My buddy Dean Dodge called me the other day and somehow the subject of my only escapade in NHRA Stock Eliminator racing came up. This also involved the current editor of Power & Performance News, Cam Benty. At the time of this story – I think 1983, Cam was the editor of Popular Hot Rodding Magazine (PHR) which was an Argus Publishing property and I was a staffer at Car Craft Magazine which was part of the Petersen Publishing empire. To put it simply, Cam and I were competitors.

I had been volunteered by the Car Craft editor, Jon Asher, to do a series of stories on a front-wheel-drive Plymouth called a Turismo. It was driven by a game little 2.2L four cylinder with a carburetor and a four-speed transaxle. At this same time, the NHRA decided to create three Stock Eliminator classes for cars like these – X, Y, and Z/Stock. I called the West Coast Chrysler P.R. office and asked if it would be okay if we entered their car in Y/Stock at the Winternationals. They enthusiastically answered “Yes”, but what I didn’t know was that as soon as they hung up with me, they called Cam Benty at PHR and offered him a Dodge Charger to do the same thing.

Because this was Stock Eliminator, there wasn’t a lot of things I could legally do to the 2.2L motor to enhance its power. My friends at Hooker Headers built a header for the car and except for degreeing the cam to make sure it was right, we really didn’t do much else. To help with my confidence, we ran a ton of passes at Orange Country International Raceway including a Stock and Super Stock show at the track the weekend before the Winternationals. I lost in the first round to a Camaro driven by Chuck Norton and my prospects of being first-round fodder at the Winternationals looked pretty good.

It was either at this race or perhaps earlier that I learned my PHR opposite had a Dodge Charger and was running two tenths of a second quicker than I was. What I didn’t know was that my future friend Dean Dodge was helping Cam with his car. I think that Dean must have studied under Smokey Yunick or somehow has the same competitive genes as Smokey. He coached those guys on tricks. As he told me later – “All they wanted to do was beat you – they didn’t care about anything else as long as they beat that Car Craft guy!”

Apparently Cam went a little too far on the head mods in an attempt to make a little more power. As Cam just recently commented – “I thought they would only tear the car down if I won. As Dean said, ‘They won’t tear you down unless you win. You think you’re gonna win the Winternationals?’ Cam did all the work on his car himself, including installing a header at mutual friend Kevin McClelland’s shop. The first day of Stock Eliminator qualifying found Cam’s PHR car in the Number One slot with my Plymouth in Second. This sounds like we had the world by the tail – but not really. In NHRA Stock Eliminator, this is really only good for a few extra national title points because Stock Eliminator is essentially like a bracket race as long as you can run under your class index. The NHRA had given these cars a very soft class index which is why we could easily run 1.5 seconds under our index – far quicker than anybody else.

Saturday found me paired against an F/SA Fairlane and somehow I won that contest by cutting a decent light. I think he probably broke out trying to catch my 5-second head start! Cam learned that any car that won first round was subject to teardown. He lost in the first round, so he didn’t have to go through what was next. I found myself sitting at the far end of the track with the other first round winners parked next to my new friend Chuck Norton, driving the Winchester & Norton Camaro. We were waiting for the NHRA tech crews to select the cars that were destined to go through teardown. This was standard NHRA operating procedure.

“What’s the criteria for picking cars?” I asked Norton.

“There are three criteria,” he said. “First, if you are running well under your index. Second, if they’ve never seen you before.”

“That’s me on both counts. What’s the third?” I asked.

He laughed and said “If you’re a magazine guy!”

“So I’m going?” I asked.

“Oh, you can count on it!”

A half hour later we were neck deep in metric fasteners resulting in an aluminum cylinder head sitting on the inspector’s bench. There’s a long funny story about what one tech inspectors found on my plucky little 2.2L motor, but we’ll save that for another time. Everything was legal and Cam, Pete and my Car Craft co-conspirator John Baechtel and I began the reassembly. We managed to get it all back together but the engine wasn’t running right. We had been the first to arrive and soon we were the only ones left in the barn. The security guard kicked us out and the next morning we were still trying to figure out why it was down on power.

It turned out there was an accessory drive that ran the oil pump and the distributor that we neglected to “time”, which put our rotor out of phase with the distributor cap. Once that was dialed in, the car ran great.

In the second round on Sunday morning, I was soundly trounced by a C/SA 428 Cobra Jet Mustang who passed me at the 1,200 foot mark at what looked like at least 50 mph faster. On the Monday following the race, NHRA’s Tech Director Jim Dale called and informed me they were bumping the Y/Stock index by more than a full second – thus ending any plans of further Stock Eliminator racing. It was fun – especially when I learned the lengths that Cam went through just to make sure he ran quicker. I’ll take that as a compliment!