He now lives in Birmingham, Alabama. It was Kloet’s friendship with AMC factory racer Bobby Allison that got him there. “When we had the gas crunch (in the 1970s), the AMC racing team was dissolved. I got a job as a photographic crash engineer in Burlington, Wisconsin, and one day when we were getting ready to crash some cars, and I got a call from my old friend Bobby Allison, and he asked what the weather was like, and I said it’s minus 45 degrees, and he said, ‘Well, it’s like 70 degrees here in Birmingham.’ That was it. Soon afterwards, I got transferred,”
Here’s a good shot of the Alliance in E Front/Stock Automatic trim, with Dennis in the background.
When the Renault/AMC deal came along, Kloet had been drag racing since he’d gotten his drivers license, starting in a ’53 Ford flathead with Offy intake with two Stomberg carburetors and high compression heads. Then in the 1960s, AMC wanted to go racing against the Chryslers and Chevys and Pontiacs, and they put Kloet in charge of the racing teams. He started racing in a ’67 Rebel, “which was before the good performance stuff started. I didn’t do anything in that car, then I put my efforts into brackets, and ended up in Super Stockers,” he says. “I had numerous class wins and set national records. I ran a Super Stock/E Automatic Concorde with a 360 engine. In between, I was helping Booth and Arons and Maskins and Kanners with their efforts. AMC gave me the cars, and with them, I won several Division 3 races.”
Then came the “Z” car. When AMC started making the Renault Alliance, it was a front-wheel-driver, one of the first introduced in America; the time was in the early 1970s. Kloet made a bet with the French that they could make this thing go fast. Fact is, they told him, “Make it fly.” Fat chance. The Alliance, built in Kenosha, sported an 84 cubic-inch engine rated at 54 hp, “a real turd,” Kloet admitted. “I was racing my (AMC) Concorde in Super Stock/E Automatic at the time, so I was ruined at going fast. They said, “Go at it.’”
One of the deals with the Kloet Renault was the displays at local dealerships near national or divisional races. Again, car is in the E Front/Stock Automatic class.
First pass on the new car, at Union Grove, Wisconsin, it turned 25 seconds. Don’t ask Dennis the mph or whatever; he is ashamed to give it. After working on the thing, though, he debuted it at Indy and promptly won class. NHRA National Dragster editor Phil Burgess and the late photog Leslie Lovett actually came by Dennis’s pit area and “confiscated” the car, taking it away and doing a big photo shoot and story on the car, it sitting firmly in the lowest class in all of drag racing. Kloet lost first or second round in the eliminator, but he and the car were on their way.
He set four or five national records by reducing the elapsed times little by little. By the time he was done, it was in the 17s. How did he do it? “A lot of cheating,” Kloet says with a laugh. “These were the first computer cars. I had all different toggle switches to do whatever. I had it all rigged up. We never told anybody, but before I ran, I’d take the front parking light out and let the air go right into the throttle body through a duct system. When I came back, I’d stop on the return road and plug the light back in. We changed camshafts, had headers, but the gear ratio was the biggest thing. I designed a ring and pinion for a 5.0 gear in the thing. I had slicks on the front once, but I never really did a burnout. It wouldn’t even smoke the tires.”
The Renault always won class. Heck, there was no one else in it. National records were 17.59 at 73.49 mph in the NHRA and 17.31 at 76.07 in the IHRA by its retirement.
