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The Prune Orchard Garage at Bonneville

Discussion in 'The Hokey Ass Message Board' started by av8, Feb 1, 2004.

  1. av8
    Joined: Mar 3, 2001
    Posts: 1,716

    av8
    Member

    There have been two more Speed Weeks since I wrote this piece. The situation has gotten better but it's only now that the Tardel-Binggeli-McKenzie team feels they finally have a handle on the last of the problems that have plagued their record attempts. I'm hoping to write a super-positive post-script after Speed Week '04.

    _________________________________________

    THE PRUNE ORCHARD GARAGE AT BONNEVILLE

    " . . . going as fast as you can without hitting anything or getting a ticket."


    It's been nearly eight years since I first wrote about Vern Tardel and his wonderful prune orchard garage. We'd met a year earlier, when I moved to Santa Rosa in northern California. Before committing Vern or his work to a magazine feature story, I had enjoyed frequent Saturday visits to his shop, just a few miles up Old Redwood Highway, on the edge of the little town of Windsor. Each visit was a trip back in time for me, to when hot rods were spare and clever and full of ingenuity and energy. It was the time in which I'd come to embrace gearheadedness, cherished then for salving adolescent angst and cherished now for its many bright memories. It's a time which also suits Vern Tardel very well.

    Vern Tardel's hot-rod roots extend back to the late '50's, when some of the original flatmotor energy lingered on in the face of the growing domination of the overhead-valve motors on the street as well as on the track and dragstrip. Ed Binggeli, one of the more persistent and successful flathead motor builders of the post-war era, was largely responsible for imbuing Vern with a love and understanding of the old motors. Their long-time association and friendship began when a teenage Vern haunted Bing's Speed Shop in Santa Rosa to paw through all the great speed equipment catalogs Ed had on hand, and watch and ask questions about the work that went on there.

    In spite of some experimentation with overheads in his teens, Vern opted early on to pursue the mysteries of the Fords and Mercurys that had started it all for him. There was still much to learn about the L-heads, in spite of all that had been done to them in the '40s and '50s. Over the years he's learned his lessons well, making old Fords his life's work in the process, collecting parts along the way, at times entire dealership inventories of early hardware that he's used as trade material with other old-Forders, or to restore '30s-era cars to perfection, and in the last couple of decades to create period-perfect post-war hot rods from scratch.

    Immersed as Vern has been in the old Henry hardware, the appeal of Bonneville and land-speed-record racing was inevitable. When the hot rods first rolled onto the salt in 1949, Ford and Mercury flathead V8s dominated both the entry list and the record book, a condition that would continue for a half-dozen years while the overheads increasingly whittled away at the old-Ford ranks. Nonetheless, the salt-racing heritage of the Ford L-head had been firmly established, legitimized for all time.

    Vern succumbed to salt fever on his first trip to Bonneville in 1966. He had been a SpeedWeek fan since his 'teen years. "I was astonished with the idea of going as fast as you can without running into something or getting a ticket!" He returned to Bonneville the following year, with a partner and a flathead-powered roadster. They ran 128 mph on a 134-mph record  thoroughly respectable for first timers. They returned the following year and nudged their speed up to 131  with the ante now raised to 140 mph.

    Encouraged, and on his own, Vern was back on the Salt in 1969 with an Ardun-Merc motor to try for the mark in the next faster class. On a shakedown first pass the roadster ran 125 before breaking an axle  the one spare he hadn't brought along. When a replacement axle arrived three days later rain was drenching the salt, ending the meet.

    The roadster languished for a while and was then sold as Vern limited his participation to crewing for friends at Bonneville until 1978 when he and old pal Billy Grainger bought the roadster back and went racing again on a shoestring  until even the cost of that approach became too great. Bill replaced the flathead with a Datsun six-cylinder Z motor and soldiered on at Bonneville while Vern became involved in the beginnings of nostalgia drag racing, sending his Bonneville malady into remission with pleasant memories in spite of not putting his name in the record book. "We had a great time, a lot of fun. But we fell short because we didn't have enough money for the trick parts."

    In the early '90s Vern's salt fever began to flare up with the advent of a new vintage category added to the SCTA/BNI rules, a category devised to encourage the return of affordable, production-based flatheads. With a couple of financial partners and a handful of talented friends Vern set about building a competent and very appealing salt racer, based on an early Nash Rambler convertible, set on a state-of-the-art chassis authored by his long-time pal, professional racecar builder Ron Fry.

    Dubbed Salt 'n Pepper for its flame-like chili-pepper paint scheme by another Tardel pal, graphics designer Mike Hawes, the round little Nash was motivated by a very desirable model 99T Ford truck block plucked from a World War II light, track-driven weapons carrier. Meticulously prepped by Vern and the veteran Bing, the motor was originally set up to run normally aspirated  injected  on alcohol, but a ruling on the Rambler's true model year scuttled that plan before the car left the shop. Although the Rambler had been sold and registered late in 1948 as a 1948 model it was technically a 1949 model, which ruled it out of running in a vintage class that is limited to 1948 and older bodies. Instead, it would have to run as a competition coupe where the record in its engine class was held by an extensively massaged, pointy-nose Datsun coupe  a far slipperier shape than the chubby little Rambler.

