More Legends of Drag Racing

[bill dedman]

Originally Posted by Tom Goldman

Bill, you hit on the Gasser thing right on the money.
An Uncle who just recently passed away, was a major influence in my life.
He ran a 50' Olds club coupe in C/Gas and C/A in the mid to late 60's.. My first lesson in automatics was rebuilding Dual range Hydros for his race car.
Some of the early Hydros from military applications evedently had even lower 1st gear ratios than the passenger car version cause I remember we put one in his car and the thing just stood straight up on those old 10" slicks! .....Having a nearly 180# rear push bumper helped.
The early exposure to those cars influenced my building my '40 Willys in the early '80's.
That car was my passport to meeting some of the great drivers and tuners of our sport.
Racers such as Don Garlets, Dale Armstrong,Eddie Hill, Fuzzy Carter,Frank Bradley,Kenny Bernstein,and even John Force actually sought out my car in the sportsman pits........Many of the Gasser greats came by to see the car and the most frequently asked question was how it handled with the front end down on the ground as opposed to sky high as their cars were.
It seems that near the end of the Gasser era, as tire and suspension technology were advancing, many of them found it was no longer practical to have the nose high in the air.
As strange as it seems, many of the cars ,particulary the Willys coupes experienced evil handling problems in the traps......Over the years many of the early racers told me the same thing.
One racer, Bob Scheffler,who along with his brother built fiberglass Willys bodies and raced in A/G ,came by at the Keystone nats in '86or '87 and asked me how the car handled at high speed being so low. .....I told him it was a little skatey in the lights . ...He showed me a picture of a car they built around 1969 or '70. ....It was nearly as low as my car in the front! .........He told me that the car actualy flew in the lights at Pittsburg,and was destroyed, the rear end of the car actually lifted off the ground !
It turns out that the beautiful slope of the Willys roof and deck lid make a very efficent wing creating lift, not downforce when the car was at the proper angle! ......Apperantly the only thing keeping my car on the ground was the fact ,I had not yet reached the proper speed!
The Gassers were probably ,in my opinion the greatest race cars to ever see the strip, un equaled even by the early years of Funny Car.

Thanks, Tom, for that really interesting note!

I had never heard the theory about the Wiilys's deck lid aerodynamics, nose-down attitude, and rear-end "lift," but it makes all kinds of sense, when you think about it. Maybe a good thing that your car wasn't a little faster! LOL!

DualRange Hydros had a 3.81 first gear in the generic transmissions,but in the last year this transmission was used in passenger cars, strangely, the '56 Pontiacs that had that transmission utilized a 1.55 front planetary instead if the time-honored 1.45, which accomplished a couple of things: Since the power flows from the crank flange, through the torus cover, into the transmission and through the front planetary unit BEFORE it goes forward to the fluid coupling, it both raises the stall speed AND produces a deeper first gear (about 7-percent) of 4.07:1. Maybe that's what that tail-dragging Gasser had???? The '56 Pontiacs also had a needle-bearing pilot bearing in the back of the crank to support the input shaft... the only such application of that, that I ever saw on a hydro.

I have no experience with military hardware, but I know that the G.M.C. six-by's had a modified Dual Range Hydro with a built-in "LOW RANGE" on the bottom of the case. But, I digress...

My point of all that verbiage was to point out that the whole drivetrain thing (as regards the slide into Funny Cars,) was a study in evolution, with the Gassers leading the way. Before Pitman-Edwards showed the way, you couldn't FIND an automatic on a drag strip.

I'm glad that I'm not the only one who remembers that.