Dward Farquar's Blob

• Nov. 26, 2005 - 1961 Darlington, the Nationals, and homemade sin.

The summer of my high school graduation (1961) I went to my first real race -Darlington! We left Ashland, Kentucky on the Ohio river about 11:00 AM on a  Saturday and were at the track late that night. I had a Chicago boxcar haircut, a pack of straight Camels rolled up in the sleeve of a white t-shirt, and Levis with a double cuff. We slept in the car and on the ground in the parking lot of the track. When we went in Sunday, we had two coolers full of Falstaff beer, bologna, cheese, and white bread. We drank all of the beer and ate all of the food. It was a lot different then - we sat on bleachers. We were all Junior Johnson and Chevrolet fans. He went like hell and , as usually happened with the  409 engine, blew up. That engine was a colossal mistake with it's wierd valve train geometry  and  failure prone everything else. Later the 396-427 tried to make up for it. There is really no way to describe the experience of seeing a superspeedway for the first time. Not only new to me but to thousands of other people too. A little later Nascar was propelled into the mass media by the live Saturday afternoon WideWorld of Sports broadcast featuring an all out brawl. It started with Cale Yarbrough and one the Allisons getting into it on the apron of turn three and four after spinning each other out. Bobbie Allison went all the way around the track and stopped right beside all of this. He unbuckled, got out, and joined in the melee. Peolpe talked about it for weeks.  Nascar and TV. In September, Butch Ackerman (a whole other story) and myself left about 6:00 PM and were in Indianapolis for the National Drags about midnight. We had a lot of our local beers - Falls City made in Huntington, West Virginia, Burger and Schoenling Little Kings from Cincinnati. We stayed up all night on truck stop speed and had a beer tasting with about 20-30 other people in the parking lot with all their local brews. We had Coors from Colorado, Rheingold, Rolling Rock and I don't remember after that. All the California cars that we had only read about in Hot Rod magazine were there in real life. Our local favorites were the Matney brothers in an A-Gas Chevrolet powered Anglia. I had a summer job in the same foundry where they worked in a dingy liitle town in the Ohio River Valley. They blew up real good as they say. The other car that we absolutely loved was George Montgomery's '32 Willys coupe in A-Gas Supercharged. The big showdown was Montgomery against Stone, Woods and Cook from southern California in a '40 Willys A-Gasser. To us it was bigger than top fuel and all seemed right with the world when that little baby blue '32 Willys blew off those big time California boys. Good had triumphed over evil and all was right in God's universe. Back to the Matney boys. Their car and everyone else's was  homemade. Now you can buy everthing to make a hot hod and just bolt it together. We even made our suspension brackets and motor mounts.. They were cut from 1/4" steel plate - stolen from the foundry of course - using an acetylene torch., ground on a bench grinder, and oxy-acetylene welded to the frame. Hence the homemade sin. There was an old dirt track racer from Ashland Kentucky named Charlie Schwartz. He never liked the nickname "Mad Dog" although it stuck with him for years "Just because I drove that car with the axle welded together" Another "Mad Dog" was named McGurk from Columbus,Ohio. He put a Chevrolet small block sideways in a Harley frame. At the old Raven Rock dragstrip near Portsmouth, Ohio, he was going through the timing traps at speed when the motorcyle suddenly went into the air in one direction and "Mad Dog" in the other. They both rolled a long way before stopping. "Mad Dog" walked over and kicked the bike. We thought he was dead for sure and just stood there with our mouths open. Then my world changed as dramatically as Mad Dog's should have. In the nowhere world of Ohio University, I discovered drugs to go along with sex and rock and roll. It was time to be a hippy. When I became aware of racing again there had been a sea change. There were professionals, foreign cars, and Rob Walker's writings on Formula One in Road and Track. To me there was an aesthetic element to the cars and romance in races with names like Monte Carlo and Spa. Nuvolari and Moss were of epic proportion. There is one photo of Jim Clark that says it all. Like he's face to face with death and not blinking; a hint of fear in his eyes.

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