    Vern had no desire to return to Bonneville just to play catch-up again, so the engine program was altered to include a 6-71 supercharger beneath the injectors, allowing the coupe to run against an open record in the blown flathead fuel competition coupe class during SpeedWeek '93

    SpeedWeek '93, and SpeedWeek '94 for that matter, left blank pages in the record books thanks to especially heavy and prolonged rainy seasons two years in a row that left the then-frail salt surface in poor shape, much too wet and ungroomable for racing. Vern and friends had to content themselves with long trips to El Mirage from NorCal for what amounted to one run for each round-trip haul.

    All of the effort expended on Salt 'n Pepper was rewarded during SpeedWeek '95 when the Rambler put Vern's name in the record book on the second morning and then bumped it up twice more before the car was put on the trailer for the trip home at the end of the week. With a couple of down-course passes over 150, the final two-way average record stands today at 147.210 mph. Before plans got very far for SpeedWeek '96, Ron Fry succumbed to the cancer he'd been battling for better than a year. Vern opted to park the car, later selling it to a racer in Oregon.

    Once again Vern turned away from Bonneville as a racer, returning as a spectator in the company of other NorCal hot rodders in what quickly became a ritual August trek across California and Nevada in an interesting array of mostly flathead-powered traditional hot rods.

    It was on one of those treks, for the 50th anniversary of SpeedWeek in 1999, that the Salt bug bit hard and a new Bonneville car was on the drawing board in early Winter of that year. This one was largely the doing of Vern's son, Keith Tardel who, with his partner in the venture, Larry McKenzie, chose an open-record class  XF/BFMR  flathead Ford/Mercury blown fuel modified roadster. With an innovative chassis of Keith's design, the '27 T roadster  not quite crotch-high  is as slippery as it is competent. Larry, who has handled the driving chores thus far, pronounced the car comfortable and calm right from the start.

    In its first time out, SpeedWeek '00, the new car and driver were both under the gun during licensing in which several passes of increasingly greater speed allow the stewards to assess the suitability and safety of the car and the driver. This had been factored into the mix beforehand and most of the first-year effort was expended on the car, with the motor put together from a mix of new parts and the pool of old race car pieces in the shop. The flathead's purpose was principally that of a test-mule powerplant to prove the chassis.

    The chassis performed faultlessly during licensing, but the veteran race-block showed unmistakable signs of its long, excitable history when, after setting an acceptable qualifying speed, it went into impound in preparation for a record run. The decision was made to go for the gold in spite of evidence of water in the crankcase during the routine oil change between runs.

    Still limited to no more than 150 mph during the licensing segment, Larry spooled the car up to speed effortlessly in the 1/4-mile trap at the beginning of the timed mile. Scarcely had the timing steward reported Larry's speed on the course radio when something went very wrong, with a calamitous bang followed by the protracted crunching of tires rolling on the salt surface, the chattering rattle of Dzus'd panels, and the whine of a rearend no longer under power  the car under control but disturbingly quiet under the hood. Larry coasted through the full timing trap, recording a return pass that would be averaged with the previous 125-mph licensing pass to net a new record of  78.769 mph. Not quite what the guys had in mind, but not all that bad for a tired mule motor in a fresh car that had actually run about double that speed during a couple of three controlled-speed licensing passes.

    The post-mortem on the engine, back home in the shop, pointed to either a connecting rod failure or a collapsed cylinder. The damage to the block  which was windowed on both sides  and the connecting rod and piston was so extensive it was virtually impossible to pinpoint the beginning of the failure event. Miraculously, the beautifully carved and polished Ed Binggeli stroker crankshaft survived unscathed, to be set aside for a future project. One of the Binggeli-fettled Navarro high-dome cylinder heads was not so fortunate, dinged and dimpled so badly as to render it unsound for future use.

    With the new Tardel/McKenzie roadster proven raceworthy, attention for SpeedWeek '01 was turned to a new engine program. The foundation was a pristine, standard-bore 1939 Mercury 99A block, fitted with a lightened and polished, new 4-inch French crankshaft that was given an additional 1/8-inch stroke. Oliver forged connecting rods and Ross pistons added a special measure of confidence in the strength of the rotating and reciprocating pieces, all precisely balanced. A custom-ground camshaft from Bruce Crower, and countless hours of hand work on the ports, the valves and seats, and the combustion chambers on a set of new Barron heads all held great promise. Topped with a 6-71 Littlefield blower and a shotgun injector, it looked to be a can't-miss powerplant. The fates had other ideas.

