Modified Eliminator Wars in the 70's

[Hemi Moose]

Originally Posted by Geerhead55

Heres some shots from back in the day around the NW:
The "Joint Venture" team of Jim Warter & Tom Turner in '74 (at old Mission).
Same team again at Seattle International Raceway, also in '74.
Bob Lambeck's A/MP Cuda at Bremerton points meet in '74.
2 MP Camaros,, Joslin Bros. & "Free Ride" at S.I.R. (the late Jim Abbott as starter).
The "High Voltage" Cuda & the Depuy and Callison Corvette, S.I.R. ( Ray Rice starter).
Depuy & Callison Corvette and the "Bumble Bee" Karman Ghia, S.I.R.
A classic NW matchup- The Frizzell Bros. "Suddenly II" Camaro against
Terry Hoard's "Samurai Warrior", S.I.R. I can still hear it buzzing, incredibly loud.
The last four were actually taken in 1980.
Danny Durham

Nice Shots Danny...

[6130]

Originally Posted by Hemi Moose

That's Terry Hoard's "Samurai Warrior" 70 cubic inch rotary-powered C/MC Mazda RX-3 SP. It appeared to be a nice, well-built car, and he did have some notable success with it. I think it ended up in Puerto Rico under adverse conditions. I think there has been at least one "tribute" type car built after it.

Although almost all class racers have a lot of...class, Terry was an unfortunate exception.

Right after NHRA killed Modified Eliminator, I switched from bracket racing my street/strip Nova SS, to bracket racing a street/strip Mazda rotary door car.

There was no internet back then, and Terry was the only guy in town involved in rotary performance. He ran a greasy little auto repair shop in a seedy part of Portland Oregon. Whenever I came to him for rotary performance stuff, he wasted massive amounts of my time preaching his Amway cult to me. He was always talking about "dreaming", and making millions of dollars pressuring friends and neighbors to buy strange soap. He had some employees that were fairly helpful, but Terry was just plain creepy. I found out years later, that the success he had enjoyed with his race car, was mostly the result of other people's work, to include a really nasty dispute over an intake manifold.

Initially, I just needed a header. So he welded me up a piece of junk with unequal-length primaries, on the shop floor, with no jig. Then he sold me a "racing" tune-up, with the promise that it would make my car much faster. It was performed out in the parking lot with used parts from a pile in a stolen shopping cart, and included "converting" the stock Nikki 4-barrel carburetor to manual secondaries by wedging a wood screw into the throttle linkage. That "racing" tune up, on my otherwise stock engine, involved setting up both distributors to fire right on top of each other, with enough advance to ensure the demise of my engine on the very first pass I made afterwards. When I told him what had happened, he was all to eager to try to sell me an engine.

About that time, I became aware of Racing Beat out of Anaheim California, and sent away for their mail-order Mazda rotary performance catalog. It had a significant amount of very helpful technical information in it. I was eventually able to put the car in Pro ET with the assistance of Racing Beat's equal-length header, exhaust megaphone, spark plug wires, underdrive crank pulley, clutch, bridge port templates, 4-barrel Holley intake manifold, and the aforementioned technical information.

[lorenr]

6130,

Nice comment about Terry Hoard. What you've said is pretty much the way I remember his domination of Modified Eliminator. If he was racing, he was probably going to win. NHRA tried altering the Modified Compact index and each time they did it, Hoard would just go faster. NHRA could not keep up.

I happened to be at the Fall Nationals, in Seattle, when Wayne County brought out their B/Gas Opel. The Opel weighed about 2000 lbs. and was powered by a pro stock style 302. A real monster driven by a fellow named, Hutchens. Both cars met in the finals. I think the Opel came out west to end Hoard's domination of the class.

Hoard would leave the line at 14,000 RPM, shifting a Nash 5 speed. What seemed like a "half hour later", Hutchens left and barely caught Hoard. Been to a lot of drag races, but to this day, it was the most amazing drag race I ever witnessed.

I did not know Hoard, but knew of him, also heard he was pretty interesting. I knew a few of the people that provide parts for the Mazda. Mazda also provided some interesting rotary technology.

Someone told me he used a 9" Ford with 7:50 gears, a really short drag tire and an under drive 5 speed to get the car moving. Pretty crazy stuff back then.

Lorenr