Husker6.5
135' diagonal 16:9HD, 25KW sound!
If you're asking me, no. I was just a pit rat in elementary school back when my dad was racing in the mid-late '60's. We raced in eastern Nebraska, Western Iowa, northern Kansas and northwestern Missouri. Ran at Knoxville, IA quite a bit, including at Nationals. We were the only team that could beat Speedway Motors' "Speedy" Bill Smith's sprint team with any regularity, in fact quite regularly, which rankled Bill a bit as owner of Speedway Motors. Dad and Bill are still friends to this day, nearly 50 years later..
I did/do know Joe Saldana Jr. personally, as dad bought his methanol from Joe Saldona Sr. back in the day when we were racing against Joe Jr. His son, Joey, is my age (50). Jan Opperman drove for Bill Smith in like '72 or so (after dad sold the car following the '68 season when our driver got killed in a motorcycle accident during the '68 season in a non-racing incident) in his sprint car before hooking up with an Indy Car ride in the 500 for a couple of years. Know the Swindell brothers, Bobby and Sammy and Steve Kinser, too. They (all three) were over at my dad's place here in Lincoln having their crew wash off their semi rigs at my dad's truck wash after a World of Outlaws 1/3 mile Nationals at Eagle Raceway just outside of Lincoln, while we were all sitting in my dad's apartment having some cold ones shooting the breeze.
Dad had Iskendarian custom grind a cam to dad's specs for our sprint car's motor. It started out originally as a 327/375 'Vette fuelie motor. The owner of the local NAPA was a partner in the car, so we weren't hurting for machine shop time or equipment or expertise. Welded up the main webs and then drilled and tapped them to run a four bolt main with our own machined main caps a couple of years before Chevy offered 4-bolts from the factory. Ran a Hilborn injector system on the motor, and dad did the physics flow calculations for the optimal velocity stack configuration at the rpm range we wanted to run. turned out that the old steel Coke cans were ideal to run as a velocity stack, so there were eight of them on top of the motor! Drilled valve spring retainers to lighten them, all the SBC tricks to get more rpm and hp. All said and done, the engine dyno'ed 675hp at 8,000 rpm and 610 lb/ft of torque at 6,800 rpm. There's tons of trick things I can tell you about the car, many of them not allowed any more, some of them are.