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Conceivably this was the road to Indy from here in '68.

To All,

As I've stated earlier at the start of '82 our relationship with Emmitt was tough but we did stand out head and shoulders above everybody at the NCRA race at Lawton in the spring, it had rained buckets for days before this race we didn't think it would run but on Sunday morning Pat had talked to Lanny and he said come on down. There was a big field of cars 78 I believe Lanny did his best but the track was really rutted out bad, going into 1 about 1/2 way up it was knee deep for about 20-30 ft. it was smooth off 2 and slick until about 1/2 way down the straight then it turned to mush and had deep rolling ruts through 3-4. We started 4th in the heat and did everything we could to free the car up 18" stagger 1100 bars in the RR & RF along with some bad stiff shock on the RS, Emmitt took off in the heat everybody dove to the pole and he ran above that big rut going into 1 and was leading going down the back stretch, man it was up on 2 wheels alot I thought he turned it over a couple of times. For the A-FEA we let the left side down a turn and put a lower gear in it, put a bigger RR on so we had 20" stagger, and chained the the front axle up on the LF shock tower started outside frt row and on the start we fell back to 2nd for a couple of laps when we went into that yellow flag mode about 3-4 times so when the race really got to going it was about lap 15, it took Emmitt about 3 laps to get in the lead but we were in very heavy traffic, our car had better then outstanding brakes which helped alot, guys were using the brakes to turn the car and most by lap 20 didn't have brakes left. Emmitt stayed up on the wheel he would hit those big holes and alot of the time it was on 1 wheel, he just kept getting faster hitting that rut in turn 1 wide open and that was no wing!!! At the finish he had lapped up to 3rd, he pulled up on the front stretch got out and didn't look the worse for wear. Unfortunatly it was pretty down hill from there and I'll take the hit for the biggest part because of those drilled out bolts, funny thing none of them broke during this race but it must have fractured them because after this race we broke plenty a few just going slow in the pits.

David,

Do you remember this Jack Rich wedge chassis that Tim and Gary had?

There was nothing else like it. It might have been a one off. You would know more about that. I know there was nothing like it around here. I remember Larry Hill let Tim and Gary run it with the NCRA, but banned anything else like it because of the upper frame rails.

I remember that car!! For the longest time I though that was what ALL Jack Rich cars were supposed to look like! Took a long time to figure out that it was unique. What was the deal on the framerails?

v6 sprint? What did they use, the GM 3.8?

TW97A,

I remember it well, I'm 99.9% sure this was the only Rich 100" Wedge car ever built, personally I don't know what all the bitching was about. The chassis met all NCRA & ORA spec's it was just configured differant, it handled very well, this is the car that Tim & Gary ran a couple of our engines in, I know this when it was first built it was powered by a bad ass in-line 6 cyl chevy with a Duggan head from Austrailia, the V-6 came later, I don't remember if the used the stock block or the Bow-Tie V-6 block. Tommy Estes had the 1st Rich car in this area I believe. There were about 3 configuration's of Rich cars, J&A was the Dealer for them, after the Estes car which I'll call the A design, there were 3 more A design cars in this area that I know about, Charles Jarvis had 1, Leon Hugh's had 1, Ray Copeland Jr had 1. The Estes car wound up with Stan Constant then Jimmy Wade, Jarvis care was destroyed in a crash at OKC during the Fair (I've posted a story about it in this thread) I don't know what happened to the other 2 A cars. The 4-coil car that The Old Man had was an A design chassis from the radiator back to the rear tube the front was just bobed off for the coil overs.

Next came what I'll call the B design chassis the 1st one was the car we ran with Emmitt then Howie it was bought by Jimmie Wade then Tony Franklin, I have no idea where it is at, then there were 4-5 more B designs that J&A sold 3D Danny Wood had 1, Ernie Edison had 1, a couple of more were sold and then we got the last B design in '84 and probably the most recognized with Sewell, MP & Shorty driving, it was sold to Bert Woodring and most recently bought by Trammell & Sandy Rushing who are working on restoring it.

Then there was the C design or Wedge car that Tim & Gary had, I have no idea what they finally did with it.

The 2 B design cars we had were modified alot they weighed about 160-165# when new, the first car we had put 2 sets of front tubes on experimenting but later cut the 2nd set off. Other then that we didn't change much on the 1st car. The 2nd B car was a differant story after we finished modifing it, it weighed 215-220# we lowered the rear tubes 1 1/4 inches to 6 3/4 inches the motor set at 8 inches with 1.5 degrees of tilt, the front tubes set at 10 1/4 inches it had 29 inch bars with 1 3/4 tube split and long radius rods for the rear end which was a 52-1 axle 16 inch LR arm, 14 1/2 RR arm, used a 48 inch front axle with 1/2 ton Ford P/U spindles, frt axle had 6 degrees caster stagger with the RF king pin set at 5 degrees camber the LF set at 3.5 degrees camber. The car was light even though the frame was heavy, it weighed in at 1605# wet. This car was a ROCKET in the rough, fast on the tacky tracks and just plain mean in the dry.

