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“It was rough, very rough, beat up and rusty,” Wood recalls. “So I told him that if we were to build this car I wouldn’t want to just fix it up; I suggested we take it to someone to build a tube chassis, take the sub-frame off and restore it. I have a very large shop and wanted to keep every last piece so that if we wanted to we could put this car back together as the two-door post that it was. I told him I’d build it, I’d pay for that part of it, he’d drive it, and if he ever wanted the car back, I’d give him all the parts and he’d just have to pay to have it put back together again.”
When completed, Taylor drove the car in Super Chevy’s top-dog Nitro Coupe class with 20 to 30 percent nitro in the tank. Despite retaining an all-stock body, the car ran more than 200 mph and for a time was recognized as the fastest all-steel ’57 in drag racing.
Still, “it did okay, but just okay,” Wood admits. “I’m not knocking the guy who built the tube chassis, but it was just not enough for the class. He did a great job, but it just wasn’t to the level of a Nitro Coupe. It couldn’t handle the torque that was being produced; it did a lot of twisting and turning. What we really had was a good 10.5 car, when 10.5 racing wasn’t even around yet.”
By the end of 1999, Taylor also realized driving the car was more than he anticipated and suggested Wood buy him out. A deal was reached, but Wood says he never put it back in competition, preferring instead to install a big-block Chevy and three-speed Lenco for easier drivability. “I’d go out sometimes and pull the gears,” he says. “It was a great car, built to go 200 miles an hour, so I felt very safe in it and it was just a pleasure to drive. And then Outlaw 10.5 comes along and I started looking around because I wanted to get involved in it. So Troy and I were talking and he said, ‘You’ve already got a great 10.5 car; it’s sitting right over there,’ and he pointed to the ’57.”
So Wood sent the car to a chassis builder last summer to determine what it would take to convert it to an Outlaw 10.5 ride. Essentially, the cage was already Outlaw 10.5 compliant, so reinstalling the stock firewall and returning the front clip to its stock configuration was all the car really required.
“Everything from the firewall forward is original to the car,” Wood proudly states. “I mean, we kept everything from the first time we built it. Those are the original frame rails, the original lights, the original dash; everything is what it came from the factory with. It’s even got all the original chrome, including the rear bumper. In fact, when we ran the car in Super Chevy, my job was to pick up the chrome pieces off the track. We would lose something nearly every time we made a pass, so I was out there picking up the trim and bringing it back to the pits. There was just one piece that we had to replace, but other than that it’s all there from the factory.”
The car now sports a fiberglass hood and front fenders, doors and rear decklid, but still weighs in at a hefty 3,170 pounds. “It’s probably not the racecar of choice for aerodynamics and weight and everything else,” Wilson concedes, “but it’s got that certain cool factor going for it.” Still, conventional wisdom suggests racing such a heavyweight in a no-minimum class would be a losing proposition, but Wood insists the big, black Bel Air will go rounds this year.
“We know we’re going to sacrifice some of the opportunities we have under the rules of Extreme 10.5 racing, but drag racing is two parts: qualifying and racing,” he says. “I think we can always get to where we can qualify; then it’s race time and you still have to deal with all the beating a car takes in qualifying and get through eliminations.”
A couple of weeks before his Houston debut, Wilson managed to make eight practice runs in the car at Valdosta, GA, including his first-ever hit in a blown, alcohol-fueled machine that he now describes as somewhat deceiving.
“When it first left I thought, ‘You pig,’ because it felt sluggish, but about the time that thought went through my mind it pinned me back and it was gone,” he recalls. “It really kind of shocked me. I mean, it 60-footed real slow at 1.22 or something, and my Camaro had been 1.25 so it wasn’t any big deal, but after 60 feet it was a whole different ball game. I was thinking, ‘Oh my God, this thing is moving!
“They had told me to just launch the car, go 60 feet and if it doesn’t feel good just back it up and launch again. I had sat in the shop and gone through the motions just to get used to where everything is, so I went up there, the car left, I pushed second gear and it was going good, I pushed third and about that time I thought, ‘They’re going to kill me, I was just supposed to launch the car,’ so I let out of it and it coasted through at 5.04 and 130, which was the quickest I’d ever gone at that point. So I came back and they said, ‘Well you did alright there, so just run it.’”