Here's some nostalgia stuff from the 50's if you are intersted in that kind of stuff. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Tom Beatty story as told to me by himself. Time: 1953 Place: Los Angeles It's 0300 on a Wednesday morning. The garage door swings up. The driver straps on his helmet and climbs in the car. Wife climbs in the 39 panel push car and fires up the 296 flathead. A gentle nudge and the #100 car rolls out to the street. She eases up gently to the push bar. The car rolls easily down the street a half block to the freeway entrance. (Remember this is 1953 and there are numerous single lane freeway on-ramps in LA.) They roll up to the edge of the freeway and ascertain that there are no cars coming or going. They roll off, the flathead in the push car straining to gain maximum speed as rapidly as possible. The engine in the tank lights off and the car screams down the freeway. The tach climbs, the blower whines, the rear end gears whine, the tach touches 7000,(over 150 mph) off the throttle and on the brakes, such as they are, (2 wheel), back down to 40 mph and drop down on the off ramp, sharp right turn at the end of the ramp, run the red light at the intersection, back up the side street to home. Back in the garage, jack the car up, change gears, load up tools,fuel, 4 spare engines and get ready to leave for Bonneville later in the morning. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bean Bandits story from 1953 Bonneville. My buddy and I had a flathead powered 32 coupe we were running and had been turning around 128 for the first 2 days. That was all we coax out of it on av-gas. This was the purple stuff you can't get any more. While eating lunch we were walking around the pits looking at the competetion and other cars. We stopped at the Bean Bandits pits where there was all kinds of activity going on. They had just changed engines in their roadster. Joaquin was looking at the plugs that came out of the previous engine. Now, I had talked to him quite a few times before and he knew who I was so when he was about to throw them in the trash can I asked if I could have them. He said "sure" and that they only had one run on them. I told him we couldn't afford new plugs so they would probably be a whole lot better than what we had been running. Ours had about 20 runs on them. Anyway we put them in and picked up 3 mph with no other changes. Fast forward to about 2003. The wife and I are walking around the Bonneville pits. I spot Joaquin talking to a couple of his friends from the Bandits. He sees me approaching And sticks out his hand. Now mind you we hadn't seen each other since about 1958 and that was here in the pits. I asked if he remembered giving me those spark plugs and he said "sure, that was yesterday wasn't it?" You could have knocked me over with a feather. A real friend.
The Jalopy Journal
