Rebel

I'm starting my new job as a professor today and had to do all the usual prep work. Like the syllabus.

One of the classes I have is an engine design course. Which includes a list of required texts and "supplemental" ones. I couldn't help myself. Put my old boyhood hero Smokey Yunick's book "Power Secrets" in there. :o

I'm well on my way to becoming a real rebel in a distinctly nerdy way.

Will

Best of luck! Hopefuly, being around all those kids will keep you young.

Are you wearing a turtle neck, a sports jacket, and smoking a pipe yet?

Watch out for coeds!

BKb

I'm thinking a tweed jacket with those elbow patches is the only way to go.

A tweed jacket? Lord have mercy I'd look like a goon in one of those. How about one of those Carhartt straight hem work shirts? :p

I do have on my lucky shoes. Bought those when I went to work at Cat 20 years ago. Red Wing foreman shoes. How's that for hillbilly?

Will

Wow Penguin! Congrats! Ummmm, do you have to swear you're a Liberal to get a University position these days? ;)

BTW, I won't bore 99% of the dufes around this joint with a Thump post, but I spent many, MANY hours (including long nights) in Smokey's "Best Damn Garage in Town"! (it burned down 5-6 years ago). A LOT of history there. I really miss those days and wish I'd been old enough to really appreciate the things (and conversations) I witnessed. Ol' Smokey was a real character ... one of the nicest guys you could ever know ... one of the grumpiest guys you could ever know ... and BOY could he drink! ;)

We were running late-model roundy-round cars on Friday and Saturday nights ... '56 and '57 Fords. My dad was also racing a (Paxton) blown '57 Ford (312 cid) drag racer on Sundays when Smokey was "with" Ford. At that time nobody in the field really knew much about superchargers, but dad filled the house with trophies in those days. He ran the stock class since the Paxton Blower was an option on the '57 T-birds. In the early 60's, dad became the Service Manager at the local Pontiac dealer in Orlando. Ha! It just so happens, Smokey had left Ford and hooked up with Pontiac around that time. I can remember Fireball Roberts sitting in our living room one afternoon and dad mentioned running over to Daytona to Smokey's garage. I can STILL hear those magic words like it was just yesterday ... "Jimmy! You wanna run over to Smokey's with us?" I think I beat dad and Glen out the door! Dad later talked the dealer into sponsoring a Pontiac for the NASCAR races and it was quite the neighborhood draw as it was many times on the trailer in our driveway before heading out for the next race.

A guy named Dick Joslin and Fireball were very close friends and Dick was Fireball's best man at his wedding. Dick was also a very close friend of my dad's, so a lot of time was spent around them when I was a kid. Here's a pic of the first car of Dick's that I remember as a kid. (he went on to run NASCAR races, including the old beach course before the speedway was built) Again, the Ford 312 came into play, but this one was injected instead of blown. That Central Florida Speed Parts was my dad's shop ... the first speed shop in Orlando. The image there was called "Lil Pogo" (not sure why, Pogo was a 'possum' while Albert was the alligator). To get his opening inventory, Dad and Dick drove out to Southern California to buy speed parts. I remember Dad put a new set of tires on his Ford F-100 to make the trip. Then they had to put ANOTHER new set of tires on the truck to make it back home! I LOVED hearing their stories about that trip ... especially the one about Dick hanging out the window shooting jack rabbits with a pistol! Note: That's me feeling the temp of the RR tire after the car came into the pits after a practice run)


Attachment 9266


Does any of this stuff sound like it may be Smokey Yunick influenced? (caption for the pic)

Joslin ran this neat '37 Ford coupe on both pavement and dirt in the late 50s. Built by Roy Jones,
long time car builder for Fireball Roberts, the car featured a 312 cubic inch fuel injected
Y-block Ford engine and offset driveline. The engine was set well back in the frame and the
body was moved aft as well.

But back to Smokey ... he was a true genius ... a self taught genius, and his biggest advantage was thinking "outside the box". I remember him telling my dad once (and I've read this many times since), that the best tool in the garage was the NASCAR rule book. Learn ALL the rules, because you can't break the rules in the book, but in his opinion, you can do any damn thing you want that's NOT in the book! And he was the best in the world for "innovation". :D

Maybe best for stock car innovation. His forays at Indy didn't work so well for him though.


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Oh boy ... I think I hear one'a those "Debbie-Downer", milk drinkin' Indy boys makin' noise. ;)

Hey, the side-car was a cool idea but it just didn't work.


