[ponyakr]

in '74 & '75, before i built the speed barn, a man who i'll call ys, let me use his shop & helped me wrench on my stockers. 1 corner of his shop was home to my stash of coors. most of the time it would be almost to the ceiling. when it got low, i'd make another run. now ys was a chevy guy. he had a '69 z-28. sometimes when we'd get tired of wrenchin, we'd git the ice chest & a case of brew, jump in the z-28 & hit the streets. ys also had a little front engine digger. 1 nite we took both cars, & ys took his digger to our local track. it was either the last tt or the 1st round when ys made a pass & ran off the track just passed the lites. from where we were we could't see a thing. it appeared as if ys just disappeared off the radar screen. so the race was stopped & we went down passed the finish line to see what had happened. here's what we saw. veering off to 1 side of the track, it looked like a lawn mower had made 1 pass through a deep stand of grass & weeds. it appeared as tho it hadn't been mowed in years. it was maybe 4 or 5' tall. we saw the trail, but we still didn't see ys. so we started walking down the trail & finally saw some movement ahead. ys was getting out of the car but was finding it hard going in the deep grass & weeds. we could barely make out the back of the car. we drug it out of the weeds & back to the pits. then we gathered around to here ys's story of what had happened. he said that just before crossing the finish line, something came loose on the motor & completely covered his face shield with oil. he could'nt see a thing. he just tried to hold it straight, but veered off the track. actually, the weeds had done a good job of slowing him down. we all had a lot of good laughs about this for several years. we told him he should send the track a bill for mowing their grass.

[ponyakr]

i just thought of something interesting. back when i first started racin my goat ('73-'74) we didn't use nhra index times. we used track records for our dial-in times. at any time during the time trials, you could notify the tower that you wanted to make an attempt to lower the track record for your class. from that time on, all the cars in that class had to use the new track record as their dial-in. my goat was much quicker than the track record, so i lowered it a lot. if you ran quicker than your track record, you broke out. so it was basically a bracket race. that even makes all my wins a little more special. there's not many folks sucessfully bracket racing a 4-speed. i certainly would not attempt it today. now this incident i'm about to tell of happened towards the end of the '74 season. they came out with a soft tread tire with just a few shallow grooves that was legal for nhra stockers. this imediately dropped my et by 1/2 sec. so i set my record lower to compensate. by then nobody else runnin my class could come close. then at 1 race i ran a c/s stage 1 buick. they said he won, but didn't give out any time slips. so i went to the tower to find out the details. but i got a hostile reception. the buick guy was a local & good buddies with the chevy boys. when i politely asked about the details of the race, all the fangs came out. they told me in no uncertain terms that i had lost & the thing for me to do was load up & go home. & they were very rude in doing so. so i concockted me a plan. the next week when i teched in i lied & told them i had a ra4 370hp motor, which put me in c/s instead of d/s. i knew the tech guys were chevy dudes & would'nt no the difference. i knew i was much quicker than the buick, so i ran for the c/s class record & bombed it as low as i could. then i loaded'r up & came home. the season was almost over so i don't know if the buick ran any more that year or not. he probably talked his buddies in the tower into doing away with the record i'd set. they ran off nhra index numbers in '75 so we never saw the buick run again. now, i wouldn't do something like that today. but that was a different time, & i thought it was just the action called for in repayment for their bad attitudes & the harsh treatment i'd received. just part of history. precious memories.

[ponyakr]

here's 5 funny cars we've seen race.

[ponyakr]

here's "Big" himself, shirley "cha cha", & the crosswalk

[ponyakr]

there were both race & street pontiacs at amarillo '74

[ponyakr]

pontiacs at the Cajun Nationals, near New Orleans. don't no if the H-O car was a house car or they just sponsered it.

[ponyakr]

T.J.'s street cars & "Wild(now mild) Bill's" dirt late model