I dont know if this photo has ever been posted here. This picture was recently posted on the NailheadBuick site. Thought some of you might be interested. Ivo's car was reportedly and 11 sec ride. Picture was taken at Santa Ana Drag Strip in 1957 Norm Grabowski in his Cadillac powered Kookie T verses TV Tom's potent Nailhead.
It's been on a couple other threads. It is a great pic. If the race was serious, I'm sure Tom cleaned Norm's clock.
April 1957 Car Craft magazine page 15 caption: "First sortie to the drags resulted in time of 103 and a shattered '39 Ford gearbox." For a while, Edd Burns had to learn how to start out 2nd gear - low gear was junk. Is it possible that this was a 2nd and High only run against Ivo? Good question for you Norm. Put down your Dremel and give it to us straight.
April 1957 Hot Rod cover showed Ivo running 117 mph 12 second ET with a 402 Max Balchowsky supervised bored and stroked nailhead. I don't think Norms would cover that even when it was blown
Great Picture! never seen that before. would have liked to hear the conversation that brought that on.
Here's more photos from that same day in '57. c/o Life magazine archives also in the "Drag cars in motion" thread here on the HAMB
That pic cracks me up! norm is out there having fun and tom is dead serious. take a look for yourself. norm's got his sunday cruise lean going on. he's looking right at tom's face. i can almost see him chuckling to hisself..."man, this kid is SERIOUS" on the other hand, look at tom. he's looking right at norms left front wheel. i can almost hear him saying to hisself "man, i got this ****er" GREAT pic!
I just got off the phone with Norm about this pic. He said that it wasn't a preplanned race. Tommy had called him out a couple of times before, but they had never lined up. They both ended up at the track on that day and Norm said why not. He said that he had blown up a 39 ****** a couple of times so he was pretty easy on it. He also says that he had to start in second as first was out. He felt that he would have a chance as he had run 103 mph at San Fernando Drag Strip. He thinks that Tommy won because he outweighed Tommy by over 100 pounds, and that's not including how much beer was on board. HaHa. Doc.
We had Tommy and Norm at The Wheels of Time Jamboree there both great guys hope we get them back one day, Hank
Ivo apparently took some heat about his "too nice to race" T, so he built another very crude T roadster with a hatchet buried in the deck lid. I believe it just replaced the body on the car we all know, and was used for a few weekends at San Fernando. I've never seen a picture of the Hatchet Car, though. Anybody got one?
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