Rustyrail, this wedge car was a 100" WB not a sprint, if you look close you can see the bell housing behind the motor, it's chrome.

brian26,

I will try to describe it as best as I can. There was a couple of things going on here. The NCRA rule book showed a distance between frame rails from side to side. I do not remember what the dimension was. The bottom frame rails matched this. Now for the gray area. The rule book did not say top or bottom rails, so this car had the upper fram rails widen out from side to side. Like a wedge. The upper rails also did not come straight back just across the top of the headers like most frames. If you look at the picture, the upper rails runs just under where Tim Thomas is painted and to the back of the roll cage. This made the cockpit wider than most cars, and with the upper rail being about at the height of where your elbows would be. A much safer cockpit, plus the room around the engine compartment made this a fun car to work on. It's hard to describe, you would have to see it to get the full picture.

I have seen it, but my photographical memory is shot! I knew it was wider and braced a bit more ridged than most. I saw it in '87 when it had a V8 in it.

Hey rustyrail,

I do not remember what chevy v-6 we ran in this car. We only ran it a few times, then went back to the inline 6-cylinder. If you look at the driver here, it is not Tim Thomas. That is Terry Spiva. This is when Tim and Gary had the bad wreck on the highway and Tim had not fully recovered yet. This was the first race of that year. Tim was back shortly after this.

How about the great lettering job by Harold leep Jr.. He always did great lettering for us. One of the funniest and friendliest guys to be around.

That car was fast whether it had a V-8 or Inline 6 cylinder in it.

I like the looks of this car. Maybe it is the color & number (color & number I used). Question,...The long rod reaching to the front of the aluminum panel, is it the RR radius rod or something else? It is longer & higher than most. ....Luther

David.

Oh yes, the Duggan aluminum heads from Australia. We had two of them. Self Racing heads in Durant said these heads, being stock, no porting or polishing, flowed better than most heads did after porting and polishing. Those inline 6-cylinders should did thump. We took it to Amarillo one weekend and finished 6th in the A-feature against the V-8's. I keep telling my son that those engines sounded like a 800 horsepower sprint car engine, he does not believe me. This car would be a great one to restore and put the inline 6-cylinder in it. They sold it to somebody there in OKC, last i heard it was wrecked and needed a front clip. I would like to find it and restore it. So if anybody knows where it is, let me know.

Luther,

That would be the radius rod. Never paid that much attention to it, till you brought it up.

I gathered from the pictures it was a 100" car, but since I am not a purist, any car with a sprint tail is a "sprint car", whether it is an 86" sprint, or 100" dirt champ or silver crown. Besides, it takes less keystrokes to type sprint than dirt champ or silver crown. LOL

Had a GM mechanic, that ran IMCA modifieds, tell me that the 3.8 was the closest to a pure race engine ever put in a street car. He said they came with good crank and pistons, and H beam rods, and could take almost anything you threw at them. When you look at the Buick turbos and GN, hard to argue.

BTW..For guys that want hand lettering, but don't quite have the knack for doing freehand, get what you want to letter, in any form, including printing it off clip art on the computer. Then, snap a picture of it. Then get the picture in a slide, like in the old 35mm format. Then dig out your slide projector and use your race car for the screen. You can move the projector around till you get it just right, then outline it on the car with a pencil or something that you can wipe off later. Now, is just a matter of paint by number. This works great to put vintage numbers on a car. You can get real fancy and do a contrasting outline around the edge, or leave it plain.

TW97A,

The last pic here shows Tim running the bottom and Gary Flatt running the middle in Paul Pearl's #2. This is C design Rich car that Tim is in and a B design that Gary is driving.

Luther, The Rich cars all had long rarius rods on them, that is also something that we tried on the 1st B design car was shorter radius rods like a std car but I hated them, a lot of people didn't like some of the stuff that Rich built but personnally I would still take one over a Stanton or Gambler. Alot of people think that the Gambler was one of the reasons we were tough in '85-'86 but we were already tough at the end of '84. The Gambler deal was strictly financial, they provided the cars we provided the HP & Tires. If we hadn't had the Gambler deal we would have had a new B-2 design Rich and it would have been built like the Nance car that Stan Constant had in '85-'86 to me that was the baddest 100" car design at that time.

David,

By Nance in '85-'86 do you mean one of these? This is Charles Riney,

they were bad to the bone!

Bubby at Ascot

I think this was Harvey Hunters car from Tulsa

This my "new" race car, the first 1987 Nance made with the wider frame rails. There were more than three in spite of the story we've heard. I've found quite a few examples on the net.

I needed it like another hole in the head, but I have liked these cars since I saw Steve Smiths super in '87. It's not a 100" car, but it'll do just to look at.