Chapter 13

I'd have to say that things went pretty good for a while after that. I'd had a little taste of racing without having to be a driver, and I'd enjoyed it. I was pleased that it didn't give me an immense craving to get out behind the wheel again, but it was nice to be around racers and racing, so it made for a pleasant diversion. But, it was also nice to have the season over with and have a little time for my family, for raking leaves, and for things like that. In a way, I was even looking forward to the next racing season; it would be good to pass on a little more knowledge, to do something positive for the kids who were trying to learn.

Now, you remember when I was talking about racing jeeps on Okinawa and I said that there's no way to separate stock cars and cheating? Well, honestly, I hadn't forgotten that lesson. I knew I'd managed to drive the dragon back into his cave at Bradford Speedway for a while, but it was still a dragon, and it was still in its cave. Unless something were done, it was bound to come out again sooner or later.

This was one of those places where it was nice that I was also an auto shop teacher, because I heard things that I might not have heard otherwise, things that Smoky might not hear, especially where it involved the Junior Stock class.

I think I knew that the dragon was poking its nose out of the cave one day along in the winter when Phil Sharp came up to me while I was a lunchroom monitor. "Mr. Austin," he said, "I've got a question for you."

"Fine, maybe I can help you," I told him. "What's your question?"

"Well, I'm thinking about getting into the Junior Stock class next year," he said. "What's the fastest legal car out there? I mean, there's no point in having to start with something that won't get out of its own way."

"No question about it," I told him. "Find yourself a Hudson Hornet. It at least needs to have the Twin H-Power carbs on it. I seem to recall that '53 is the first year they had the 7X tuning package available, so it'd be legal if you could find one, which I doubt."

"You're kidding!" he said. "A fat old Hudson?"

"A fat old Hudson," I nodded. "You remember last season when the Mansfield kid got caught with that Stovebolt Six his dad had bored out to 308 cubic inches for him?"

"Yeah, I remember," he replied with what can only be described as a big old shit-eating grin.

"A 308 is what the Hornet came with stock. A flathead, but if you know me you know I have a soft spot for flatheads. It wouldn't be any trick to get it to 200 horsepower and still be legal, and maybe even more if you find that 7X tuning package. Plus the Hornet was lighter and handled better than anything else in its time, except maybe for a Nash."

"A Nash?" he said. "Mr. Austin, you're pulling my leg."

"No, I'm not," I grinned. "You knew I drove in the race on the beach at Daytona one time, didn't you?"

"Yeah, I guess I knew it."

"That was a '51 Nash," I told him. "The guy who won the race was driving a Hudson Hornet. The point is, those big sixes were whipping on the heavy V8s of the day pretty solidly. If you wind up with a Nash, get a Statesman, rather than the Ambassador, it's smaller and lighter, but has the same engine. Get one with the twin carb package. It probably isn't as easy to hop up legally as the Hornet but it'll do pretty well."

"All right," he said. "I guess I'll have to visit some junk yards."

"If you wind up getting one, let me know and I'll tell you what you can do to it legally."

I really didn't worry much about the conversation at the time, but I sure thought about it a lot afterward. Once I thought it all out, it became clear that we were going to have a tech war heating up in the Junior Stock class.

I'm told that once upon a time there used to be a sign on the wall of a speed shop that read, "Speed costs money. How fast do you want to go?" Right next to it was another sign, "The only way to beat cubic inches is with rectangular money." The Junior Stock class was supposed to be a cheap class, but there was a lot of wiggle room in those lax rules.

If you're not technically minded, just go ahead and skip ahead a few paragraphs, but hang with me if you can. To get right down to the basics, for the most part the power an engine puts out depends on how much air you can get through the engine. A bigger engine with more displacement will move more air and fuel mixture through it, which means more power. It's as simple as that, but in the simplicity are a great many complexities. If there's some reason you can't have more displacement, like a size limit, then the next thing you can do to move more air through an engine is to turn it faster. An engine moves more air/fuel mixture through it the faster it turns. However when you turn an engine tighter it starts to put more stress on various components, and sooner or later things start to break. That's just as true with the little six cylinder engines we used to have in the Junior Stocks as it is for the fastest NASCAR Chevy on the track today. The only difference is that the NASCAR Chevy has higher quality – meaning more expensive – components that will stand up to hours of high RPM quite a bit better than the factory stock stuff that you'd find in your early-fifties Stovebolt Six intended for a car that was basically a grocery-getter.

When Glenn Mansfield – I doubted that Bert had the technical knowledge or resources to do it – bored out that Stovebolt 261 and stuck a stroker crank into it, he was taking the easy route to higher horsepower. Unfortunately for him, it was also the easiest cheat to detect so long as I had a father-in-law with easy access to a P&G meter. But there are plenty of other less detectable things you can to do to hop up an engine, and many of them are even legal, like getting a car that came stock with a big engine in the first place – like a Hudson Hornet.

