Guys, Guys, Guy,
All this technical
talk on drag racing gives me a headache. It was not complicated back in the
50's. I could take one car and let 6 guys race it and get 6 different elapse
times in the quarter mile. The driver had much, much more to do with drag racing
then the technical little things y'all are talking about. Most Mopar's got
beaten on the drag strip because they had 3.31 or 3.36 rear end gears and very
few had Sure Grip. The ones who changed their rear ends and went to Sure
Grip ran much better. Skinny tires that did not bite...... Wrong!
Everybody ran Atlas Bucrons or Firestone Butaliers which were super soft and
gave you about 10,000 miles before they wore out. They also had tires
called " Cheater Slicks". They gave so much traction that you would have to rev
a stick shift car up an extra 600 to 1000 RPM over your normal starting RPM'S
because if you didn't they would bite so well your car would stall right on the
starting line. Nobody talked about spending all day and most of the night
studying the starter with his flag and learning to read him and his
little idiosyncrasies. No one mentioned studying the Christmas tree and
getting the feeling of comfort you needed to have an edge on that starting
light system. No one talked about the good lane on the strip and the bad
lane as far as traction and timing goes. No one talked about
feathering the throttle off the line and punching it 30 feet out so you lost no
time spinning your tires, if you did spin the street tires.
No one mentioned the shift point of the cars and how to improve
it by changing the shift points and bring your quarter mile time down. No
one mentioned tire pressure high in the front and low in the back. No one
mentioned cranking the torsion bars up a little on '57 and later cars so the
weight transfer already took place with the front up and the back down and the
car would move out faster with better traction. No one mentioned changing the
jetting in the carburetors to meet the altitude change in different areas and
different drag strips. And why, I say, why does everybody take for granted your
car is getting full throttle when you floor it------Did you ever check it?????
Do you know the correct way to check it??? No one mentioned the linkage to the
automatic transmission which regulates the pressure of the shift you get at full
throttle. No on mentioned the line pressure on the transmission and how the
pressure can be adjusted up for much quicker shifts. I could go on and on and on
and on------but I think maybe you get the point? Drag racing back then was not
done with just a slide rule, calculator or a COMPUTER. The guys that tested the
cars for the magazines were really nice guys but sorta nerds that pushed
pencils and took photos. About 95% of the road test were done by Magazines with
cars that had no tachometer!!!!!! Unheard of on a drag strip!!!!
How good were you at racing your car a day or two after
you got it??? Most of them only had the cars for the
weekend.
The "All Chrysler Nationals Show" in
Carlisle Pennsylvania has arrangements with Quarter Aces Drag Strip to use the
strip for it's Chrysler cars coming in for the show. No, it won't hurt your car
to drag it. Besides, it is not even a full quarter mile ------it is 3/16th
strip, which means you might get up to 60 or 70 MPH. It is a fun place,
where it is not all talk.... you actually go out and have fun while you're
learning. I won more than 224 competition drag races and never knocked a singe
transmission out. Now I wore a few out, but never knocked one out, and most of
my Mopar's were automatic. I will be taking my 56 Fury, that set all kind of
records in the 50's to the drag strip at the " All Chrysler Cars National Show
in Carlisle and I will be running it on the drag strip. Today it has been
restored back to 100% stock and all modification for the drag strip that I
had on it in the 50's, have been removed. Will some of you join me???? Or is it
more fun to just talk about it. I can't wait to see a bunch of 50's and 60's
cars on the drag strip at that meet. I will be taking photos like there is no
tomorrow. Come on, you only live once, have some fun and come to the REAL
drags. Put down those hot rod books and stop dreaming and join me in the
real world with your beautiful Mopar's on the drag strip. Most stock cars
turn about 10 to 12 second in the 3/16th of a mile so it is more fun than high
speed. Got any questions on coming to the drags, write me. If you do join me at
the strip, I know you will be smiling all the way home when you leave the
show.
