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Brian,

This is a Walker car, Aaron had them build it, the torsion tubes were under the seat and the arms ran back to the shackle plates, Aaron ran this afew times and Grady Wade drove it also for Aaron, I also believe this is the first car that Larry Madden drove. Somewhere in this thread you have posted a pic of this car that has Larry's name on it. Jim would know alot about this car it was in the time he worked for Aaron. George bought this car and put the 6 cyl. in it and was pretty fast at OKC & Goldsby. I remember he won 2 or 3 A-Fea. in it during this time at OKC, I believe it worked real well on the dry slick.

Brian,

I thing the car in the back ground might have been Gary Cole's #35 it had rear cross torsion, of course somebody could have put rear cross torsion on the #01 also. Gary had a 6 cyl. modified that was blue frame with a light blue body and dark blue and yellow strips, it had a thin alum. full motor plate and when he ran it it had an Allison built Power Glide with open drive line. Had a schroder 6-1 manual steering.

Gary Cole. I'm sure it's at least a copy of a Walker, but not the real thing. Ours is NOT the Madden car if the torsion tubes ran that way.

Did someone turn out a lot of Walker copies back in the 70's? I keep running across a lot of them relatively speaking. Reason I ask is this tubing does not look like moly or DOM. More like pipe to me. Yet the welds look like someone spent a lot of time doing this type of work with a mig since they are more consistent than your average backyard builder.

Brian,

That is another reason I think it is possible Gary's car I remember it being built out of non-std. tubing. Also as you know a ton of people were building there own cars back then and alot of them looked like copies of Walkers. B&T built a few cars and did alot of repair work, the first few cars they built were alot like Walker cars and then they hit there own stride and had there own designs.

To All,

After the OKC fair races in '84 we won a couple more races and came down to OKC Winter Nationals & Devils Bowl W/N's. After Lawton a few more people had noticed that wing valve but it was not hooked to anything but the wing cylinder so Phil still wasn't after us to bad but he was getting alittle heat, at OKC we arrived late and parked over by the pit gate off turn 3. We didn't want to be around everybody else anyway so they wouldn't be bitch'in. We had just unloaded and Phil showed up and said I need you to start it up and work the valve and show me it doesn't control the wing, so we did and the wing didn't move so he was satisfied. It had been raining alot right before this race and the track was soft and heavy. We ran well in the Heat and started 5th in the A-Fea. man it was rough almost as bad as I had ever seen at OKC. Before the A-Fea. we were trying to figure out what we wanted, you were going to have to run more stagger then normal or figure out how to get the car to turn with less stagger, we had been playing with the wings alot besides the valve, We had this old alumn. wing that I had rebuilt and movedthe runners off center 3" so the wing was to the left more and had built new front stands that moved the wing about 6" further forward so thats what we put on. About everybody was on 15"-16" on that big old 1/2 mile, we went out on 12" afew guys were laughing at us and to be honest I don't think Shane and I really felt comfortable but we figured there would be alot of Reds so we could change it up. On the start we were a tad tight for a lap or 2 but when the air built up a little we were fast and started moving up some, about lap 12-15 they had a red and other then adding a splash of fuel and getting tear-off's that is all we did, we didn't even knock the mud off the front of the car as we didn't want to hurt the balance to much. It took about 3 laps after the restart to get the lead and then Shorty just started mowing them down, he was running through the holes and that car was like on rails about 1/2 way he lapped Stone who was still hurting from the Knoxville crash, I really did feel bad for him because the track was beating everybody up, I remember at lap 30 Pat showed me his lap counter God it felt like we had already had run 50 laps. The way Shane was running through the holes I knew something would break, you could tell with 10 to go only Ewell,MP & Shane were the only ones still running wide open hammer down, about 5-6 cares pulled out in the last 10 laps. Shane won by almost 3/4 of a lap and had lapped up to 3rd he had lapped Stone twice but Stoney didn't give up and he finished. After the race I was surprised how well the car looked there wasn't alot of mud hanging on it because hitting those holes knocked it off, ole Sonny Honey Bear only ran 190 degrees, we went thru engine tech no problem and on this day I think everybody was so tired they didn't bitch about the wing valve but during the week we got a call that said if we showed up at Dallas with the wing valve we would be protested and torn to the ground.

So we went to the bowl wing valve and all and that turned into a storm!!!!

My son told me about this site and I decided to look at the car in background. The reply was fairly accurate about my car except my cars had auto transmissions built by Gene Brown from Norman. Gene, along with Ken Hailey and Lee Martin owned the #54 modified that ran @ OKC and Lawton. Arley Anderson from Norman built an adapter to replace the torque converter. His early ones used the end of a Chevy crankshaft so as to bolt up to the motor and the rest was tubing with notches to engage tangs in transmission pump and drive gear with splines inside the adapter. He also ran lines outside from servo valve to ball valve. You could start the motor in gear and it would not move. You opened the valve and it was like releasing a clutch and the car moved. If this is my old car, the chassis was built by Phil Hancock of OKC. Phil drove the orange #12 modified

and built several frames for people. He worked for a mechanical engineering firm in OKC and was an excellent welder. The

material was not moly, but black pipe. Les Lusk of OKC also built several of these chassis's. There were not too many moly frames then on modifieds or supers. Some were better than others. I have picture of this car that I will post after I won a feature in Lawton. You might look at one of the recent postins about a site that somebody found that has pictures from OKC, Tulsa and Enid. Click on Tulsa and there are pictures of Emmit in the #52, Benny in the Suchy car, Darrel Brazeal and me in the #35. My picture was of me packing the track in the opposite direction. This was a qualifying day for NCRA on Memorial day weekend, Qualified in the day and raced @ night.

