[Tom Vaught]

I first met "The Super Stock" guys through Rick Johnson and his "No Sponsor" car. This is when I was helping Jim Brady on his 64 GTO.

Rick Johnson introduced me to Bill Banks who ran the "Boppin Bear" 64 GTO (who later died of cancer).

Rick also was doing work for Joe Zajac, Dave Johnson, and other pontiac racers at the time.

I met Dave Johnson for the first time at one of the Norwalk events back when the "Super Stock" guys would have their buddies from the Mopar and Chebby camps join them to put on a show at the Norwalk event. Lots of those car showed up back then.

Dave Johnson was involved, with others, in trying to repop the old bathtub intakes and I remember the first batch of intakes they made. This allowed them to run more competitively with the mopar and chebby dual quad stuff vs using the old low rise type intakes.

At one point, Joe and Dave asked me for an opinion on how to make the basic "bathtub" better and still look somewhat like the original piece. I gave then some suggestions and the next year they had created some much newer design parts when I saw them at Norwalk.

They had some fuel distribution questions so I helped them a little bit more on the deal and later became good friends working with Randy Williams and Joe Zajac on the later intakes.

Dave always had one of the fastest cars out there but traditional would carry extra weight to keep the racing vs the "big cars" close for the fans. I never saw him complain about that deal or any other deal as long as I was around him. I knew he was sick but never asked for specifics. He was sick for a period of time (like Randy Williams) so I was pulling for him to beat the cancer even though Randy tried and failed in his attempt.

Dave's passing on does not surprise me in some ways but I just wish he could have made a few more trip to Norwalk to be with his friends in the pontiac community. He recently posted on the board about his "guts ram" dual 4 bbl 4 cylinder project that he was working on.

We will all pass on to a better place at some point. It is not how you died but how you lived. Dave lived a great life while he was with us in the pontiac community.

JMO

RIP my friend

Tom Vaught