Need your guys help .I,m getting ready to build a 50's dirt track car, I have a 1941 Pontiac 5 window coupe. I want to put in a 50-52 Cadilliac 331 V-8. What do I use for bellhousing,flywheel,clutch,transmission ? I want it to be period correct.Thanks Denny
A true 50s dirt track car would have had any transmission the guy could get his hands on. Anything available up to the time period your looking for would be acceptable. It truly was a time of innovation, the only guys being copied were the guys that were running away with the wins every week, but most racers thought they had a better way of doing things. If someone was winning every week, most thought it was because of the driver, not anything to do with the car. Gene
A true '50s dirt track car wouldn't be a '41 Pontiac to start with. Too big. I'm not going to say never, because a lot of guys tried a lot of things, but before you ruin the car, have a look at some photos. There's plenty of real dirt track cars out there you can build if you look a little, too. Frankly for drivetrain a small block Chevy dressed to look like a 265 or 283 would be perfectly acceptable; I have a '39 Chevy coupe here that was a real stock car and that was what it ran when built, it still has the '55-'57 three speed trans in it. The majority of cars ran flathead Fords until the Chevy came out and those took over - they were cheap, easy to hop up, and easy to come by. Guys with more money built the craizier stuff. As for the Cad, you're limited in choices anyways, there's only one manual bellhousing that bolts on, if you can find one, and it takes the GM 6-bolt (top cover) three speed trans, either the later side-shift version or the earlier one with the top shifter. Nothing that's super easy to find; I had two of those transmissions, the open drive sold in a week for $300, the closed drive a guy overseas needed bad enough he paid me $500 plus $250 more to take it to a shipper five hours away. Whereas if you do the early Chevy clone you can run a $100 Muncie 3-speed and be done with it, or if you're not going to beat on it too hard a T5 will do the job.
At least around here, in the early '50s the dirt track stock cars had to be "stock". That's why so many Fords were cut up for that - those v8s revved up good! They stripped out the interior, took off the fenders, welded up roll bars and crash bars, etc. but the engine was supposed to be stock. Of course there was plenty of cheating on the engine, but it had to be the right type. There were 6 cylinder cars and straight 8s in there, but the Fords were usually in the front. A 41 Pontiac coupe would have been a likely candidate - they just went to the junkyard and found something to race.
Hop-up parts for Pontiac are few and far between; the engines were low-revving inlines and didn't have a lot of power, so they'd be an unlikely candidate unless someone was broke and had a worn-out one in the yard they hadn't junked. It could depend on the track, too, a small, slick track where it's hard to get lots of power down, a lower powered car might be able to keep up. A big track or a paved track, not so much. But I've seen some goofy stuff, a yard that had a batch of Accord (NY) cars had one '54 Plymouth 4-door that still had the flathead six in it, that had been a stock car for a while. You might see that stuff in a bomber class, I suppose. That said, every other car out of there was a Chevy or Ford of some sort with exception of a '68 Dart GT.
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