Why did we race a Stocker? A short story to share

[Glenn Hayes]

I just wanted to share a story from a few years back, from our family to yours this holiday season.


Why we love Class Racing:
On a early fall Wednesday night at Kansas City International Drag way, my wife, 3 sons and I arrive in our old ’74 Chevy Dually with our ’74 Corvette I/SA in tow on our open trailer to doing some testing. There were about 20 Stock and Super Stock cars there that night doing the same.
I made a run with a recent carb adjustment and was pleased with the results. So as we rolled through staging lanes for our 2nd time trial, as were ready to go to the water box, I see we are paired up with a Black ’55 Chevy (which turns out to be with a 454, tunnel ram, 4 speed, big slicks, cage,) nice looking car and sure sounded really good too. I roll up and slip the Turbo 200 into 2nd gear a do my burnout and roll right to the pre-stage beam. I sit there and wait while I can still hear him boiling the tires and then roll by. He backs up, does a couple of hard dry hops and then finally stages. I roll in, take the engine to 2600 rpm and when I see the last yellow I nail it. The car always leaves with the front tires around 2’ in the air, so at 5200 rpm I click 2nd, then at 5800 I click high gear. There is a slight chill in the air, so I’m thinking… if I had a portable coffee maker in here, I’d start a cup of coffee! I then crossed the finish stripe and then the ’55 Chevy blows by. I roll up to the timing shack, get my slip and motor on back to the trailer.
As I shut the car off and open the door, Jennifer and the boys are right there with big happy smiles and Jennifer says “You spanked him”!
I smiled and said, “Honey, its just time testing runs”. As I crawl out of the car I hear from behind me, “HEY”! I turn and this BIG guy carrying a helmet comes up to me and blurts out “What you got under the hood of that thing”?
I calmly reply “A stock 350”.
He says “NO WAY, SHOW ME WHATS UNDER THERE” ….. So I pop the hood and open it. The look on his face was classic disbelief; he looked and looked and looked, stood up and said “You’ve got Nitrous”.
I again calmly said, “No, sorry, stock class cars are not allowed to use anything like that, our cars have to be factory stock, but we can have headers! I then began to explain to him what stock class was and about, but he kept interrupting me ….” There’s NO WAY this car is stock, it’s just to fast for that to be true, you’ve got nitrous hidden in there.
So once again I calmly said, “Tell ya what, if you can find anything that even looks like nitrous on this car, I’ll give it to you, right here, right now.”
He stood there, just glaring at the car, looked inside, got on the ground and looked, and looked and looked, finally after a few minutes he turns to me and says “That thing is just crazy, I just don’t get it” , then turned a walked away.
I turned to Jennifer and the boys, we all smiled at each other and then had a family group hug. Then my oldest Son Cody (Rest in Peace Son) said “Dad, let’s go do it again”, to which I said, “Let’s Go”!
As I grabbed my helmet, Jennifer walked up to me and said, “Did you even look at your time slip”? I said “No, I forgot all about it”…. She shows it to me, His ’55 Chevy-12.52, our Stocker -11.80 … that put another big grin on my face.

We had another group hug and off to the staging lanes we went.

For us, building and racing our stocker was a family affair that we loved to do because it kept us all together.
God Bless you all and Merry Christmas!
Glenn, Jennifer, Cody (R.I.P. Son), Casey and Cort