My cup holder’s happy, my tank is full. My engine’s running like a Brahma bull. My bumpers are polished and talk about luck. I just got a date with an ice cream truck.
– Tow Mater, from Cars In my early 20s, I got a job working for a retail establishment called Handy Auto Parts.
We sold a lot of high-performance items like Hooker Headers and Crane Cams.
Everybody who worked at the store loved cars and racing, and everybody but me had a hot rod or had delusions that the car they drove was some sort of muscle car. I drove a Japanese truck with a four cylinder, so I couldn’t participate in that delusion. At least not yet.
Most of the employees were a bit crazy, and we did a lot of irresponsible stuff.
For example: If things got really slow, we might decide to throw big screwdrivers at bottles of Freon, the R-12 kind that got banned for causing ozone depletion. A direct hit caused an explosion and released pressurized Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) into the atmosphere.
“Take that ozone layer!” Leaded gasoline was on its way out then, as the U.S. Congress had adopted the Clean Air Act in 1970. So, most new cars had catalytic converters on them that would supposedly curtail air pollution by supposedly turning toxic emissions into harmless water, carbon dioxide and nitrogen gas, leading to perfectly pristine air.
By 1975, unleaded gasoline was available almost everywhere, and by Jan. 1, 1996, leaded gasoline was essentially banned altogether for street use.
But some of that nasty leaded gasoline was still around back then, so I sawed the catalytic converter off my relatively new truck and replaced it with a piece of straight pipe. The pipe didn’t fit very well, so I wound up driving the truck with the muffler disconnected. It sounded glorious, but it still wasn’t a hot rod.
So, I bought myself a ’67 Camaro like any other respectable collard-greeneating Southern male would have.
The Camaro was a mess when I bought it, but I had grandiose plans for that whip: Holley 750 doublepumper carb, roller cam, headers, tunnel-ram intake, pop-up pistons, maybe even a supercharger. But things soon began to unravel.
One day, while I was driving down Glenwood Road, the hood flew open, and I had to stick my head out the window to drive. Turned out the hood was so badly bent, I had to remove it completely, which created another problem.
The Camaro had one of those old small-block Chevrolet engines with the oil filler tube sticking out in the front of the engine. But pouring Valvoline into the tube was a Sisyphean task. The Camaro always wanted to give the oil back, because it had bad oil rings. When you drove, the car looked like an old train with smoke pouring out of its chimney. Oil would get all over the windshield, too, if you drove faster than 10 mph. My girlfriend was not amused.
I also bought a used big-block Chevy engine I planned to build into a 500-horsepower beast for the Camaro, but the shop I took it to went bankrupt, and since I had no receipt for it, I lost the engine to the bank.
I sold the Camaro. Probably just as well, I was certainly no Smokey Yunick.
But a guy who worked at the store claimed he once had a job at Smokey’s “Best Damn Garage in Town” in Daytona Beach, Florida.
His name was James, and he had lost part of one ear in a bar fight. He was “rough as a cob,” as the saying goes. But we all admired him, because anyone who knew Smokey Yunick had a certain amount of cachet.
Yunick was an iconic mechanic, designer, engineer and NASCAR crew chief who had a reputation for bending NASCAR’s rules.
One of the most famous examples was his fuel line trick. NASCAR rules stated that each fuel tank on each car could hold only a specific quantity of gasoline, a measure designed to make all the cars equal.
So, Yunick installed a lengthy fuel line that snaked through and around his race car’s chassis to hold a few extra gallons, which cut down on pit stops considerably. Technically, he had not broken any rules, just skirted them, creatively.
But such automotive creativity is on the way out. How on earth are you going to soup up a confounded rolling battery. You certainly can’t bolt a set of headers to it and get more horsepower.
But that’s just another symptom of the latest fin de siècle, as the French say. Or an inflection point, if you believe Joe Biden.
As for me, I got tired of getting grease under my fingernails a long time ago. I finally went back to school where I read some highfalutin literature and nearly starved before I got a job typing up things like this.
But I do still remember how to replace the brushes in a Chevy alternator.
Selah.