Old Dogs and New Tricks

Old Dogs and New Tricks

Not sure if I've posted this before, but since I’ve posted a couple of excerpts featuring the Big Dodge, here’s a little bit on the life and times of the for-real Big Dodge.

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Fun times for sure.

Dangerous - sometimes.

Not so smart - yeah, not so smart.

Would I do it again - no way.
Well, two words, but I think you understand.

The past is past and life then wasn’t quite so complex.
At least about cars, girls, a whole other story.

Which translated means, the back roads really were pretty deserted and to an extent that made what we did reasonably safe.
Safe in the cars anyway, the right girl - or the wrong one - in the right car could be dangerous no matter what.
Maybe not life-threatening dangerous, but dangerous nevertheless.

We weren’t running the horrendous speeds that some of the modern day street racers can run.

Even so, it doesn’t make it ok and it wouldn’t have taken a very complex chain of circumstance to turn it into a tragedy.

Which doesn’t make what follows a moral story or anything along those lines.

It just makes it a story from a quieter and a simpler time.

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To sorta set the scene, you need to know a little bit about the two cars involved and maybe even a little bit about me and other bother-in-law.

At the time, I was a fairly knowledgeable tuner.
At least I was for the HP levels we were running and I’d been learning a lot about building cars.

The Olds powered 50 Ford coupe being a pretty fair example and the one in question about the third one I built and the best running one of the three.

Other bother-in-law - Sweetie’s brother Tom, and admittedly a bit of a wild man - not to be confused with plain old bother-in-law - Sister’s hubby, totally calm guy and a bit of a 180 out compared to Tom.

Tom was a smart guy and a bit of a thinker. He wasn’t quite the builder that I was, but I wasn’t quite the tuner he was, which, to my mind made us pretty equal in the car department.

As it turned out, more equal than either of us thought.

Regardless, we were doing ok with our cars.

My car, the many times mentioned 50 Ford coupe running 335" Olds engine, Ford Interceptor OD three speed with Hurst shifter - the good one - Spicer 4.27 rear axle out of a 53 or so Merc Wagon - Fords got em too, the Spicer chosen for it’s strength over the stock 50 axle - black tuck and roll and a removed front bumper.

Aside from the built engine, pretty much as they were in the good ol daze.

The little coupe was a good runner.

Due mainly to the Olds engine running - gasp.... - sand cast pistons, cast 1st and 2nd rings, chrome oil ring, stock rebuilt rods, 10-10 crank, cleaned up heads, DuCoil ignition with it’s two of everything - points, condensers, coils etc., Schiefer aluminum flywheel, 11" clutch, home built headers with four 2" primaries dumping into a pair of DragFast collectors in the wheel wells and then exhausting into a pair of 2" in and out stock T-Bird mufflers.

What really made the engine in my opinion was the #153 Engle cam and kit which consisted of 1.8/1 rockers and pushrods along with a set of Isky aluminum retainers. The cam had about 288-292 degrees advertised duration if I remember right. What I do remember was the .500 lift. What I forget is the lobe separation.

Intake was three Rochester 2 bbls running straight linkage and a home made fuel block.

The combination turned out to be a pretty good one. Making the power output not too bad once you got it spinning in excess of 2000 rpm and preferably in excess of 3000.

Inside, a most cool gold metalflake steering wheel, tachometer and a few other gauges. 6.70-15 tires up front, a pair of about 7.60 x 15 cheater slicks out back, sitting stock height both ends and running the little stock 50 Ford hubcaps.

Traction control taken care of very nicely by a copy of the ChryCo Super Stock leaf spring setup. We found these did better than the Traction Masters that most everybody else used.

For those that have never heard of Traction Masters, simply a brand name for a traction device that looks just like the lower bar of a four bar setup.

The little coupe was a good runner, won quite a few trophies at San Fernando dragstrip and won one at Santa Maria dragstrip, but to my disappointment never won one at Long Beach drag strip.

Not for lack of trying though. We took it there several times. The simple truth was, the C/Gassers that showed up at Long Beach were tough to beat for a street runner with minimal traction equipment, minimal budget and most of all with limited experience. We were learning though.

Tom’s Big Dodge was a white two door 61. Which had to be one of the ugliest damn cars that ChryCo ever let out the door and once it was out they probably slammed the door behind it.

