted his fan on backwards?

 

I ***umed it was a speed increasing pusher fan. Those stock car guys were always such craftsman. Ron

 

Who knows, unlikely being supercharged but as @Marty Strode mentioned it could be a reverse rotation engine. It might have been a simple mistake trying to get the car ready for that event.
I was trashing until 9:00 P.M. and loading my project under the streetlight at 10:00 P.M. to make it to the Mid-State speedway reunion a few weeks ago.

The people who are so critical of stock cars have no idea how much work it is and always has been having a racecar, whether it's an oval track car, a drag car, land speed car it is a never-ending amount of work just to keep it on the track plus the work it takes to try and improve the cars performance, handling etc... it's like having a second job you pay to have!


The thing is I have never denied that there were (and still are) some junk stock cars, but there were plenty of crudely built hot rods and drag cars as well, you have to look at history as a whole you can't pick and choose the parts you like and make blanket statements based on your own limited experiences or personal taste.

That is the point of this thread!

 

We had one week where we blew the motor and wrecked the car about 3 weeks from the end of the season. We were in a tight points race (season points finish paid better the winning everything on the weekly program). Me and one other guy spent 30+ hours (after each of our 40+ hour weeks) repairing the car, and putting together a motor we hoped would run all night (you don't even want to know the things we did to make that motor even run). On race night, we started the motor, for the first time to load the car onto the trailer to go to the track. The motor had a head gasket leaking a few drips. We dumped in a can of block sealer, started the motor with the car on the trailer, and headed to the track with the motor idling, hoping the block sealer would work. When we got to the track, we shut the motor off and had enough time to let it cool down. The block sealer worked, we ran that motor the rest of the season. We gained one better position in the final point standings. And all this was for a hobby stock cl*** car!

 

Ollie Silva Super Mods

Note Six two bbl intake



Early 1960s Note Hilborn's


The following photos by Ron Wheeler ( @wheeldog57 )

 

They irony here is much of the criticism is based on the body work, mainly how much the cars were cut up.

I keep going back to the Noland Swift 10 Pins Super Mod, this car was built in the winter of 1960/61 for the 1961 racing season.

The Car had a full tube ch***is, four torsion bar suspension until that point torsion bars were only seen on open wheel oval track cars, and four bars were Indy Car technology.

Rear torsion bars would become the standard in D.I.R.T modifieds in the late 1970s early 1980s (now coil overs are the hot ticket) but in the early 1960s a Stock Car with bars was the cutting edge of technology!

However, when I have posted this car in other threads all any of the naysayers want to talk about is the body.

Many of these critics are completely overlooking, don't know or understand what they are looking at in the ch***is.

 

Here's a 70's dirt modified ch***is:
Not much different... It's an Alberti ch***is with a couple of changes he made to accommodate my sprint car tail tank.

 

Running the street stock / hobby stock / super stock circle track cl***es, you could see it all. Some were nicely built cars, some repurposed from a different cl***, some were chicken **** weld backyard abortions. But, some of those crudely built cars, were pretty fast. My first foray into weekly racing was purchasing a car (71 Chevelle) that was supposed to be a former track champion. It had WOOD spacers between the front coils & frame. The frame had rust holes you could fit your hand into, and the cage was old rusty well pipe. It barely turned left & the engine only lasted a few races. I did get it to work OK & win some races, after a good engine was built, new springs/shocks, & got the thing scaled. When I built it's replacement (65 Chevelle), it was to Grand National specs from the 60's. Worked great for the short tracks. I can't imagine running Daytona with that car. Those guys had giant kahones!

 

A friend of mine was racing Supers in California in the early 70's. They had a Speedweek, something like 6 races in 7 days at multiple tracks. This guy rolled in wearing shades, towing with a Cadillac convertible that had M***achusetts plates. The locals were thinking who is this guy ? Well, when the week was over, Ollie won 5 of the main events, they knew exactly who he was then !

 

I raced against all sorts of cars from all sorts of budgets. Some were antiseptically clean and fast. Some were wrecked on a Friday night and pieced back together for Saturday and no longer pretty.

Late in one season at Islip, a front runner wadded his car up in a heat race and wanted to rent my car for the night, I told him no as I was in a battle to make it into getting a slice of the points fund. I don't know how they got the car sorted, but they made the race and did well. One of the rear frame rails was 3' feet off the ground before they worked on it.

Post season in 1984 I got the invite to go with a group to Flemington NJ that was just paved. Gulp... that place was too fast for a home-grown car and I p***ed on it.

 

A little off this topic but here is a great example, The Ramchargers High and Mighty.

There was a thread a few years ago about unforgettable hot rods, and race cars someone posted High and Mighty, a member of the only body and paint count non race car crowd went on a ranting raving diatribe about how the only reason that car is remembered is because of what a crudely built ugly body work flaming pile of sh-t it was.

I pointed out the car is remember for how fast it was and for it's ground breaking innovations, like a

- One of if not the first car to have the rear wheels moved forward for better weight distribution/transfer
-Dyno tuned intake
-Tuned exhaust
-Adjustable rear 4 link

 

235 12port

 

Walley Dallenbac, Note the engine set back Lincon Power (430 I believe)

 

Not only the engine set back, look how far back in the coupe body Walley is sitting, and how small the left front tire is.

 

He was one hell of a racer. It boils down to the rule books how much you are able to set an engine back in regards to the upper ball joint. Using a 430 Lincoln is definitely thinking outside the box. The left-front tire is known as the "pony tire" in dirt and asphalt racing. It does the least amount of work on the car. I had one that lasted 2 seasons before I replaced it.