Years of planning has gone into this project. My dad Joe was a modified eliminator racer back in the 70's and early eighties and I have to say he was pretty successful. I spent most of my childhood traveling with him to tracks all over the south and midwest including Florida, New Jersey, Atlanta and so on. In 1981 with his 1959 Corvette he was one of the fastest modified eliminator cars in the country and went on to finish 2nd in his division and 6th in the country on the NHRA circuit. Boy those were the days. Well those days are gone but not forgotten. In the pictures provided is a few shots of our new (old) modified eliminator nostalgic 1969 Camaro and also a few others of the vette.
Modified eliminator consisted of high winding small displacement small block engines with 4 or 5 Speed manual transmissions that would rev up to over 11,000 RPM's when leaving the starting line. In the day dad ran a 277 cubic inch small block chevy with a Doug Nash Five Speed and would wind that vette to 11,500 RPM's when he dropped the clutch. Quarter mile times would range in the 9.90 to 10.00 second area at about 130 mph. Talk about awesome. It was a sight to behold and would grab everybody's attention at any track. It wasn't just dad's car. There would be around 100 of the same type of car at the big NHRA events and it was a fan favorite I assure you. After the 1981 season modified eliminator was banished from the NHRA and racing to dad was just never the same.
Back to our new car. Almost 30 years later he is getting behind the wheel again with a 69 Camaro that was built to replicate almost everything from the 70's and early 80's. With a 323 cubic inch small block , Doug Nash 5 Speed, Ladder Bars, Tunnel Ram with 2 four barrel carbs we made sure everything was era correct. This car was even built with old school cast iron cylinder heads that have over 100 hours of machine time to get them where they have to be to rev these things to the rpm levels we are exceeding.
We are running this car in exhibition fashion and will be at a few events locally at Kil Kare Raceway in Xenia and Edgewater Raceway in Cleves Ohio. We will run in a circuit called the United Manual Transmission Racers Association (UMTR) which is a great organization that strictly runs manually shifted cars. No automatics, no electric boxes etc. We will be running with the UMTR at Thompson Raceway near Clevelend on July 3rd in a nostalgic event with a dozen or so similar cars. It should be a great time and I am really looking forward to it. Take a look at some of the pictures and I will add some more in the future.
It is nice car.The steering wheel did have an odd but familiar shape to it for me-- it was kind of shaped like some aftermarket performance steering wheels I have seen.mostly i see this cars in PC's games. i always play the games by using this vehicles.