The Jalopy Journal

I grew up in Midland, TX. To most, Midland is the place where Jessica fell down “the well” or maybe just the “oil town.” BUT to me, Midland will forever be a car town. As a kid, I spent a lot of time at Rattlesnake Raceway watching my heroes of the Chaparral Race Team conquer one [...]

Alright fellas… I’m headed for the knife tomorrow and they tell me I won’t feel like doing much of anything for a week or so. While I can’t imagine not writing for an entire week, I definately will be playing hooky from my other duties: shipping merchandise, stamping Alliance tags, answering emails, etc… So, be [...]

I spent the weekend in my hometown of Midland, TX. As I mentioned last week, the Mabee Special was opening at the Petroleum Museum and I was lucky enough to get an invite from my old crew chief and now museum curator, Ronnie Low. I had been sick all week and almost didn’t make the [...]

I grew up in Midland, TX. It’s a small west Texas town with a rich racing tradition. VDS racing, Jim Hall, Eddie Hill, the Mabees, John Paul Jr., and many other entities spent at least a little time in the land of Friday night lights. As such, it only made sense when the Petroleum Museum [...]

So as 2007 comes to a close, I thought it would be interesting to crunch some numbers and list the top 10 posts in the last year on the The Jalopy Journal. Essentially, I took the number of page views and the number of replies and figured their percentage of the user base after taking [...]

My first car was a 1955 Chevrolet hard top. I’ve mentioned this plenty of times before, but I don’t know that I have ever told the whole story. I was around 14 or 15 years old and already heavy into racing in all kinds of forms. As a lot of kids do, I would pick [...]

It didn’t take long after writing part 1 before I was contacted by the current owners and restorers of the Mabee Special. While I got the history of the car right, I missed some really important details about the car’s saviors – Jim and Lea Ann Robinson. As the owners and restorers of the very [...]

I was pretty young when my dad and I decided to get serious about drag racing. Through the years we campaigned a number of different cars with differing degrees of success. It was my personal golden era and a period I will never forget. Amazingly, some of the most memorable moments didn’t go down at [...]