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The whole point is, he tried something new. He also had no sponsor other than himself and even you'll have to admit, you'll never win against the millions of $$$ the Indy teams have thrown at them. He grew to HATE NASCAR and had many battles with the France clan ... for the exact reasons they're losing fans today. The NASCAR rule book looks like a Los Angeles phone book! One of the main draws to Indy for him, was the fact the Indy rule book was just a few pages at that time. He didn't feel so limited when it came to trying new ideas. I think he only played around with Indy for a very short time (3 years??). Back at NASCAR, he told both Bill Frances to kiss his ass and never looked back. He hated seeing racing become so regulated and once said if he were running the NASCAR organization, he'd have no rules! The winner would be the most talented and innovative in his opinion. That's not persactly what he said, but that's about what it boiled down to. I'll see if I can dig up a quote somewhere on Al Gore's ol' Internet thingy.

Here's a blurb I found that pretty much sums up his "run what ya' brung" approach to racing.

What made him bail out of NASCAR by the 1970s was his disgust with Bill France Sr.'s insistence on policing -- stifling, in Smokey's view -- technology.

Had Smokey run automobile racing, he would have had only one rule: "All right you sonsabitches, let's have a race." :thumbsup

Good stuff jimmie. I would have loved to meet the guy but I was just a sprout when he was getting out of the sport. The reason I listed him as an extra reference was simply that so many times young engineers have a horrid time with innovation or running up against a new situation. You can't really teach someone how to be innovative I suppose. BUT the old Power Secrets book shows the mindset of one of NASCAR's greatest mechanics.

I myself have gotten much more cautious as time has went by. I'm not sure whether it is reluctance to look foolish? The product of getting burned when you guess wrong? I don't know.

But I know the first time I saw the inside of a transmission. Had a vibration. Had a day to waste. Took out the transmission, looked it over, found a bad output shaft bearing. Took it to a buddy, pushed a new one in. Voila, almost new transmission. Sometimes you can freeze up and the best thing to do is yell 'Damn the torpedoes!' and give her the gas. :p

Will

Actually Willy, I wish I'd been older so that I could have appreciated it more. I "knew" practically all of the old racers, but they were "old" men and I was a kid. I loved hanging around the garage and going to the races, I just wasn't old enough to really absorb all that was going on. I do remember Smokey laughing his ass off as he told my dad about ... Hot Rod Magazine (?) coming in the shop to interview him for a story. They noticed a Chevelle (I think it was) that he was working on at the time and the writer noticed little holes (maybe 1/8"?) in the headers close to the exhaust ports on the heads. They thought they'd discovered one of Smokey's power secrets and as the word spread (I believe the magazine even published the "secret" in their article), EVERYONE started drilling holes in their headers! He was about to bust a gut as he told my dad they were just openings for thermo-couples so he could take temp readings to see how even his fuel distribution was! :D

As for innovation ... like Deppity's comment above, who cares? Smokey just used Indy's lack of rules to experiment with ... something that he had a hard time doing with NASCAR. I think of Edison trying to make a storage battery when I think of Smokey.

Edison's battery experiments involved over 10,000 experiments with different chemicals and materials to develop his alkaline storage battery. He never tried anywhere near that many materials in his inventive work on the light bulb. The authorized biography by Frank Dyer and T. C. Martin, Edison: His Life and Inventions (the first edition of the book is 1910), quotes Edison's friend and associate Walter S. Mallory about these experiments:

"This [the research] had been going on more than five months, seven days a week, when I was called down to the laboratory to see him [Edison]. I found him at a bench about three feet wide and twelve feet long, on which there were hundreds of little test cells that had been made up by his corps of chemists and experimenters. I then learned that he had thus made over nine thousand experiments in trying to devise this new type of storage battery, but had not produced a single thing that promised to solve the question. In view of this immense amount of thought and labor, my sympathy got the better of my judgment, and I said: 'Isn't it a shame that with the tremendous amount of work you have done you haven't been able to get any results?' Edison turned on me like a flash, and with a smile replied: 'Results! Why, man, I have gotten lots of results! I know several thousand things that won't work!'"

You must have F1 and Indycar confused. Indycar teams don't have anywhere near the funding that NASCAR teams have now. In the '80's and early '90's that would have been true, but now, a fully funded full-season Indycar program is about 6 million. That's a fraction of a NASCAR budget.

Here's a neat story about one of those "prissy, wine and cheese" Indycar drivers, who by the way, happens to be French.

http://autoweek.com/article/indycar/...eturn-race-car

Ha ha! I can imagine your confusion. I use "Indycar" as a generic term for open-wheeled racers. Kinda like "NASCAR" ... they have a bazillion different classes and racing series'.

I ain't bone-pickin' here ... I just admire Smokey's "colorful" history and innovative skills. Plus the fact I spent some of my formative years in his shop brings back fond memories. That's all.

:poke

If you don't have a stool, I can loan you one. ;)

Congrats and good luck to you Penguin.