After a while and after we’d been around it for bit and gotten used to it’s decidedly strange looks it kind of grew on us.

Ugly is as ugly does I guess.

When it came from the factory, which is pretty much how it was when Tom got it about 1964 or so, it was totally stock, running the killer dual quad with cross-ram - the long ones, 30 inchers - on top of a 413 backed up with a T-10 four speed.

The engine still had the 900 pound cast factory headers on it which were yanked posthaste and a set of lightweight tubing headers installed which dumped into a pair of truck mufflers.

Not long after, the T-10 was pulled and a push-button Torque-Flite installed.

Not sure what rear axle ratio he was running. More than likely whatever came with the car.

I think too, the rear axle was a locker.

What made Tom’s Dodge tough to beat was the good bite he had off line with the slightly larger and softer cheater slicks he ran as compared to the hard ones on my coupe.

With the Torque-Flite and the good bite afforded by the cheater slicks, the Big Dodge would launch so hard that he broke the brackets on the passenger seat a couple of times.

Later on, the car launched so hard it would pull the right front wheel about six inches off the pavement.

Toms Dodge, as did my coupe, ran the ChryCo Super Stocker leaf spring setup. Which added considerably to the Dodge’s hard launching capabilities.

You can probably see what’s coming here, but it took Tom a little while to get there. Not so much in the building department, but in the driving end of things.

At the time my little coupe was cranking off 13.90's at the strip - which isn’t too shabby a performance even today - and it looked like racing the two cars could be more than interesting.

Tom had already cleaned out some of the county’s street runners, mostly Chevys and I’d done the same to an extent. There were still some Chevy’s out there that would have had no problems in cleaning our clocks, but for the most part these cars ended up on the end of towbars as dedicated drag racers and seldom showed up at the drive ins.

Toms Dodge had the torque curve come in so low, that if he’d been in the musical world it would have rated about the low E string on a 4 string Bass. Not the electric, a gennie Bass.
Sorta like a steam locomotive with it’s full torque available at zero rpm.
It wasn’t zero for the Big Dodge, but it wasn’t far from it.

All of which made my little coupe about mid-range between the Dodge and the high winding Chevy’s as far as torque curves went.

The little Chevys were a force to be reckoned with though. Especially so a couple of them that regularly touched on 7500 rpm or so. And touched on a whole lot more when they missed a shift now and then. You’re probably talking bent needles on 8000 rpm tachs here. Either way, they were the soprano’s in the performance world. Soprano’s with balls though.

What made the Chevy’s victims on the street - at least some of them - were the owners tendencies to run very low diff gears - 4.57's were not uncommon - and street tires.

All of which pretty much turned the little Chevy’s into cars that ran like a sumbitch, but with no launch they were usually in second place in a lot of the street races. Not all of em, but enough to make it interesting.
Specially if you weren’t the Chevy owner.

At the time Tom lived in Ventura with Sweetie’s folks and we lived in Newhall about 50 miles away.
With friends and family in Ventura we usually spent our weekends in Ventura visiting, running around town and the like.

Sweetie’s folks knew Tom was a bit of a wild man and I think they kinda liked me for a son-in-law and thought too that perhaps I had a bit of a calming influence on Tom.
Fat chance there
Tom and I were more alike than either one of us, Sweetie, or the in-laws wanted to admit.

Fun part for me and Tom was dinking around with one of the cars on our visits or simply bombing around the countryside doing guy stuff.
All of which was ok with Sweetie as she would visit family and girl friends.

Surprisingly, no one ever seemed to notice that quite often Tom and I would take off in different directions with our cars. Especially the times I brought the coupe into town.
Which was - most times.

It was bound to happen sooner or later, Tom and I ran into each other at the Frosty Shop one cool and slightly foggy Ventura night.
He with his buds in the big Dodge and me with little brother in the coupe.

It didn’t take long to set up a race and even less time was spent on deciding where to go.
Fifteen minutes later we found ourselves on a favored by the street racers back road near the power station road.

Since both cars at that time were running street tires, we’d decided to go from a roll.
It worked pretty good and most times it was an even start.

Tom was a bit of a newbie in the street racing arena and I used to force the start at about 3000 rpm on the coupe.