One of them is to just "blueprint" the engine. I'd done that with the 66's engine back over ten years before when I put in the maximum legal oversized pistons, along with a few other things that can be done by a good machinist. You can mill down the head to increase the compression ratio like Carnie did to that Jeep back on Okinawa. Even with the head off to be measured it's not the easiest thing to detect, and within reason it's going to be quasi-legal anyway.

A hotter cam, like I'd added to the 66's engine in later years isn't exactly legal. A good tech inspector back in those days could tell by the way the engine ran that it had a cam with nonstandard lift and timing, but proving it could be another story unless it was way beyond stock. That cam makes the valves open farther and stay open longer, which allows more air-fuel mix to move through the combustion chamber, which is what you're trying to accomplish.

Now all this stuff can be done, and in fact is commonly done, perhaps more commonly done in those days than it is today because the engines today are more complicated and harder to work on. But it isn't cheap – it takes a reasonably equipped automotive machine shop, along with a machinist who knows what he's doing. Junior Stock was supposed to be a simple beginner's racing class that was cheap and easy to get into and run, but it looked to me like it wasn't going to stay that way. Thinking back again, this was the same kind of thing that happened among midgets when the Kurtis Kraft Offys came out, and was what drove Frank and Spud into starting the MMSA in the first place.

In any case, to get back to the story, what Phil had told me was that people were working on their engines and didn't plan to be caught by Tom and his P&G meter. While it was legal and in one way commendable – and what racers do, anyway – it sort of violated the spirit of the Junior Stock class. What's more, there wasn't much I could do about it, at least not without having Tom and Willy at the track every week.

Now that Phil had inadvertently given me the alert, I did a little quiet asking around, and two or three other kids at Bradford High had cars in the Junior Stock division. Don Boies came right out and told me that he'd heard that there was a lot of engine work going on; he had his Plymouth for sale on the strength of winning the second season championship, and was gutting a Hornet for the next season. From what he picked up through the grapevine, he wasn't the only one, either.

After several days of poking around on it, I decided that the time had come for some decisions to be made. As far as I could see, there was only one way to keep some sort of control on the engines in the class – and that was to reach deep into Spud McElroy's bag of tricks.

One Saturday a couple weeks after Phil had come to me, I made it over to Kay's Restaurant for breakfast one Saturday morning. I laid the whole problem out in front of Smoky, some of the things that I'd learned. "If it gets out of hand, I can't control it, and it's going to ruin the class," I summarized.

"Yeah," Smoky said. "I don't hear stuff from the same circles that you do, but I hear stuff anyway. It all leads to the same conclusion. A little bird told me that Glenn has a 235 Chevy six sitting up in a speed shop in Detroit getting all sorts of cute little things done to it. It won't really be legal, but it won't be easy to detect, either. It won't be cheap, either. My little bird tells me he has a couple big ones into the mill already and he ain't done yet."

"Good God," I shook my head. "Will you or someone please tell me what he intends to accomplish by putting that much cash into a Junior Stock car? Hell, Bert could win every heat and every race of the season and Glenn won't get a tenth of the money back in payouts."

"Beats the hell out of me," Smoky shook his head. "About all I can tell you is that Glenn likes to win, and he doesn't like to lose. In fact, he'll go damn far out of his way and spend lots of money to keep from losing."

"Has to be something like that," I agreed. "It couldn't be anything rational. Maybe he thinks he's accomplishing something, but all he's teaching his kid is that if you have drag and money to cheat enough, you can win."

"Might be some truth to that," Smoky nodded. "You know what happened with Bert's older brother John and the football coach. In fact you probably know more about it than I do. You want my guess, this is the same thing."

"You're probably right," I agreed. "I know that Glenn was about ready to kill Ed Snyder because of it."

"Oh, yeah," he smiled. "Glenn was a mite worked up about that. But that's beside the point. What are we going to do to keep things from getting out of hand?"

"I have an idea," I told him. "It's not quite as clean and assured as a good tech inspection, but at least it will equalize competition, and that includes the kids driving Hornets with the 7X engine packages as well as people like Glenn."

"I'm just about sold already, if it'll work," Smoky smiled. "What do you have in mind?"

"What if I don't tell you?" I grinned. "The way to keep a secret is to not tell anyone. It'll work a lot better if we spring it on people, rather than let them know it's coming. We might even want to run a race or two before we institute it, just so we can see if our fears are justified."

"Now you've really got me curious," he grinned. "What do I have to do?"

"You haven't published rule sheets for next year, have you?" I laughed and pulled a piece of paper from my pocket. "All you have to do is to include this in the Junior Stock rules."

Smoky glanced at the paper, then replied, "This doesn't tell me anything. 'The management reserves the right to equalize output by the use of issued control devices.' What's that supposed to mean?"

"Everything and nothing, which is exactly what it's supposed to mean," I told him. "What it really means is that we can make a key rule change on a moment's notice if we're prepared for it. Could be that we never have to do it, but it's there to allow it. And I wouldn't bet on not having to do it with Glenn Mansfield's kid racing."