Any questions, you can email me @ [email protected]

Gary Cole

GRC35

GRC35,

Gary great of you to reply on this, I thought (key word thought) when I bought this car from you that Allison had built the trans, I remember you were fast in this car and it had a good engine, I didn't remember who built the frame but I do remember the welding was excellant and it was non-std tubing. Brian has posted some where some more pic's of this car that show it in more detail I believe if you were to look at them you could tell if it was your car or not, when I looked at them it sure reminded me of your car.

You have to have some good stories when you raced post up some we all would love to read them, I work with Jerry Havill #6 modified at alot of the NASCAR races but I can't get the old fart to post on here, guys like you, Havill, Wilson were some of my hero's back then post us some stories.

Great to have you checking on this site!!!

Here's a recent shot of it. Over the years knockoffs were added. When it got here it had wishbones front and back.

Made a neat looking old car didn't it?

Powerglide open drive, schroeder yes

Here's a recent shot of it. Notice it has a wishbone mount in front of the rear tire- that was on it when it came here too. I think the car was bought in late '76.

Keep in mind that is a new body.

For some stupid reason I have a piece of pipe in this picture against the mainrail.

It looks like some sort of pivoting mount for the front of the rear radius rods. A pin welded to a plate, with the rods hooked to the ends of the plate, and the pin allowed to pivot in a bushing on the frame. Don't know if that is right or not, but that kind of thinking is what makes bringing these old warriors back to life, so cool. Thinking outside the box, and not afraid to try something different. Always another way to get the skin off the cat, if you just think about it for awhile.

Brian:

There is a lot of similarities between my old car and this frame. If not the same car, it was built about the same time and probably by one of the OKC builders, Phil Hancock, Les Lusk, etc. They all did about the same things. Notice the bracing between frame and front bumper mount. Looks the same. Notice the dzus fastener plates between main rail @ front and bottom rail. I had a cover built that used dzus fasteners on bottom. One of your pictures looks like there is a cover on bottom of engine bay but it looks a little mashed. Very similar.

GRC35

I moved the rearend forward about 1.5"

front wishbone is the same style if not the same one.

Nerf bars are very much the same ponits

That body is identical to what came here, aluminum side panels, narrow top and tail to fit the cage, flat cowl hood.

Not sure if they were with the car, but a set of chrome Wallace Collins headers in there too.

open driveline

powerglide

closest I've seen so far.

This July will be the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing. In my opinion that was one of the most exciting seasons of racing at the old Tulsa Speedway. Harold Leep won 13 features and the championship but there were a lot of good races.Buddy Cagle was in his last year in the Zink car. it was the pink roadster. The track had to be just right for that car to be really fast, but one night the track and car hit each other just right and I saw one of the best races between Buddy and Harold, they must have past and re-past each other at least 10 times before Harold finally got the checkered flag. I have a program from that year but I can' find it. I will have to go from memory. I think that Buddy won 4 features that year and finished 4th in the points. Jackie Howerton was driving Del Torrance's #1 car and he had a breakout year, he won 6 features and finished 2nd in points. That's 23 features between those 3 drivers out of 27 or 28. Frankie Lies raced 3 times and won 2 features Emmett Hahn was in the Joe Cox 33 and finished 3rd in points with no wins. He finished 2nd so many times that he was called "Avis" after their commercial. I hope that you are old enough to remember the Avis and Hertz commercials. Ray Crawford was the super Rookie of the year. The average attendance was over 10,000 per night. We would go about 4:30 pm to get the seats that we wanted, that was 3 hours before the races started. Benny Taylor ran his headers upside down and ran the pipes all the way back. It sounded so cool. Benny and Harold got into it one night. Back then it was considered dirty to put a slide job on a car to pass it. Harold told Benny to stop sliding him, benny did't stop. They were going into the pits after a heat race and the next thing that you saw was the deuce of Harold's running up on the back of Benny's car. Raymond Cates hit Benny and was suspended for 2 weeks. They went to Lawton and won the features there. It was a very special year.

Ray

Brian,

Doe's it have a 2 or 2&1/2 OT axle, when I bought this from Gary it had a housing rear end. The first night and only night that I drove it I powdered the front stretch wall at OKC, that valve Gary's talking about from the tranny and I didn't get along very well, I pulled out of the pits for hot laps and some how I didn't think I had it right so I moved it and it went into neutral and Danny Daniels ran over the LF, i manged to get it into the pits and fix the LF flat. Started on the back of the heat and on the second lap I hit the wall hard going into turn 3, felt something hit me in the leg but kept going when I realized the steering wasn't working. I was pointed right head on into that front stretch wall when I remembered my good pal??? Bruce Moss telling me David if your going to crash stand on the GAS because 9 times out of 10 it will save you, so go figure I floored it and head on into that wall WFO (THING THAT HIT MY LEG BOTTOM BROKE OUT OF THE STEERING BOX). I had to have the frame straightened alittle when I put it back together, I bought another old car and used the steering out of it as they were the same, we put the motor in Jarvis's #20 and he ran it for a while, I had picked up a 2&1/2 inch axle and some side plates and assembled a RE to put back in it, I never did finish the car and sold it, it was not assembled but everything was there with the exception of the motor, for the life of me and I've thought about it all day I can't remember who bought it!!!! It might not be the same car but it sure has numorous simularities. Also I was going to set it up with swinging shackles and when I sold it the shackle plates and all was with the rear end all somebody had to do was make the wishbones and put mounts on the frame.