I like Austins and Anglia's but they are outside the Hamb scope because they were not made in the US.
Found this picture of my car and another Willys in the shut down area at Bradenton. Unfortunately his son was killed in the red Willys the next summer at Jax raceway in Jacksonville.
My all-time favorite...and built in my area when I was a youngster. I often wondered whatever came of the car?
I forgot to add an interesting story (IMO) about the "Bad Jose" gasser. About 5 years ago (in the cold of winter) I am reading about an estate sale that is coming up in Elkhart, IN. The ad has the usual crap for a mid-winter auction...tires, shovels, tarps. blah blah. And then I notice an item that says Hilborn injected Chevrolet 305 engine on skid with other misc parts. So I decide to go to the place ahead of the auction to check it out. When I get there the auctioneer is there organizing and I ask him about the engine and he sends me to the owner of the stuff who is at the other end of the building. The owner tells me that when he came back from Vietnam in 1965 he and his brother bought a 55 Chevy gasser(not Bad Jose) just because they had always wanted one. He goes on to say they knew little about it and only ran it about three times and blew up the engine. Somehow they got sent to Competition Engineering and Jerry Marquart to see about another engine. Jerry sold them the engine that was in the auction and told them it was his spare engine for Bad Jose. They bought it but never used it. Things came up and they sold their gasser w/o an engine and kept the one on the skid all these years. I ended up buying it at the auction and took it all apart to see if it was what I thought it was and it was...a Hilborn injected 302 with 12 to 1 pistons, 2.02 #492 heads, all the good stuff of that era. I left it apart on purpose to sell it and sold it to someone on the HAMB for a gasser project. An additional "funny" part of this story is that when I was at the auction I saw a vintage Eelco fuel tank bunji-corded to the back of a fork-lift as a gas tank. I asked the owner if that would be off his old gasser and he said it was. The fuel pump had gone out years ago on his fork lift so he took the Eelco tank off his gasser and mounted it on the back of the forklift to gravity-feed the carb. I asked about buying it but he would not sell it because the forklift would not run without it but the forklift was in the auction. It ended up selling to an Amish fellow and I asked him about buying it. I offered him $75 for it. He said " Isn't that about the silliest gas tank set-up you have ever seen. If you can wait until I load it on my trailer I would sell it to you but $75 is way too much. How about $25?" So I left that auction with the engine and the gas tank! I even have a few pictures to verify the story. Ha!
Yes I have and I've seen it make a handfull of passes at the CHRR some years back. That is one 55 Chevy to be reckoned with!
Yea. I have seen the car run. Launches are violent and Greg is a master at forcing this monster down the track. It is a real deal gasser.
The Fugitive gasser was owned by a few police officers from Stamford Connecticut if my old memory is correct and I think Steve Devito was one of them. Interesting name they choose for their car! Jimbo
So many of the great photo's in this thread are of the gasser's that run with the Southern Gasser Association which Quain Stott started and this group has managed to bring back a wonderful era of drag racing which was just the way it was in the 60's. I really appreciate everything all of these guys have done to bring drag racing back to what many of us remember and loved! For me this is the REAL DEAL drag racing and I never thought that at 73 years old I would ever see this happen again! I tip my hat to all the members of the Southern Gassers Association that build a car and made this whole program work. Every event they run is worth every penny of the admission to go see one of their events. Just my opinion. Jimbo
Back in the late 50's and 60's I was infatuated with the Gas Class cars, and wanted one badly, even before I could drive! In 1968 I bought a '40 Chev coupe, and dropped a 413 with a torqueflite out of a 1959 Imperial into it. I thought it was really neat, and it was a fun car. I've always loved the late 30's '37-'39 Chevy coupes as gassers, but also loved the Austins and Anglias I watched run in the 60's. The idea of a small British sedan with a V8 in it was just about as good as it got for me. When I retired in 2010 I went looking for a retirement project car. I hoped to find a '48-'52 Austin A40, or an Anglia. Instead I stumbled across an earlier pre WWII era Austin A8. It was a rust free car, and the price was cheap, so it came home with me. A year later I finished my street legal Austin gasser. I was good then, until in 2019 at a local swap meet I stumbled across a '39 Chev coupe. It was extremely rusted, and rotted out, but the price was right. Next thing I knew we were shaking hands and I'd bought my other dream car gasser project. A couple years later it's finished, and I love it. It's getting thousands of miles racked up on the odometer, and enjoying the more spacious interior of the full sized coupe over my Austin.
Man, I thought this was gonna be an easy one.. wow, so many cool gassers.. My personal favorite is "Squirrels" (Jim Forbes) PLAN II Chevy 2. It's the real deal, then some, he kicks the shit out of it, and DRIVES IT, It's the perfect example of simplicity. points ignition, single master cylinder, home-made shifter, home-made headers, you name it, he built it. I mean he built EVERYTHING himself. probably some help from his son Steven, I've had the pleasure of hanging out with Jim on the last 7 HOT-ROD drag weeks. He is the real deal. no bullshit. He DROVE the thing from sierra vista ARI-FREAKING-ZONA, then did DRAG WEEK, and drove it home.. more than once !! ..talk about HARD-CORE !!
Never saw No Big Thing make a decent full 1/4mile pass. Its like watching a steel wheeled pregnant roller skate slide down a sidewalk. It’s still around. It lives in Valparaiso Indiana I believe and it still looked the same last I saw it.