Tom,
Where were you living in 1960? You must have had quite a drive to get to
Santa Maria. What MPH and ET did the roadster turn? What kind of power? A SBC?
In the mid to late 50's there was a guy from the Valley (Madera, I think)
named Hut Watkins who ran a fuel roadster sponsored by Ed Fant Buick and
powered by a Nailhead. He ran ET's about the same as my fuel Flatty (10's on
a good day at about 125-130). I always dreaded having to face him, but he
never was at SLO or Santa Maria when I ran. I see him regularly at El Mirage,
Bonneville, and the Reunions. I'll introduce him to you sometime.
Also from Madera were a couple of guys with a DeSoto powered slingshot
Modified Roadster with a shark nose made from a late 30's Willys hood. They
were Milt Alley & Herb DeWitt (I think), and the thing ran pretty hard. I
never had to run them either.
Did you ever run into Harry Webster from Fresno? He had another slingshot
27 T Modified Roadster that ran 140+ at Kingdon (Lodi, CA) powered by Joe
Boghosian's fuel Ardun. Boghosian is still building racing engines and is at
the salt regularly, turning wrenches on the Indy Cammer SB Ford powered fuel
roadster of Ron Van Natta.
I remember once in the 50's when Webster & Boghosian took the Ardun and
put it into a bone-stock 40 Ford sedan, adding only 8" slicks on the rear.
The thing turned 118, phenominal for those days when George Santos (father of
Rick Santos the "three-peat" Federal Mogul Dragster champ) and his Flatty
powered steel 5-window Deuce were dominating "A" Gas at 106 in the 13's.
As a side note, one of the "heavy-hitters" of the mid 50's was Ernie
Hashim from Bakersfield, CA who had one of the first front-mounted GMC blown
Chryslers in Calif. He was sponsored by Hylton Drilling Co. and the car was
driven by Bill Replogle. It was a pretty basic, very short WB slingshot using
what looked like Model T Ford frame rails.It consistently ran about 150 in
the 1/4 mile.
In the mid 1980's I was at an old-time-rodders-reunion in Paso Robles, CA
put on by Chic Cannon (the NHRA Safety Safari guy from the olden days). Ernie
Hashim was there and I had a long talk with him. Turned out that he had no
pics of his old car. I just happened to have one taken in 1955 at Minter
Field (near Bakersfield) at a meet put on by the Smokers. In those days the
promoter always had a photo-op before eliminations with all the cars lined up
at the starting line. I was there from San Luis Obispo as a spectator and
snapped a pic and Hashim's car was the first in a line of about 10 fuel
dragsters. The pic was taken with an old reflex camera using
2 1/4 X 2 1/4 film, so when I enlarged it 30 years later it was really clear.
Ironically, in the picture are 3 Ardun powered dragsters. The rest include
the Glass Slipper (Flatty powered), Art Chrismans old #25, the
Nesbitts-Orange special, and a host of other then-famous cars.
On a final note, the next pic took was the Top Eliminator race. The cars
running for the top spot were not included in the photo-op because they
weren't fuel dragsters. The race was between Fritz Voigt (later to be Mickey
Thompson's wrench) in his Chrysler gas hemi dragster and Jim "Jazzy" Nelson
in his legendary Flatty powered Fiat coupe. Jazzy got the "Flathead-Jump" on
Fritz, made a little noise, Fritz smoked the tires, and we had a Flatty Top
Eliminator.
If anybody's interested I can post the photo-op lineup of all the fuel
cars.
.Ardun Doug in CA
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