Dale: that was 'zactly the same "incident" read about it down below!
From: "Clay, Dale" <Dale.Clay@mdhelicopters.com>
Reply-To: "Clay, Dale" <Dale.Clay@mdhelicopters.com>
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Subject: RE: more on Smokey Yunick ........
Date: Thu, 10 May 2001 14:02:22 -0700
Or the time NASCAR confiscated his fuel tank for some reason and he drove
the car back to the garage! LOL
Dale C.
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Racing innovator dies at 77
By DAVID POOLE
The Charlotte Observer
Henry "Smokey" Yunick, one of greatest mechanics to ever work on a race car,
died Wednesday morning May 9 th 2001 at his home in Daytona Beach, Fla.
Yunick was 77. For the past year, he had been battling leukemia.
"He was perhaps the most creative racing mechanic of the 20th century," said
Lowe's Motor Speedway president H.A. "Humpy" Wheeler. "He not only thought
outside of the box, but way up in the ionosphere. To say he was a genius is
not enough." Yunick was in instantly recognizable figure in a race track's
garage area. He wore a flat-topped cowboy hat and a white uniform labeled
with the slogan "The Best Damn Garage in Town," that he used to describe the
automobile repair shop he opened on Beach Street in Daytona Beach in 1947.
His racing career certainly backed up that boast. Yunick won the Daytona 500
twice as a car owner and also won the Indianapolis 500 as a chief mechanic.
Although he had little formal education, he was universally revered as one
of the top minds in racing. In 1955, Yunick helped develop Chevrolet's
original small-block engine, and the basic principles of that design are
still used today. Born in Tennessee, Yunick first saw Daytona Beach from
the seat of a B-17 bomber during his service in World War II. Yunick liked
what he saw and settled there in 1946. After opening his garage, he quickly
became active in Daytona's racing community and was the chief mechanic for
Herb Thomas, who won championships in NASCAR's Strictly Stock (now Winston
Cup) division in 1951 and 1953. Yunick and Thomas teamed for 49 victories.
Paul Goldsmith won the final race held on Daytona's beach course in 1958 in
one of Yunick's cars, and when NASCAR founder William H.G. France opened his
mammoth 2.5-mile Daytona International Speedway it was Yunick's cars that
dominated its early history, winning four of the first eight races there.
Among those victories were Daytona 500 wins by Marvin Panch in 1961 and
Fireball Roberts in 1962.
"My daddy drove for him," Buddy Baker said. Buck Baker joined Tim Flock,
Mario Andretti, A.J. Foyt, Curtis Turner and Bobby Unser among the hall of
famers who drove for Yunick. "I never did, but I chased a lot of his stuff
around the race track. "When he and Fireball were together, they were the
first major speedway superstars. When they showed up with that black and
gold No. 22, it was trouble for everybody else." Baker said his team once
had engine trouble and crashed in a 125-mile qualifying race for the Daytona
500. While the crew worked on repairing the car, Yunick stepped in and
offered to take the engine back to his Daytona shop. "Smokey stayed up all
night long and helped us get that motor ready," Baker said. "If you talk
about engine people, he designed engines. A lot of people can put an engine
together. Smokey designed them. He was just brilliant when it came to making
horsepower."
Like many mechanics of that era, Yunick also knew how to find and exploit
gray areas in the NASCAR rulebook. The most famous story began when
questions were raised about the fuel cell in a car Yunick had built for
Daytona in the 1960s. After NASCAR impounded the fuel cell, an angry Yunick
got in the car, with no fuel cell, and drove it back to his Beach Street
garage. "The funny part of the story is that Smokey said nobody ever said
how long the fuel lines could be," Baker recalled. "I said, `Smokey, you
drove it all the way to your garage?' He said, "If I had wanted to I could
have driven it to Jacksonville and back.'" Yunick, who was among the first
group of 20 to be inducted into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame
in 1990, closed his Daytona garage to the public in the 1980s, but he kept
right on working in his research-and-development room. "His uncanny brain
worked best when challenged by extra horsepower," Wheeler said. "From his
renowned `secret' room at his Daytona shop where he let no man enter,
horsepower of impossible levels came forth." Stock-car racing was not,
however, Yunick's only passion. From 1958 until 1975, he built cars that
raced 10 times in the Indianapolis 500. One of those cars won in 1960 with
Jim Rathmann at the wheel. "Back in the old days, I would've pulled my car
to Indianapolis with a rope if I had to," Yunick once said. "That was the
ultimate, to stand there on the starting grid on race day at the
Indianapolis 500, and pull up your pants and say, `OK ... let's have a
race." Yunick stopped fielding Winston Cup cars in 1970 because he didn't
like what he saw to be the politics involved in NASCAR. He and France had a
heated argument and rarely spoke over the next two decades. France died in
1992.
Services are scheduled at the Ormand (Fla.) Funeral Home at 1 p.m. Saturday.
The family has requested, in lieu of flowers, that donations be made to the
Stewart Marchman Treatment Center at 3875 Tiger Bay Road, Daytona Beach,
Fla., 32124.
>From www.thatsracing.com 5-10-01
Posted at 1:39 p.m. EDT Wednesday, May 9, 2001
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