PETE'S ODD SENSE OF HUMOR
Since Pete was a lightweight fanatic, and since NHRA had established minimum weights for dragsters, every time he brought out a new car the tech officials would descend on the car like locusts. Once with his new Woody car, the tech guys took a silver dollar and whacked it against the frame, every inch and listened intently, looking for weight concealed inside the frame. They found nothing. Pete told them "If I knew you were going to scratch up my new car I wouldn't have painted it!"

Pete told me of a plan he had to play an elaborate joke on the NHRA tech crew. Because his dragsters always had tubing that was .02 thin, he would buy a new car every year because the chrome moly would fatigue and crack with time. He sold his old car to a friend John Reed, another Georgia dragster shoe, and ordered another Dragmaster car that was a virtual twin to his first car, down to the location of the Dzus button attachments for the body. Pete wanted to take Reed's car, remove the crank, rods, pistons, clutch, flywheel, blower impellers, third member gears, etc. to gut the car yet make it externally look like a real car. His plan was to put the body panels from his new car on Reed's car, go through tech and across the scales, weighing 700 pounds, 400 pounds below the weight limit. He would push Reed's car back to his pits, take the body panels off John's car and pop them on his real car and go back across the scales 20 minutes later at legal weight to watch the tech crew go crazy. He never pulled off this practical joke because he knew it was unwise to piss off the establishment.

One night in his garage, we spent hours going over his car trying to figure where else he could shave off another half pound. We started with the tires, talked about choice of tires and tubes, and contemplated filling them with helium rather than air. We went through every part of the car, and the only way we figured he could save some weight was to have his seat belts made to exactly the correct length so they didn't need an adjustment buckle!

So where did Pete hide the 120 pounds or so that he would add to his match race cars when he was at a NHRA track to be legal? While I was puttering around his garage I stumbled across two big hunks of lead, slightly larger than a shoebox, tapered at the bottom. Upon closer examination, I realized that one of them was designed to fit under the blower of his small block Ford and the other was designed to fit under the blower manifold of his Chevy. NHRA never found them and he used this trick for years. It was a perfectly safe place to conceal the needed weight, yet could be put in or out of the car in a matter of minutes.

Another Robinson first was an enclosed trailer to haul his dragster, as everyone up until that time pulled their drag cars on an open trailer. Pete's Ranchero tow car had a camper shell on the back for him to avoid motel bills. Rather than have the dragster carry the additional weight of a push bar, his Ranchero had two metal bars that protruded forward several feet in front of his rear bumper, holding a wood 4x4. He would simply push the rear of his dragster roll cage with the wood 4x4 push bar that was attached to the tow car.

On the road this push bar provided a source of amusement for Pete. One night we pulled into a gas station and he asked the station attendant to "Fill the tank, and, oh could you catch the windshield?" It was dark so the poor attendant didn't see the push bar. After finishing the driver's side of the windshield Pete turned to me and said, "Watch this!" The attendant started to walk around the front of the car and the metal bars holding the 4x4 caught him right in the shins, as he disappeared in front of the car, Pete warned him (too late), "Watch out", and then broke into laughter.

Pete Robinson crashed at the Pomona 1971 Winternationals in his SOHC Ford AA/FD. He succumbed to injuries that night. I was on the roof of the starting line tower and saw it happen. I got very,very drunk that night because I feared the worst. That is one of the reasons I stopped going to drag races.

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