Okay, not as glamorous nor inventive, but a small one.

They opened up a track just a mile from where I basically grew up, an old store in Woodford, Ok. At the time I was running a car named "Betsy" courtesy of Bob Garnett, a heavy old six cylinder car with a coilover front on it.

I broke a rod end off of a coilover shock when I got squeezed off of the track by a PRO-stock they threw me in with. Guess he hated open wheel cars.

I dug through the trash filled truck of mine and found a loadhelper coil over for the right front, then rigged up a way to get the thing to mount on the car,--just good enough to get it back on the trailer.................after the 3 car feature they had me in, with of course two pro stocks. They said it would never work, yet I knew it would if I ran slow enough.

I ran last , just staying out of everybodys way trying to see if an old Mustang radiator would help cool the thing (the real reason I was there). The stocker boy that ran me off the first time spun, and I went on around. He passed me and spun again. Each time he spun after that, guess he got madder.

I'm tooling down the back straight minding my own damn business and the car seriously bogs down, then I hear a BA-DOOMP! I look to see the front end of a pro-stock 3 feet off the ground after he ran over my RR! He went through the cable fence into the pit area, and I went on to 2nd in a now 2 car A feature. Got 40 bucks.

David,

That aluminum Nance w/o engine was so light a guy could pick up the front end easily with one hand! I was there with JD , and his parents on our way to Hutch after the Wichita saturday night show rained out.

It's a total shame they had to shut that place down. The City of Wichita should have just bought it, locked it up for 20 years, and re-opened it as a museum. Nobody forgets being there just once in their lifetime.

David, That is some good stuff.

We flipped my 100" car at Meeker in the A main in 93 and did a complete roll over and got high enough to not hurt the belly of the wing but just crush the sideboards and we used a whole roll of duct tape on the red flag to pull the left panel back up and then taped it off to hold it up from collapsing and was surprised outside of a bent nerf bar bent everything on the car looked pretty good and with only 11 cars left in the A and 9 laps to go we managed to finish 5th and the duct tape held up really well.

I got to see that Nance all Alum. Chassis one last time in 95 or 96 up at Carol Nance's house when he was still building some cars then and Danny Wood was driving them for a guy out of Tulsa and cannot remember his name but was up at the Winter Auction at Wichita , Ks. and we went by Carol place and looked at some of the cars they were building then and he showed us that Alum. Chassis.

Speaking of Aluminum Nance sprinters, here's Shane in the one he drove and had outlawed at K'ville. The last run

So now, we know there were at least 2 aluminum sprint cars and one titanium sprinter as well from the house of Nance.

the titanium sprinter is in wichita, as well as the very first sprint car built by nance speed equipment the only alum. car that i know about is the one shane had bought

JD and I were at the Nance Speed shop in July '87. Laverne had a red winged sprinter inside, barely new. When I heard it said it was an all aluminum car, I thought "okay, lots of aluminum parts, no big deal everything out there already was". But then it was explained to me in the company of Laverne, that even the frame was aluminum(everything was painted red on the frame, you wouldn't know just by looking at it), yes in 1987. I skipped a summer college final for this trip, Wichita and then to Hutch(the last year the Champ Dirt cars ran the headline race, and the last year the pits were on the infield). I picked up the frontend with ONE HAND, and so did JD. Laverne had a titanium 10-10 coupler in his hand talking about what titanium was like to machine. The Abernathys were there talking about balancing the weight of their early '80s super. Charles Riney pulled in with his Sooner Trailer with the raised roof for a winged car(winged 8R in back). There was a Gearte engine in a plastic container on your left as you walked in through the garage door. There were lots and lots of header pairs hanging around the walls, as if it was an odd collection. In the showroom there were several photo albums to look through from all over the country. Carol was working the front counter on the damn phone. I remember much more, but I'll give you a break.

I have a few pictures from that trip, but I was not allowed to take any pics of the sprinter. That was okay, my cheap camera (Burger King drive through 50 cent job, yes really) didn't have a flash, and the lighting was bad bad.

I asked again knowing that the WoO wouldn't allow the car, they were using sonic testers at the time(or said they were) and there was no way they would allow this. Laverne told us he only ran it in Open-Comp shows. Cannot remember the drivers name.

Nance had basically given up their WoO house car efforts nationwide and had been venturing out in the non-wing circles and for some reason, there doesn't seem to be much data on this car.

I know I have glitches in my memory, but if I can't even remember an impression properly like that one, I need to leave this board alone.

