qondio.com/aioF

Stock Car Racing

By Gilbert Griffiths

At the age of 15, I joined a local car club called the “Drifters.” Just about every male under the age of 35 joined. One of our first orders of business was to buy a stock car. We wanted to race this car on a track. One thing you must remember...this was 1956 and it took place in an unorganized district, on Vancouver Island, called Fanny Bay. The nearest race track was 60 miles away in Nanaimo. The only other one was 124 miles away in the British Columbia capital, Victoria. Just getting to either of these places was an adventure all by itself as the highway at that time was a narrow winding two lane road with no shoulders. It went through resort villages and hugged the rugged east coast of Vancouver Island. The maximum speed on the highway was 50 mph with the speed in many places reduced to 20 mph.

Some of the more senior members of the club located an old dirt track race car that was for sale. At that time, the cars racing on the Nanaimo and Victoria tracks, which were paved, had to be made before 1949. The car they bought was a 1934 Ford coupe, with a 1948 Mercury truck engine that had been ported, relieved and the motor had been balanced. A relieved engine is one in which the intake manifold openings have been enlarged and polished to allow the air and fuel mixture to flow smoothly from the carburetor into the engine. When a motor is ported, the holes in the motor where the exhaust exits the engine, or ports, are enlarged and polished and the exhaust manifold is also polished on the inside so that the exhaust exits the motor quickly. To further aid the exit of exhaust gases, the exhaust manifolds were modified so that each bank of the motor had its own exhaust pipe, with no mufflers. When a motor is balanced, every piston weighs the exact same weight and so does every lobe on the crankshaft. In this way, the motor runs much more smoothly and efficiently. To ensure that the valves opened and closed smoothly and quickly, we changed the angle of the valves from 30 degrees to 45 degrees. We also added a washer to each of the valve springs so that the springs were under constant compression. This ensured that the valves would not flutter when the motor was running at a high rpm (revolutions of the crankshaft per minute). Our motor, which was known as a flat head V8, was tuned up to run at 8500 to 9000 rpm. To further increase the horsepower of the engine, we bored out the engine cylinders and inserted enlarged pistons. All of the above changes were allowed under the rules in affect at that time for “stock” cars racing on those particular tracks. (See Wikipedia.org, section 1.6 Internal Fuel Flow, for more information on porting and relieving a V8 engine. This whole article has a lot of interesting information on these types of motors.)

We stripped all excess metal out of the car body so that the only thing left inside was the firewall between the motor and the drivers compartment. A single bucket seat for the driver was firmly fastened to the frame and equipped with a fighter plane three point safety harness. The floor was cut out on the passenger side and also behind the driver. The gas tank was relocated to the trunk and surrounded by a metal firewall. A pipe cage was welded around the driving compartment and the doors were welded shut. All glass was removed from the car. The roof was cut out and this allowed the driver to get in and out of the car. A crash bumper was welded to the front and rear of the car to protect the radiator and gas tank in case of a collision. The driver, a professional that we hired, wore a crash helmet and goggles when driving. See the picture below for the finished car. It was painted lilac purple with white trim. I'm leaning against the front of the car.

I had spent much of my life hanging around local garages, when I wasn't going to school, hunting, playing football or commercial fishing, and knew quite a bit about repairing cars, so I became one of the pit crew for the Nanaimo races, which took place on Friday nights. The three-eighths mile paved track was equipped with lights and we had to get the car to the track by 7:30 PM. The feature race, which was usually 50 laps ended about 11:20 PM. The Victoria races took place on Saturday nights. Because of the distance and the fact that it usually required overnight accommodation, I was not allowed to attend these races, so another member of the club took my position on the pit crew.

Our car started out relatively poorly, but through constant changes and innovations we ended up becoming one of the better cars on both tracks. Between sponsor money and prize money, we only had to raise about $1500 per year to keep the car on the track. This money came from weekly dues of $1.00 per member, car washes and monthly dances we held at the local community hall which we got to use for free, in exchange for cleaning it after it had been used.

