[Dan Bennett]

One of the best things that happened to me in drag racing was getting to know both of these men. I met Jenkins first through Pro Stock and then Steve Johns introduced me to Jere at Maple Grove one year. A team I later worked for hired Jere as a consultant so that resulted in our having long conversations a few times a week. And that instantly showed how different the two men were.

It's a much overused term these days, but in my opinion both men were geniuses. With Bill, phone conversations were never idle chitchat. Ask your question, get an answer, hang up. With Jere, they were always over an hour long as his mind jumped from concept to concept and all of them were related to what we were looking at.

I heard the concept a long time ago, but it exactly fits the impression I had of Jere's thought process. Consider a man on foot crossing a tall mountain range. He struggles up to the summit, works his way down the other side, and starts up the next peak. And then consider an eagle that just quickly goes from peak to peak. I was the mountain climber, and Stahl was the eagle.

Most of the time I spent talking to Bill was in the Pro Stock trailer as he was there to keep the engine in top shape. I remember long pauses frequently before he'd answer a question or tell a story. I think he was giving thought to making sure what he said was clear and understandable. He'd answer and you immediately understood what he meant.

Trying to keep up with Jere was like trying to stay on top of a wild bull. He had such a depth of knowledge and a quick mind that a lot of the time I struggled to keep up with him - I was familiar with the science and concepts he talked about but he'd somehow just throw out a stunning take on things I thought I knew well, but from a perspective I (and anyone I'd ever talked to) had never thought of.

It would have been fine if I'd had a few minutes to think over what he said, but within a minute or two he was on to the next thing that occurred to him. And he insisted on measurement - accurate measurement and not the "yardstick" kind he believed most people thought sufficient.

Both were true perfectionists. Bill was absolutely obsessive about ring seal and jetting. I think that Jere lost a lot of business because if a serious racer called him about buying a set of headers, Stahl would bombard them asking for measurements and specifications that most racers were unaware of, had never been asked about, and wouldn't have known how to measure in the first place. If he was going to build custom headers, they were going to be the best he knew how to make. He had done extensive testing and had come up with his own formulas for what worked best.

This is too long already, but I can't resist something that shows the kind of thought that came from Jere. On one visit to his shop, we were looking at his dyno, which hadn't been used for years. Yes, there was a dyno in the room, but lots and lots of other stuff I didn't recognize.

It turned out to be a project he never finished. He was getting a lot of business from dirt track racers. What he was building was a powered cradle that would tilt the engine - yes, during a dyno pull - at the same degree as the bank of the tracks his customers raced at. He wanted to see how much, if at all, it affected the fuel distribution. And he planned to include a system which would duplicate the time the car was on a straight, hit a banked turn, and hit the straight again. Maybe Nascar shops are doing that, maybe for a long time. This would have been in the early 1990s.