[ponyakr]

in the '70's, if you had a friend working in parts at a gm dealer, you could buy a ra4 head for about $100. i,d heard so much about em, i decided to try a set. there was a young man who showed interest in racing in '77, so i put a 455 together with ra4 heads on it. he liked my '69 goat so we just went to the bone yard & picked out the best prospect. it was a clean '69 except for a little rot on the lr qtr. we soon had it ready to race, but this boy didn't like the looks of my ole stickered up cars, he wanted a nice paint job. he said that he had helped some other guys do some paint & body work & he knew how to do it. so i said "knock ya'self out". i had only dabbled a little with paint & body work & discovered that i hated it, so i was not about to sand on it, if it never raced. well, he worked 100's of hours & finaly got it lookin purty good, with gray primer, almost ready to paint. he decided to go ahead & start racin & finish the paint later. i figured it would run a little better with the ra4 heads, & it did. the 1st pass was a shocker. with only 3.73 gears & a stock 13" converter, it was a "wheel toter". i was used to a little air under the left front, but this goat jerked the front wheels what looked to me like a foot (it was probably only about 5-6") & carried 'em maybe 20' or more. i was shocked! i later put the battery back up front & made some other ajustments & got it calmned down some. fast foreward now to a later race at tyler , tx. we're between time trials & all 3 cars are parked side by side in the pits. all of a sudden we heard a loud crash & when we looked around there was dust flying everywhere & the 2 goats were bouncing around. when we went to investigate, here's what we found. a guy with a mopar (challenger i think) was running hot, so he came flying through the pits, & turned the key off so he could coast back to his pit. he forgot that the steering wheel locked when the key was off. he was going so fast he didn't have time to turn the key back on, so he just locked up the brakes, thats what caused most of the dust we saw. well, he hit the lr of the gray goat, right where all the bondo was & knocked it into my goat, bangin up the lr qtr quite a bit. after all the body work he had done on that qtr, makin it look good, he had told folks that the body was perfect, no bondo at all. but there it was, exposed for all the world to see. i guess he just could't face people after that. as far as i know he never raced again.