Hoyt Grimes Still Going Strong

Georgia dragster pioneer was “first” in many ways

3/8/05

ack in the days when Hoyt Grimes was a hot dragster pilot, there were no phone calls to order a blower drive or pulleys, no company-made intakes, not even a shop-built car. If you wanted to race a dragster, you had to build it yourself.

This was no sweat for Hoyt Grimes, a master machinist and lay mechanical engineer since the late 1930s. Today, Grimes, 83, who lives on Lake Lanier, “in Buford (Georgia), up there close to Warren Johnson,” is still at it, machining parts for customers of his son Garry and his “Twister Engines” shop in Alpharetta. Hoyt still puts in seven to eight hours a day, still machining everything from street-stock hemis to big-inch, dual-engine power boats to small-block this-and-thats for local racers.

Hoyt is a man of “firsts” --- first to break 100 mph in Georgia, then 150, then 175, and so on. First to build a competitive hemi-powered dragster in Georgia --- actually a tank/lakester car --- and the first Georgia dragster racer to win big at a national event, the ’59 Winternationals at Daytona, a joint NASCAR/NHRA race. He won all five nights of the race.

Grimes was also the first dragster racer to experience a blow-over. It happened at Bristol on Oct. 9, 1965, at a special race against another now-legendary racer, Bill Mullins of Birmingham, Alabama. That crash and his subsequent recovery ended Grimes’ dragster career, but he went on to more fame, as partner and crew chief for the late “Sneaky Pete” Robinson. Grimes also served as chief on his own son Garry Grimes’ Pro Stocker, who also retired abruptly from racing in the then-new class when he hurt his lower back after a giant wheelstand slammed his Vega hard on a racetrack surface.

Hoyt Grimes is a walking history book on early Southern dragster racing. He actually be gan racing on dirt round-tracks at Lakewood Park in Atlanta in the early 1940s, before he went into the navy as an air-sea rescuer and skipper of a converted PT boat. When he got out after WW II ended, he began drag racing at the 1,000-foot dirt track at Fairburn, Georgia, in 1953. “[The late, great NHRA starter] Buster Couch was some kind of unofficial official there. First car I raced was my street car, a ’40 Ford with a ’49 Cadillac engine,” Grimes said. “To me, it [drag racing] made more sense. Being a mechanic and machinist, I stayed around round-track racing when I was a kid. But there weren’t any rules in round-track racing then, and they tore up so many cars. Nice cars. I worked on a lot of them. I got disgusted with no rules, amateurs using conduit for roll cages and all the crap they were doing, I was sharp enough to understand that that wasn’t the way to go.”

Some time in the early 1950s, he collaborated with some Georgia Tech engineering students on an unfinished dragster, and he finished it up and took the Cadillac engine out of the ’40 Ford coupe and put it into the rail. He drove it until he built another car in 1954.