“All the Jag could see were my six taillights”

Dean Man’s Curve, lyrics by Brian Wilson, performed by Jan & Dean from the Drag City album.

My buddy Scott Gilman bought a ’64 Corvette about 10 years ago. It was a mild custom from the day and eventually a previous owner stuffed a 427c.i. big-block Chevy under the hood backed by a Muncie four-speed and some fairly tall rear gears. Until about three years ago, Scott had been living in Colorado when he moved back here to Southern California. While the mountains are beautiful in Crested Butte where he used to live he said “there just wasn’t enough car stuff going on.”

He had just returned from hauling his Corvette back out of the mountains and asked me if there was an autocross happening this coming weekend. It just so happened that the Chevrolet Performance Nationals, NMCA West was staging its September drag race at Fontana. At the same time, Hotchkis works with NMCA to also stage an autocross race in a nearby parking lot. I’ve been to several of the Hotchkis events at Fontana and they are always challenging offering a long, second-gear course.

Scott asked me to bring an air tank in case we had to play with tire pressures, but frankly that was the least of our worries. I had seen the car back when I visited him in Colorado but this would be my first time driving the car in competition. Besides the iron head big-block and four speed, the ‘Vette was tricked out with big fender flares and giant 265/60R15 front and 275/60R15 rear tires on turbine style wheels that looked like they could have come right off a Darryl Starbird car. The tires were decent for the street but hardly autocross compatible. Frankly, they were harder than those plastic tires on a Fisher-Price Ferrari.

Before my first lap, I jumped in the car to get acclimated. “Hey Scott, is this manual steering?” I asked after I fired the engine and tried to pull out of the parking space into pre-grid. It was more of a statement than a question since it was obvious the manual steering matched the manual drum brakes. “This is gonna be a handful” I thought as I sat waiting for my first run. It was all of that and more.

The big-block has plenty of torque so I left easy and almost immediately yanked the stock Muncie shifter into Second and left it there. The first couple of short turns immediately told me this front-heavy beast was an understeering monster, but that only lasted until I hit the tight, slightly uphill decreasing radius corner at the end of a short straightaway. The ‘Vette pushed badly through the corner and I rolled into the throttle in anticipation of exiting the corner under power. That’s when the rear tires starting spinning and the tail immediately jumped out on me so now I was in a throttle-on-uh-oh tail-happy-about-to-go-into-a-tank-slapper exercise! Yikes!

I managed to complete three laps of wrestling with this beast trying to keep up with it both pushing and loose at nearly the same time with a slow steering input and rock-hard tires. It was a blast. I told Scott after I parked the car after the first session “Man, that’s a workout just trying to keep this thing going straight!” He laughed and just nodded his head. He knew…

We made about 20 more passes that day and had more fun than should be allowed.
It was also about 105 degrees that day and with one more session to go, Scott decided he’d had enough and would rather pull the car back on the trailer while it was still running. I didn’t argue. It was really hot and I was very surprised that something hadn’t already broken.

In a twisted, perverse sort of way, the car is really fun to drive. No, it’s not even close to properly prepared to run this kind of event. As Hotchkis’ Rob Byrd, the event manager said over the P.A., “that car looks like it would be tough to drive,” and it was. But it was fun too because you really had to work at it just to remain on course. I mowed over three or four cones in one corner when I got about a half-second behind the car. In a split-second, I decided just to kill the cones rather than induce the spin that I knew was coming. I’m pretty sure I abused the car more than Scott did and that may be why he decided to call it a day! He was there just to have fun while I was approaching this as a challenge and still trying to pull off a quick lap.

We didn’t stick around to see how we finished in the Classic Muscle Class but I know we ran quicker than at least one late model BMW sedan that should have been seconds quicker. So we didn’t completely embarrass ourselves and I know we had more fun.

The car is exactly the way it was when Scott bought it 10 years ago and part of its allure is its ‘60s custom touches – including the six taillights. They were a common custom trick on the Stingrays of that era. The quote that accompanies this column is, appropriately, from the 1964 Jan & Dean song. It’s just as well we were in a big parking lot so we didn’t have to worry about hitting anything at “Dead Man’s Curve”.