Which made life easy for me. Once you spun the engine up to about 2500 rpm and started rolling the throttle in, the tires would spin a little bit, not too bad though, hit six grand, shift to second and I’d have half a length on the Big Dodge and I could hold it all the way to the end.

Trouble for Tom, with the big 413's low torque band, he was screwed when we rolled the throttles in at the best spot for the coupe. I’d be pulling good and he’d be darned near out of revs and had to punch the button on the Torque-Flite. Making low gear in the Big Dodge pretty useless.

I’d recognized right up front that Toms Dodge ran an engine quite a bit stronger than the one in the coupe, but it all went back to experience and running your own race when you could.
Not always easily done against some of the guys that tried to make you run their race.

So Tom was on the losing end of the stick for a while. And it got even worse for him when I made some timing changes and the little coupe ran better than ever.

Tom hadn’t been sitting idly by though.

He’d been making a few changes himself. Nothing too radical, just putting his brain to work and wringing the most HP out of the combination he had. Said combination being not too bad when you looked at it.

The fateful day finally came when Tom made the best discovery of all.
Good for Tom and bad for me and the little coupe.

Somewhere along the line he’d learned about short shifting and came to the realization that if he could force the race start into the lower rpm ranges and shift around 4800-5200 he’d be the guy with the advantage.

So there we were - as the saying goes - me, fat, dumb and happy, as the other saying goes and headed out to our favorite back road to once again pit our cars one against the other.

We’d both gotten the cars to where they would launch a little better. Both cars now being shod with cheater slicks.

Even with slicks, we still went from a roll. The simple truth is, on regular pavement, even modern wrinkle wall slicks 15" wide aren’t really worth a darn. A small fact discovered a few years later by little brother and I after trying out the new engine in his 10 second Henry J drag racer on his long asphalt driveway. Spin city.

One good thing about this particular night was that the Santana’s were in - Santana’s being a hot dry wind that comes in off the desert and at times could bring the day time temps along the coast into the high 80's, sometimes low 90's during a December day.

Most times, it was a little foggy and the roads weren’t always at their best traction-wise, but this particular night, there would be no excuses for either of us. You either did or you didn’t.

We lined the cars up, started the roll and when I started rolling past 2000 rpm, Tom wouldn’t bite. He stayed where he was and let me slide on ahead.

I tried it a couple more times with the same results.

It was easy to see that somewhere along the line Tom had gotten smart. Smart enough to overcome that old adage about Youth and Skill being no match for Age and Treachery.

Kinda too bad in a way, I was only five years older, but I’d enjoyed the age and treachery part about as long as I was going to.

I finally gave it up and decided to use the old trick of slipping the clutch to control speed and tire slippage while the engine was spinning along at five grand or so.

When we finally went for it, we were darned near at a walk.

I slid the clutch out and rolled in the throttle, keeping an eye on the tach and where I was going and the little coupe was pulling hard. Hard enough to darned near do it, but not quite hard enough. The clutch was slipping, the tires were spinning a little bit, but it didn’t make any difference.
Tom pulled me a half length right there at the start and it was enough to give him the advantage.

Adhering to the old physics rule of, “Assuming both cars are evenly matched the vehicle that sets the initial rate of acceleration will always pull away” it was easy to see what was going to happen.
The rule pretty much answers the question of why two cars running virtually identical times at the strip will be separated by several lengths when one car gets a half length hole shot at the start.

I finally got some bite and nailed second, but the Big Dodge was steadily pulling away leaving me about a length and a half back at the finish line and staring at the unfamiliar sight of the Dodge taillights.

Win a few, lose few I guess.

I didn’t feel bad about it either.

Tom and I both learned something out of the deal.

Trouble was, he was the one that learned the most.

Making it all boil down to, I guess, sometimes it’s the new dog who teaches the tricks......

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This pic not of The Big Dodge, but a good example of the genre.
Tom's was white, not lowered, ran blackwall slicks and blackwall fronts, chrome wheels and little moon caps.

 

Cool story, could only be told by someone who has been there.

 

Excellent narrative. Wish I coulda seen it!

Jay

 

Great story, felt like I was there. Thanks

 

Thanks C9, I love your stories

 

nice, very nice.