Rich,Your mention of a Graham supercharger took me back fifty years !
I was a teenager attending the stock car races at the long gone Lonsdale
Sports Arena in Lonsdale, Rhode Island, and there were very few cars
competing in the class A races that were not flathead Fords . This was
when the " full coupes " were still running, and there was a huge looking
Graham four door sedan that was usually running right up there with the
front runners when the feature race was underway . I do not recall how
many times this unique looking " bomb " driven by Phil Mirabella garnered
the checkered flag, but I recall being totally amazed that any other engine
could run side by side with the engine I had already come to worship .......
the Mighty Ford / Merc Flathead ! It was running one of those under
the carb centrifugal superchargers, and obviously this is what made it
competitive with the bent eights, along with some very good chauffering
on the driver's part . That supercharger was the only one available on a
popularly priced car at that time, according to one of my reference books,
and raised the output of the Continental designed six of 217.8 inches
from 93 HP @ 3800 RPM to 120 HP @ 4000 revs . This power boost
and the standard 4.27:1 rear gears gave that big bomb a lot of jump out
of the turns, but the car was no longer competitive when the lightweight
cutdowns and " bugs " came along around 1952 and ' 53 .
That car not only looked very different, but sounded different, too !
Looking back at it now, it seems pretty strange a blown car was allowed
to compete with all the other naturally aspirated ones ...... but it WAS
an option on a STOCK automobile, not aftermarket speed goodies !
Lonsdale was a third mile, very hi banked ( 14 * on the straightaways,
and much more on the turns ) asphalt oval where the OFFY midgets
averaged about 108 to 110 MPH around the track . A hurricane in the mid
Fifties, and the resulting flooded river nearby, washed away about one third
of the track, and the great racing that had been there for almost a decade
became a memory many of us will always cherish ......
Somebody once stated that the only thing in life you can be certain
of is CHANGE .
Bruce, remembering other days and evenings spent at that track .......
with great fondness
PS : This was one of only two tracks where I have ever seen
well over FIFTY cars in the feature race !
|