A lesson in humility
By Ro McGonegal
You know the old saw that “money talks and bullsh*t walks.” This is the story of a couple of wise guys who thought they knew everything and what they didn’t they could sure as hell fake. When they took up this sojourn they had no goal in mind. Yes, race the car and maybe cop glory at the Stewart’s drive-in, but then what? They were young bloods and their car made lots of noise and it looked scary. That they were part of the drag race life was goal enough for them. They didn’t want to drive a fuel dragster; they wanted to race doorslammers like the colonists around them. And they found that even if their money did do the talking, it still didn’t let ‘em walk the walk.
Neither I nor my partner Steve “Dirt” Diegnan had ever pedaled anything quicker or more complicated than our 13-second street rides. The idea of a purpose-built race car, one that was illegal on public roads, was almost too exciting to entertain. We hung out at Chestnut Garage in Ridgewood, NJ, and came under the wing of owner Tom Pomeroy, intense, sardonic sense of humor, an unusual dude (this was 1965) and a man of the highest character, skill, and aspirations.
Pomeroy had put a great deal of thought and effort into a class-perfect ’55 Chevy Gasser. It had an all-steel body and the fenders and the hood were bolted together to make a one-piece tilt front end to go along with the 10 percent engine set-back (allowing more weight towards the center of the car and better-bite-in-the-old-days stuff). It was everything (B&M 4-speed Hydro-Stick, truck full-floater axle, 4-link suspension, slicks, towing tires, and tow bar) but an engine. Engine set backs and tilt front ends were Hot Rod cover cars or Pop Rod feature cars. Most of the guys we’d face didn’t even dream of it. Then Tom needed money and had to off it—and he certainly didn’t want to sell it to two wannabes from a
Pomeroy favored fairly large small-blocks, in this case a 358ci assembly that put the ’55 in B/Gas with some very rough characters. Dirt and I along with (drag race historian) John “Jersey John” Anzelmo deduced that D/G would be a better place to live. You could run a 12-flat and win back then. OK, so where were Dirt and I going to get this engine? We could barely rebuild a two-barrel, so a race motor was somewhat out of our realm. I won’t tell you where the money came from, but somebody dropped a bag of it on us. It sure looked like an engine to me, yes, one that professional hands could build for us!
We got the hottest trash on the aftermarket for our 301: Crane ported cylinder heads and roller lifter camshaft, Forgedtrue pistons on pink Chevy rods, Vertex magneto, and Hilborn leakers on top of it all (stacks ultimately concealed by a hood scoop fashioned from the best part of a mail box). Dick Simoneck in Paterson’s (NJ) Gasoline Alley built the thing and when it didn’t run like we (and John) thought it should, I called a tech guy at Crane. “Do you want to go motorin’ or do you want to go racin’?” he said, like what kinda chump are you? “If you want to go racin’, you gotta knock such-and-such off the heads to get the compression ratio up and doin’ sumpthin’.”