A Tale of Two Engines

A TALE OF TWO ENGINES

They were the best of engines, they were the worst of engines. The Dickens, you say?

Actually, they were both the best of engines, each in their own time. And, they're both pretty much gone from the scene.



The first of them was the flathead-V8 Ford. This engine was made by the Ford Motor Company from 1932 until 1953. At the end of World War II it was probably the most common automobile engine in the world, and it would be made for almost another decade. Suffice to say, when racing started up again after the war, they were everywhere. It was the engine that Chuck Berry refers to in "Maybelline." Nothin' outrun my V8 Ford.

Between VJ day and 1950 a number of tracks opened in the area, as they did everywhere. The Gilford Bowl, Thunder Road in Barre, VT, and a dirt track in Claremont, NH all opened during this time, as well as others. Ford flatheads were not the only engine in the field, but sometimes it seemed like it.

By the mid-60's, Riverside Speedway in Groveton was running two classes, cleverly named A and B. The B cars were late-model, post-war machines, and you got to see a little bit of everything. This was during the heat of the musclecar era, and everybody had a big V8 to stuff under the hood. The A class, on the other hand, was just about all pre-war iron minus fenders and running boards. And, no matter who made the body and frame, the power came from Dearborn, Michigan more often than not.

The first chink in this armor that I ever saw came in the late 1960's at the Bear Ridge Speedway in Bradford, VT. A Vermonter showed up named Alan Whipple. He drove a 30's Ford coupe, but under the hood was a very controversial power plant. There was a lot of debate on whether or not it was legal. In the end, it was decided that it was, for two reasons; it had two fewer cylinders, and was smaller in displacement. In spite of these disadvantages, Whipple's # 47 ruled the track from that moment on. His engine was a straight-6 260 cubic inch Chevrolet.


If you bought a base-model Nova, you could have the same engine. By 1970 they were pretty common. They were easy to find, easy to work on, and with more and more racers using them, high-performance parts were becoming easier to get as well. Plus, the newest flathead Fords were now almost 20 years old. Slowly but surely, the 260 Chevy replaced the flathead as the motor of choice.

As with the Ford, there were other engines available. If you bored out a slant-6 Dodge they ran really well, but not every track would allow that level of modification. Ford made a 300-ci straight six truck engine, but they didn't catch on like the Chevy. Even GM came up with a good alternative, with a very good V6 to counter the outdated in-lines. And, there were still a few flatheads around.

The last competitive racer I know of that ran the flathead was Big Bill Moses. His father, Buck Moses, was one of the crowd of racers that came of age after the war. He was also one of the best car builders around. Bill was still winning features and challenging for the track championship at the Nor-Way Pines Speedway into the late '80's with a flathead Ford V8. In the end, he and Buck finally gave in to the inevitable and swapped out the V8 for a 300 Ford 6.

By that time, a lot of changes had come to open-wheel dirt track racing. '34 Fords were now too valuable to convert into race cars. They also didn't get the job done against the specially-made cars from Troyea, Tobias, etc. The biggest nail in the coffin of the Chevy 6 came from NASCAR.

By then, the major-league's engine formula had settled down. Instead of an actual stock car with whatever its manufacturer put under the hood, Winston/Nextel cup cars were specially made and all sported the same cubic inch displacement; 358. Whether the engine was Ford, Chevy, Dodge, or now Toyota, they displaced the same area. And, as happens in a free market economy, it wasn't long before these basic engines became available to non-millionaires. Soon, local dirt-trackers started agitating to be allowed to run modern V8 powerplants, and put their 6-cylinders into mothballs.

In the last years before the Modified Sportsmen class at the Nor-Way Pines became the V8 Modifieds, the dominant car was the #92 of "Dynamite" Dave Sanville. Rumor had it that brother JJ Sanville spent over 11,000 dollars, in mid-80's money, to put together Dave's 260-ci Chevy 6. Supposedly, it had been put on a dynomometer and shown to produce over 500 horsepower. When asked, Dave and JJ just smile and walk away. They still have the engine, but have nowhere to race it.