A TIMING ***OCIATION NEEDS TIMING EQUIPMENT The partnership with the NHRA Safety Safari in running drag racing at Linden Airport in 1954 left the NJTA eager to get into the drag racing business on its own. We needed timing equipment. The quest for a timer began with Johnny Garde of the Motor Mounts club in North Plainfield. Johnny was a colleague of Fred Schulz and Don Dworkin, electrical engineers at Blonder-Tongue Laboratories in Newark. Garde described the ***ociation's need to measure the top speed of a hot rod in a 1/4-mile race. Schulz and Dworkin worked out the theory that would be the basis for a timer. Schultz then designed the timer with Dworkin's ***istance and Johnny Garde constructed it. Hot Rod Magazine mentioned this timer in their June 1957 issue, referring to it as the Garde-Schulz timer. The timer was ready for use at the new Woodbine, N.J., drags in 1956. The speed trap was two beams 132 feet apart centered on the finish line. The timer measured the car's time between the first and second beam. The timer operator then used a manually prepared chart to look up the speed that correlated to the displayed trap time. Schulz was on hand on Woodbine's opening day to see that everything worked as planned. It did. A long and successful relationship ensued between Schulz and the NJTA and Schulz went on to design, build, and maintain all timing equipment of the NJTA. It was about this time that racers were realizing that elapsed time (ET) was a more useful metric than miles-per-hour and ET clocks were becoming common at drag strips. Dual-lane timing was also becoming more common and provided MPH and ET for each lane. Schulz's next clock was another MPH clock. It was followed by a dual-lane ET clock that used motor-driven mechanical clocks to record ETs. This gave us dual lane ET and MPH capability. The timing stand crew soon began getting inquiries from racers who had lost a race but who had a faster MPH. They couldn't understand how this could be. After all, their car was faster. As racers began to better understand ET and MPH, these issues became fewer and fewer. All of Schulz's timers were electronic. They all employed vacuum tube technology and used a light beam with photocell pickup on the track to capture MPH and ET events. It was a simple matter for Schulz to employ automatic win notification. The ET timer that stopped first generated a win light over the corresponding lane so finish line judges as had been used at Linden and elsewhere were no longer needed. When the NJTA began receiving requests to time events on conflicting dates, another set of timers was ordered from Schulz. This second set of timers was delivered about 1960. This gave us two full sets of timers. Drag races were still being started by a flagman. The flagman was the sole judge of whether a car had fouled, i.e., crossed the starting line before he pulled the green start flag. Foul calls were often disputed as you might expect. Fred Schulz and NJTA's Art Grotyohann collaborated to solve this problem. They created a small electrical box which sat on the ground by the flagman and which was wired into the ET clock. There was a push ****on on the top of the box. When the cars were staged, the flagman would push down the ****on with the start flag which would arm the timer. So, if the starting line beam broke before the flag came off the ****on a red light would go on over the offending car indicating a foul. We never had another disputed foul. The NJTA and Fred Schulz were indignant that the National Hot Rod ***ociation would not recognize speeds and elapsed time records set with timers other than the Chrondek brand. This precluded national records being set at tracks timed by the NJTA. So Schulz designed a piece of test equipment that received an electronic signal broadcast from the National Bureau of Standards in Washington (known as N.I.S.T. today) and which was the exact one-second official U.S. government standard. There was a beep every one second. Exactly. He could connect one of our timers so that the signal would start and then stop the timer. I would occasionally run these tests on the timers that had electronic displays such as Nixie tubes or H-P decade counters. Working under Schulz's supervision, I invariably recorded 1.000 seconds. I remember a few times - perhaps once in 200 tests - where the timer recorded .999. We always thought that such precision should be adequate for national records. The NHRA requirements relating to timer brands and timing procedures for national records evolved over the years and the whole matter eventually became a non-issue. First picture: Fred Schulz working on a timer Second picture: Me operating one of the newer timers as a MPH clock circa 1961. I'm looking up the displayed trap time on the chart to find the MPH that correlates with the trap time.
The Jalopy Journal