    On its first record-qualifying pass of SpeedWeek '01, Larry McKenzie reported that the car accelerated strongly as it approached the first timing trap and then began to "lay down." It did the same thing on the record pass that followed, although everything appeared to be okay during the inspection and service that followed the first pass. While the exhaust-gas temperature remained in a safe range, the engine coolant temperature rose dramatically. When crewman Terry Griffith pulled the right cylinder head after the record run, for certification by the stewards, he discovered cracks, from valve-seat to cylinder, in three holes. The consequences of continuing to run the car with the damaged deck were discussed at length, and in the end it was decided that the risk to crankshaft, connecting rods, camshaft, and the car itself was too great to chance any more passes. Also, the overheating problem required some careful thought and corrections; continuing to run otherwise made no sense.

    A new record, bumped up to a more-respectable but still-vulnerable 131.205 mph fell to a 151.282 mph assault by Dave Thomssen the day after the Tardel/McKenzie team returned home to Santa Rosa. The news, received as the crew dismantled and cleaned the car and tended to support vehicles and equipment, already planning corrections for SpeedWeek 2002, briefly cast a shadow over what had been a pleasant and spirited exchange of ideas and resolve for "next year" as the guys went about their assigned tasks.

    By lunchtime, the energy was back up and it was agreed that the core participants would meet the next day to develop a firm plan aimed at eliminating potential problem areas from the effort just ended. SpeedWeek '01 was in the book and it had been a great one, even if the new record lasted little more than 24 hours. It was time to enjoy that special promise that Bonneville holds for racers, a special and enduring truth that makes land-speed-record racing such a compelling undertaking. It's hope, and it's often expressed the same way: There's always next year.
     
  2. NoSurf
    Joined: Jul 26, 2002
    Posts: 4,461

    NoSurf
    Member

  3. Levis Classic
    Joined: Oct 7, 2003
    Posts: 4,066

    Levis Classic
    Member

    Great Story - What do ya think she'll do this year?
     
  4. Digger_Dave
    Joined: Apr 10, 2001
    Posts: 2,517

    Digger_Dave
    Member Emeritus

    Mike, great piece of history!

    I'm curious though; what does #61630 mean?

    Not to be picky, but wasn't the 50th anniversary in 1998?
     

  5. phat rat
    Joined: Mar 18, 2001
    Posts: 4,920

    phat rat
    Member

    Thanks for a great read Mike. Was very interesting.
     
  6. av8
    Joined: Mar 3, 2001
    Posts: 1,716

    av8
    Member

    Damn, Dave! Right you are. Not such a good piece of history after all, is it? Well, most of it was correct.
     
  7. av8
    Joined: Mar 3, 2001
    Posts: 1,716

    av8
    Member

    Levi -- The guys feel that there's 175 in it, thanks in great part to how slippery Keith built it. The underside of this roadster is absolutely smooth, nothing there to create turbulent drag. McKenzie has said all along that the car just hunkers down and goes, no wheel-spin once it's up in the range.
     
  8. Digger_Dave
    Joined: Apr 10, 2001
    Posts: 2,517

    Digger_Dave
    Member Emeritus

    [ QUOTE ]
    . Not such a good piece of history after all, is it?

    [/ QUOTE ]

    No, no, Mike; it's a damm good piece of history! And other than your slight memory glitch, (which you are forgiven for!!) I enjoyed learning more about the Tardel - McKenzie LSR history.

    I was there for the 50th Reunion in '98 and I just happened to spot the "tiny wee" little mistake.

    Now; what the heck does the #61630 mean?? It shows up in a number of places.
     
  9. .........and 61630?
     
  10. av8
    Joined: Mar 3, 2001
    Posts: 1,716

    av8
    Member

    Sorry about that. It's a formatting glitch resulting from the transfer of a Word Doc to the HAMB. It represents an em-dash, one of my favorite writing tools -- like this.

     
  11. Spike!
    Joined: Nov 22, 2001
    Posts: 2,733

    Spike!
    Member

    Very cool indeed. Thanks!

    Spike
     
  12. Digger_Dave
    Joined: Apr 10, 2001
    Posts: 2,517

    Digger_Dave
    Member Emeritus

    Mike, now it's PERFECT!
    I "cut & pasted" your document back into Word, inserted the --'s and it's GREAT!!

    Thanks for sharing!
    (now, back to work! ) [​IMG] [​IMG] [​IMG]
     
  13. Great story MNike.

    How is Kent Fuller's car coming along?
     
  14. laverda
    Joined: Feb 18, 2003
    Posts: 292

    laverda
    Member

    Great story. Thanks. I always wondered about that chubby chili car [​IMG]

    later,
    papa al
     
  15. 296 V8
    Joined: Sep 17, 2003
    Posts: 4,666

    296 V8
    BANNED
    from Nor~Cal

    Thanks for the great story Mike and id also like to thank you for the signed book of yours I purchased from Mr Tardel at Turlock. I have very much enjoyed it.Greg
     
  16. av8
    Joined: Mar 3, 2001
    Posts: 1,716

    av8
    Member

    Greg -- Use the book wisely. Excessive application of the methods described could jeopardize the college funds for educating your offspring, to say nothing of their inheritance. [​IMG]
     

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