I don't take the story of the 'aluminum race car ' lightly, here's why.

I was bitten hard with an affection for the supers before I could remember anything. We quit going to Lawton for 4 years when I was eight years old. This was the late 70's.

ANYTHING SUPERMOD related hit my radar. Still does

For several years there was a guy that made the swap meets in north Texas, and he had an Edmunds top(white), a midget nose and hood AND a polished fuel tank shaped like the tail on the Torrance super.

Also there was part of a frame, aluminum it was. He went on to tell me the story, and at the time I didn't care since the frame was cut up after it was outlawed (so he said).

However, the trail of the all aluminum race car has always intrigued me, and when I heard Laverne specifically explain to me in '87 his new house car was aluminum, I listened .

This is not the car, but it could have been mistaken for it easily

I know very little about Nance compared to many of you out there, BUT I do have a strong affection for the '87 Nance. 85's and 86's are okay, but the 1987 Nance race cars are badass in my book. This is THE FIRST SPRINTER built that year, it's on the cross bar (1-87-1, sold first to the Michnowicz family in LA). I also have a June car too, got it for $500 2 months ago, basket case roller! The upper framerails give it away, swedged out.

Someday I want it to look this good. The cool part is, that $500 purchase I made in April came with an unused original aluminum Nance hood! Not a ding.

the # 2 sprinter pictured was owned by bruce bromme and his son bruce jr. driven by bubby jones. i was at nance shop when they were in town to take delivery. they raced it locally but don't know who drove it. before heading west to cal.....

funny, i live in wichita and in 95,96 carol nance was not building race cars in his house garage to my knowledge. i guess ya learn something new on this site every day !!!!! now, allan nance was building some caged go-carts i think about that time frame in his home garage, could you be confused !!!!!

We are here to learn and staighten out the facts. I admit I'm wrong when I can, doesn't mean I catch every single mistake I make, hell let's face it there's too many of them.

The drive and intention is to keep this a credible site. If you'll notice, I do a lot of editing. People get things wrong, i get things wrong----but sometimes my info is due to having smoke blown up my ass.

If JD got a few years wrong so what? Like many he was busy doing and didn't bother to stop and record the actual date in a ledger.

Honestly, had everybody recorded everything in detail through the years, this site probably wouldn't be here.

There may have been a driver during the changeover from Dean Thompson. When the CRA came through here in June, Bubby came through with a red Bromme car. On the SCRA site it was said that Bromme actually had more than one of this model. I don't know if it's true.

Apparently there was a hiccup in the parts flow to the west coast, while a store was in the works out there. During the quick chase on the sprinter I bought, the praise was high for the car, just a complaint of how hard it was to get parts for when it was new in SoCal.

The central money movement jumped over to Gamblers the next year, following Bromme.

What really confuses the issue is all the Nance cars that had the Nance colors and numbers.

bushwacker , I might be off a year or so, hell could of been 93 or 94 as well, did'nt take my ginkoglobin memory medicine yesterday, but me and Charley Ford did go by his house in one of those years while up there for the Kansas Racers Auction on a Friday afternoon , they still were building a few sprinters at his house , he kept 2 jig tables from his Speed shop that he did not sell in the auction they had and he had a young kid building some cars and like I said Danny Wood was driving them for a guy out of Tulsa(The owner was a long time friend of Laverne) then in the Mid 90's back when Tulsa had 50 + 2 Bar. Sprints and 30 + 410's on Sat.

Hell I do one better than that I will ask Danny Woods himself at a ASCS Speedweek show this week at OKC or Lawton and he can tell me the car owner name and what year he drove for him and that they were Nance race cars. Then we will have the exact year and the whole story.

o/k i guess i'll tell ya how it was, you are confused. after the speed shop closed a guy named barry built a few cars in MRS NANCE'S garage at her house!!!!! i guess you may have been there thinking you were at carroll's house!!!!!! barry went to work a boeing and thats the end of that story !!!!!!

OK, my bad .

The mans name was Melvin Jerningan. He owned supers & sprints around Tulsa for years. I think he still has one of those Danny Wood driven cars at his shop complete.

Randy Pierce

being around the nance shop a lot , got to see all the new stuff like the inboard brakes, splined wheels mag parts ect, and be able to stand at the mid section of the aluminum frame and lift it up over your head was neat!!!head was neat, used to have a photo of that but it's lost,,,,, saw lots of history at that shop!!!!!