Being such wise cats, we screwed around and did nothing. We just had to wait for “natural causes.” A few weeks later, I blew up the “good” motor at an outlaw track in west Jersey called Harmony. We still had the automatic in the car, but the engine didn’t make enough torque to pull it off the line like it should, regardless of its 5.14:1 final drive, so a clutch transmission was inevitable. Because the linkage operated erratically, I’d shifted from Low to High at eight grand, and like a dope I pulled it back into 2nd. The tach went to the moon, things got real noisy for a second, a rod poked a hole in the oil pan, and smoke came out of everywhere. The motor was still running when I slid to an oily halt. That was last time we tried racing with the Hydro-Stick. All we were able to salvage were the Hilborns and the cylinder heads; the rest was chipped, flat, burned, or broken.
Dirt, John and I swapped in a close-ratio four-speed but the engine set-back had rearranged all the control points to the point of major fabrication. To get around the mechanical linkage, we adapted a hydraulic clutch system that was inconsistent at best and more often than not wouldn’t allow the clutch to engage properly (eventually we discovered that the master and the slave had to match). The flywheel was a Gotha billet that was so thick it looked like something off a diesel. It began life as a 60-pounder. That the clutch slipped constantly had us getting the flywheel and pressure plate resurfaced on a weekly basis. At the end, the Gotha probably weighed fifty pounds.
With the manual shifter removed towards the rear of the car via the 11-inch engine set-back, the physical dynamics changed. You weren’t pulling the stick so much as pushing it from your side. Awkward. We reversed the stick so that the curved part faced towards the front of the car. It had stability issues that we tried to amend with bracing. It didn’t work. It looked like clutter from Hell.
We were also about to undo some of Tom’s more creative construction. We put some 12.00x16 Goodyears on the full-floating axles. While this piece looked Gargantuan, it had a marginal ring gear and axle shafts that made a toothpick look hefty. This was also the day of the flat tow. Extract eight Allen head bolts (per axle), pull the shaft, put on the scab tires, and do Freewheelin’ Frank all the way to Alaska if need be. That was the only good thing about the floater. With the four-speed workin’ and the big Goodyears hooking, I managed to separate three of the four Heim ends from the four-bar suspension in the staging lanes at Englishtown. Obviously, the car never had to work hard with the automatic.
Our idiot vignettes were endless.
Maybe the squids were even learning. One day at Island Dragway under a clear blue sky and an incendiary sun, we were never able to fire the motor. Sunoco 260 was literally pouring from the spark plug holes. We washed the rings out, all because we were stupidly afraid to admit our ignorance and ask somebody what to do. The Vertex has a hot tail that comes out of the magneto body and fits into a (the only) hole in the distributor cap. The hot lead is what gets the spark to the cap. Try puttin’ your tongue on that one when the engine is being cranked. Dumb and Dumber had missed the sleeve in the cap we put it back on, so the mag wouldn’t have spit flame even with divine intervention. This was something we discovered during our weekly Repair & Replace sessions. One of those deals made you feel absolutely brilliant.
How about this? It’s hot as a mother. We’re coming back from Englishtown with The Mule tailing my ’57 wagon (the one with the engine built so tight we had to drag it with a chain and dump the clutch with the tranny in gear to get the thing to turn over—at first, the back wheels locked and dragged). Anyway, you remember how the mechanical fuel pump would go into vapor lock when the engine got hot? Basically the car won’t go very fast, if at all, much less tow a load. We had a pressurized fuel tank (aroused by a bicycle pump) in the trunk of the race car, so we ran some rubber hose from the racer to the fuel pump
e bypass we’d rigged up and pumped air into the wagon’s system, boosting it enough to finish the tow home.
We were nothing if not petulant…dogs. That things didn’t work the way we thought they should have began to burrow beneath our level of tolerance. We did more fixing than racing. We did a lot more bitching, moaning, and arguing than being thankful for even having the wherewithal to do a gig like that. Three years of The Mule encapsulated a period of transition in my life, at least. It stood for everything I wanted but couldn’t summon the nerve to follow through. It was easier just to stay in bed every Sunday morning. It stood for the vagaries of the real world, not the self-centered, egotistical cocoon that I inhabited. The Mule was a test of patience, humility, and responsibility. It meant public embarrassment nearly every weekend, punctuated by periods of temporary insanity. I wanted to torch the bitch.
Along about then, I figured out it would be a hell of lot more fun to write about drag racers instead of trying to be one. All the money that went into the car was like we’d thrown it into a furnace. There was nothing to show. About two years into it, I’d gone through more than $15,000 (1966 dollars) of basically someone else’s jing and a few bucks from Stevo. I’d decided that the car sucked way too much time from everyday life and gave back mostly a duodenal ulcer, late hours, and a hot-headed Sicilian girlfriend who wouldn’t let me touch her “with those greasy hands!” Ha! The sound of the motor when I dropped the clutch at 7,500rpm just wasn’t enough anymore. And the money was an absolute. Absolutely gone! Once again that odd but somehow sensible notion ricocheted around my brainpan: Boy, I’d much rather write about this stuff instead of having to live with it.
Dirt, hands bloodied and heart full of angst, was ready to cash out, too. We sold the operation (for what, $5 bucks?) to Anzelmo. He was already hooked up with the right guys in the New York metro area Modified Eliminator Mafia and one of his pals was “Coney Island Ralph” Landolfi, a Gasser champ from Brooklyn. They talked.
Before he swapped in one of Ralph’s 287-inch wingers, John hung an Olds rear end with 5.86s (easier to change chunks with the Hotchkiss-type Olds than the Salisbury GM). He made some brutal mechanical linkage to counter the mismatched hydraulics and cured the smoking clutch. Ran 11.80s and held the NHRA F/Gas record for a few months. That alone was worth all the crap the car put us through.
When I see a ’55 210 today, I realize that I’m inextricably connected to it, the memories of it, like the first complications a young man has with the female sex. 
 |
|||||
|
|||||
 |
Dale Wilson's People