After the first night of racing we did with the car, I suggested that we tear down the engine and examine all the parts to make sure that they were in excellent condition. Since I made the suggestion, I was tasked with doing the job. I took the engine out of the car and placed it on the garage floor. I took off the pan, after draining all of the oil out of the motor and I noticed some fine pieces of metal in the bottom of the pan. There should not have been any metal pieces there, so I took the motor completely apart. When I tried to take the hydraulic lifters out of the motor, they fell apart. (lifters rest on the cam shaft and lift the valves up to let the gas and air mixture into the engine cylinders where it is ignited by the spark plugs and then lift the exhaust valves to release the exhaust.)

I called the head mechanic and showed him the broken lifters. He said he would drive to an auto dealership in Courtenay, a 15 mile drive and get a new set. I suggested that he consider getting a set of solid lifters as I didn't feel that the hydraulic lifters would stand up to the stress of pushing the compressed valve springs when the motor was running at 9000 rpm. After thinking about it for a few minutes he said that my idea was a good one, so we made the change. Because of the way we constantly checked our motor, we were the only race car in the 4 years that I was involved in the sport which did not blow an engine. And, in the process of racing in Nanaimo we set a track speed record.

I enjoyed my time working on the car and attending the races, and I learned a lot. We got good enough to replace the race car transmission, in the track infield, in 20 minutes. And yet, I didn't learn to drive a car until I was 19, when I learned so I could make an application to join the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Ironic, isn't it? A member of a race car team who couldn't drive.

Contributor's Note

I originally published this last night when I was tired. I woke up during the night and realized that I had made some factual errors and also some grammatical errors. So, after I got up I removed this Intel, corrected the errors and now I've republished it. Sorry for any inconvenience.
gilbertg

PLEASE VISIT THE CONTRIBUTOR'S WEBSITE

Birdhouse Publishing
A blog providing information on pets
birdhousepublishing.blogspot.com

Cool intel. I love this kind of stuff. Thanks! I gave it five stars. Actually I gave it five stars when I read it last night, then again when you resubmitted it. :)

Thanks very much. It was a great time for a young kid to do something exciting and to get his hands dirty and see great results from it.

gilbertg

Interesting bit of history, sounds like you had a wonderful experience.Love the photo!

Thankyou. Yes I had a great time and it was nice to see positive results for my efforts...something I didn't get to see a lot of as a police officer.

gilbertg

Is the sponsor, the Bowling Centre still around? I need to get some whitewall tires like that "fur ma truck".

I think the building is still there, but I'm not sure if it is still a bowling alley. It's been a while since I was there. Goodyear sells racing slicks, but I don't think they still make the kind we used. Much too primitive for today's stock cars which are capable of speeds over 200 mph. Our track record was 92 mph in second gear. Our 3 speed manual transmission had a long shifter which we clipped into a holder on the dashboard. This prevented the car from slipping out of gear. Using second all the way around the track gave us great acceleration and explains the 9000 rpm of the motor.

gilbertg

Thank you for bringing back the memories of the local stock cars racing on a dirt track in Groveton, N.H. when I was a boy. Early 1950's.
Keep up the good work.
Best wishes.
Frederick

Thank you. Yes stock car racing in the 1950's was a lot of fun. Unlike today when you need millions, we did it for less than $4000. However, in those days $4000 was more than most people made in a year. My first year (1961) as a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police I made $3400 (gross pay). Mind you 10 years later when I had three children and a wife and I was a Corporal living in Ottawa, Canada my yearly gross Salary was $10,004 per year. Never did make much money as a policeman back then, but the work was very interesting...I got a chance to help develop an online police system...at that time we were at the forefront of developing a secure coast to coast computer system...IBM engineers and techs worked along side of us developing hardware and software that allowed us to do what we wanted...since no one had ever done what we were attempting, no one had either the hardware or software to do it, so it was developed on site. Being in on the ground floor of something and helping it to come to fruition was an exciting and heady experience.

gilbertg

The copyright for this content entitled "Stock Car Racing" has been specified by the contributor as:

This content may be copied and distributed (but not modified), as long as the original author is acknowledged with a link back to the content page. If you use this content according to the license specified, you must link to the following URL: