[ponyakr]

i got an nhra rule book & started asking ? this time i asked the rite people & got the rite answers. got a sheet from nhra with all the legal specs for our cars. found a machine shop that had built pontiac class racer motors. found out about stall converters( i'd never even heard of a stall converter) bought a 9" converter(vitar was a big name at that time) bought us a lunati cheater cam. then i made another dummy mistake. the rule said pontiac oem cast pistons only. but gm was out til they could run off another batch, so i just bought a set from napa. big mistake. i was told later that the only cast piston at the time nearly as good as gm was sterling brand. of course i'd never heard that name. anyway the machine shop got it together before the season started so i stuffed it in the bird & got it runnin. it was time to race so we just shot it with primer and loaded it up. They made headers legal that year and we found a used set of Hookers for it. They also made 9" slicks legal so we bought a new set. When we made it to the track we really didn't know what to expect. But the converter, cam, gears and slicks seemed to be the right combo. She won the first four races with no problem and the first two at another track. Then the problems started.

[ponyakr]

TJ won the 5th race in a row, but by now the non-Pontiac competitors (all of em) were tired of getting beat by a Pontiac and to add insult to injury, it was a female driver. Thru the years we saw em fume and cuss and sling wrenches and gravel while loading on the trailer after a whuupin' from TJ's early bird. (The hi-dollar Chevy boys were the worst) It finally got so bad we started staying away from our local track if there was a race anywhere else close. Anyhow, back to this 5th race, we were protested. My feeling was "Tear it down if you want to." I knew the only thing that wasn't legal was the napa pistons and I figured since the tech guys were all Chevy boys they'd have no idea what a Pont. piston looked like. I guess they knew that, so instead they just put it on the scales. I assumed it weighed what the book said it was supposed to, since it wasn't stripped down at all. You see how little I knew? If i'd had anybody to help me they'da said "Hey man, you better weigh it, you may have to add some weight." So they said it was a few lbs. lite and disqualified us. Well, all the guys seemed very happy about that. But they knew that she had beat them far enough that a few lbs. wouldn't have made any difference. Experience can be a good teacher, but no fun sometimes.

[ponyakr]

I put a spare tire in the trunk and and made sure the tank was a least half full so if they weighed us it woulnd't be lite. And just as I thought, it didn't slow down a bit. At the 6th race she was well on her way to another win. She was running a Mopar - a Demon or Duster, I think. She had run him several times that year, he wasn't even close. I watched her leave the line, looked good, and no red, so I started back to the trailer. Then I heard somebody say she lost. I was thinking "Something must have broke." But she made it back to the trailer and when she got out of the car she had a sad look on her face and holding her head down she said, "I'm sorry! I forgot to release the parking brake." To keep it from rolling backwards at the end of the staging lanes she would mash the parking brake then release it when it was her turn to race. But this time she forgot. She said "It was close though, I almost won anyway." We've had many a good laff about that thru the years. Sometimes after that I would think to ask her if she had released it, but she never did that again. Pontiac finally got another batch of pistons in so I took everything to the machine shop and soon had the old Goat back on the track. It was doing ok, but then the napa pistons gave up in the Bird.

[ponyakr]

I forgot one incident that was interesting. At the track where we'd won the first 2 races, the Bird started missing real bad, so we lost the round. We decided to just load it up and watch the rest of the race. Then we heard over the loud speaker that they had classed a car wrong and were going to run the whole thing over. And when they got the field lined up they'd call us up. Well, we went to work. I jerked the intake and valley pan off and there was the problem. A lifter had come apart. I didn't have a spare, but all the parts were still lying there so I just put it back together and stuck it back in the hole, adjusted the rocker arm and buttoned everything back up. And just in the nick of time, they were calling us to the staging lanes. So TJ jumped back in, backed it off the trailer and headed to the lanes. Well, I reckon that was the only problem. It ran great and chalked up another victory. We never had anything like that happen again. If you lose you load it up and go home. But it actually did happen once. That reminds me, in case you run hydraulic lifters, never run the kind with a flimsy wire clip retainer. This incident points this out. Make sure you use the lifters with real snap ring retainers. After this incident we always bought Rhodes. There are probably other good brands also.

[ponyakr]

Now, back to the napa pistons. The Bird started slowing down and smokin a little. It would still beat most of em but definitely up to par. So I pulled it out and put the Goat motor in it. I could have left the cam in it, but there was a little difference and I didn't know if they would ever tear it down to check it or not. So I swapped cams and now it was perfectly legal. Looking back on it now I really don't think they would have torn into it at our track. That stuff only took place at point meets and nat. events. That reminds me of another shocker in my continuing education: We had never taken a car to a points meet so I had no idea what to expect. We didn't even get to unload. One of the tech guys saw us and realized immediately that we didn't have a clue what was going on! He walked around the cars, opened the doors and looked in, then he turned to us and started naming all the obvious reasons why we could not pass tech: A piece of chrome trim missing, radio hole not covered with metal, clutch fan of Bird (that motor came with factory flex fan like Goat). He said "Fix all this and we'll look at it a little closer." All the air left our balloon. Thank God, bracket racing was coming to tracks near us soon! Our stocker days were about over. The thrill was gone.

[ponyakr]

With our stocker days behind us we made new plans. The early Bird was still running good so TJ said she wouldn't mind driving that car on the street. So I pulled the tranny and put her a 4-spd in it, some Thrush Hedder Muffs and swapped the 4.56 posi for a 3.23 1-wheeler. It made a nice street car. I guess some folks didn't understand what all the racing decals were about and it was purty loud! But she only got 1 $25 ticket for loud pipes. It was fun for a couple of years, til it got hit. But most of the parts lived to race again. And TJ moved on to a '73 455 4-spd TA for a street ride. It seems that the desire to go faster comes to all who race. I was no exception. Our local track ran a class I think was called Street Modified. They used the stock specs for wt. limits, then you divide your wt. by your cubic inches to determine the class. Of course this favors the small-cube, hi rpm Chevy. I had no business in that class, but the brackets were still a year away, so I decided to give it a shot. I had a '68 ragtop Bird, which could be heavier than a hardtop, so I got to work on it. Found a good used roller from an SS racer and took my block and stuff to a new machine shop in a nearby city. Huge mistake! They had a top fuel car, so they HAD to know what they were doing - right? WRONG! The roller motor made it almost thru 3 passes and the 350 blew up just backing out of the shop. Listen very carefully! Never have machine work done by anyone who has little or no experience working on Pontiac stuff!

[ponyakr]

For us, '76 was a disaster! I spent more $ trying to go faster than on all our stocker stuff in '75 and we never even made it thru the time trials. But good news was on the way. Stock, SS and St. Mod were history. For '77 we'll run ET brackets. Our track called em Pro and Super Pro, and they had Street for the slower cars. Each track set their own bracket times. They ranged from 11.99 to 13.99 break between the top two classes. Their was no such thing as an Electronics Class. That brings up a ?: Who knows when they first started running the Electronics Class? Well, '68 Birds were cheap ( I probably bought at least 15 - $300 was the most I paid) So I picked one out and started putting it together for TJ. We still had the motor from her street Bird, so i stuck it in but without the 9" converter. She took to it right away. She had already learned how to cut a good light and with a tite converter it was very consistent. She went right back to her winning ways. But it was another year of learning for me. I was introduced to the torque-monster 455. It looked just like the 400s I was used to, so I was not ready for what was to come. In my ignorance i reasoned "Since a Goat is heavier than a Bird, this motor should even things out." But I soon found out the 455 was in complete control of things - not me.

[indymanjoe]

Good reading!carry on...