My favorite story is my Dad's story. A lot of you guys have probably read other posts of mine telling how Dad is the one who got my brother and I started racing in order to keep us from doing it on the street. So he was our real roll model.
At our local track he was known by track officals; as "The Nervous Man". Now Dad was not nervous; but they would irritate the **** out of him because every stinking week we rolled into that track, the same tech people would give us crap about our carburators. They kept telling us they were the wrong carbs for the car. Dad told them he did't care, it's what came on it. And they were, the first season, our car was bone stock except for headers and slicks. Anyway over time he had developed a reputation as someone who you didn't want to piss off (he was a Golden Gloves boxer; and a good one at that). So a few season on, we're racing our 990 Super stocker, running through the field as usual, and we get to the finals against a '68 Mustang Cobra Jet, which I think was SS/E, to our SS/B. Now you always got 45 minutes between rounds, and on this day we were doing our usual between round work, like changing plugs, etc. The tower calls us to the staging lanes to run the very moment we get all the plugs out of the car. Where we pitted was visible from the tower. They called it so precisely, they must have been watching us.
About two minutes later they announce that if we don't report to the staging lanes immediately, they would "wipe" us.
We throw the old plugs in , head to the staging lanes and the announcer says, "wipe Storm King". Dad goes out the pit gate, hangs a left toward the tower, and all these guys in the tower see him coming and start falling all over themselves to get out of there before he arrives. The announcer is still going on about "Wiping Storm King" over the PA, and then you here the tower door slam. Over the PA, to the entire track you heard, "If there's going to be any wiping today, it's going to be me wiping your ass up and down this quarter mile". The grandstands went nuts, cheering and hollering in support of my Dad. You see, the Mustang guy got beat by us pretty regular; and he talked the announcer into trying to hot lap us and not give us enough time for the usual maintenance the hemi took. So they tried to pull a fast one on us so the 'Stang could make a lone run for the money.
In short, we ran, beat him, but not by as large a margin as usual because the plugs were a bit fouled up, and that's the last time the track tried to screw around with us.
I miss "The Nervous Man". |