Oh, and if I hear " man on the street one more time I am
going to scream". In 1956 it was a still a big deal if you had a V8, if you had
a 4 bbl and duals it was really special and rare. If you had a Plymouth Fury, or
a Dodge D 500 you really had something special. Guys------only car guys
ordered these cars. If I guy bought a D 500-1 he was really a car guy and if he
filled out all the papers for Daytona Beach Racing he was prepared, really
prepared. A lot of those guys brought their own mechanics. Please cut that man
on the street crap. Times were different back then. Car guys raced and you got a
place in the pecking order. They did not read magazines written by guys who
were educated to become writers who tested cars to get out of the
office. These guys would not like the color of a car and they would bad
mouth it in a clever educated way. The rule of thumb back then was if your car
didn't run and it was a dog-----then you'd better be able to really bullshit,
because you were not bringing the gold home every weekend. Did you ever notice
the loser of a drag race has much more to say then the winners??? I do not mean
to offend anyone but the guys that talk about their cars and how fast they are,
never, never have a bunch of photos of their car on the drag strip; they never
have trophies sitting all over the place or even photos of their trophies and
they have no certified time cards to show their record breaking elapse times on
the drag strip. So out come the magazines and the bench racing begins, but it is
not real. Sorry, it is not real. Take your car to the drag strip and run it
and see what it will turn in the quarter mile. Take photos of it on the strip,
take video of it on the strip, let us hear the roar of your dual quads
scream----------then you will be talking cars in the real world. When I was a
kid I bought and read and almost memorized every car book I could get on
American high performance cars. There was one and only one guy who
ran road test for a magazine and knew his shit and was a car guy, his name
was Tom McCahill and he worked for Mechanix Illustrated magazine. ( Google his
name and read about him) Motor Trent was also reliable when it came to road
test. I have hundreds and hundreds of official time slips from at
least 9+ different drag strips on the East Coast. I would bet that
the guys that have wrote about what happens on the drag strip were never there
except in their own minds while reading a car book. ( ok, maybe they were
there watching once or twice) In the future you will never see or hear of
them on a drag strip, because they would not know how to explain that their
super powered head jerking tire ripping cars best times would
be approx. 17 seconds in the quarter mile. In the real world 16 seconds
was fast back then. 15 seconds was really really fast and 14 seconds was
almost unbelievable for a stock anything. So the D 500-1 and the D 501 and the
Fury's and Chrysler 300's were very fast at 15.50 to 16.20 on the drag
strip-----but guys, PLEASE DO NOT say you heard of a 13 second
or a 12 second run with a 56 and 57 Super stock anything. It didn't happen,
I am not telling you what I read, I was there when drag racing
started and I still have hundreds of time cards and print outs of the winners
and their elapse times which were printed every week in Drag News, etc. You
want to hear a wild true story? One day I will e mail the list of how I won 5
out of 7 official drag strip races with my ole 1959 DeSoto
Adventure---------and the announcer said over the loud speakers " Wow, who ever
heard of a fast DeSoto.-----Yeah, and I got at least one photo of that too. In
closing I want to say again I do not mean to offend anybody or talk down to
anybody because we are all Mopar guys and I think y'all are a great bunch of
guys. But being blessed with ADD and being a OBSESSIVE CONPULSIVE
personality with a super memory I have seen much over the years and
remember most of it. In closing I will repeat what a very wise old man of
drag racing once said" The winners find a reason to compete on the drag
strip and the losers find a excuse to not compete on the drag strip".
Ron Allyn Swartley
56 Plymouth Fury ( stock ) Automatic
56 Plymouth Fury ( 392 Hemi from 300 D full race )
stick
58 Plymouth Fury 350 Golden Commando
Automatic
65 Dodge Dart GT soon to be Hemi powered
70 Plymouth Superbird 440 +6 pak
78 Chrysler Cordoba 440 High performance
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Non Chrysler Products
56 Pink Cadillac previous owned by Elvis Presley
70 Lincoln Mark V Triple White trimmed in gold- previously owned by
Elvis Presley
76 Harley Davidson Motorcycle 1600 cc previously owned by
Elvis Presley
2 Lincoln Towncar's---daily drivers
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