Then Grimes got a surplus fuel tank off an airplane and built the first hemi-powered tank car in Georgia, a dragster. “I built all my cars and all my engines. The first engine I had in the tank car was a blown Cadillac. I had two, one unblown with two four-barrel carburetors which I fabricated the intake and made up myself. You couldn’t buy nothing for speed equipment in those days. I made my own aluminum flywheel, my own intakes, and I couldn’t buy a magneto for it, so I took a Harmon-Collins flathead Ford magneto and put it on top of a Cadillac distributor housing and made myself a performance magneto. I made all my blower drives. The Gilmer cog belt wasn’t even manufactured at that time. I put a No. 50 motorcycle-type chain drive on it, and that drove the blower. All pulleys, idlers, the whole works, I had to make myself,” Grimes says.

Hoyt then bought a 392 hemi and put a stroker kit in it with a 6:71 blower on top --- later on, he helped Pete Robinson build some of his blower drives --- and there was a guy in Atlanta who had bought a Chassis Research dragster and his wife wouldn’t let him finish it, so he bought that. That made Hoyt owner of the first blown competition dragster in the state. He ran it for about three years and did well.

His own lightweight chassis came next, then experiments with hemis, Pontiac big-inchers and small-block Chevrolets, and he found out that the lightweight stuff was the way to go --- for good reason. “It was because of the bad tracks we ran on, and the slicks were not too hot either. I finally went from 110 mph to 130s to 160s to 170s, in the low 9s, in 1963-‘64, somewhere along there,” Grimes says. With his own car, Hoyt won the five-day NASCAR/NHRA Winternationals at Daytona, plus a big Division 2 race at Phenix City, Alabama.

Then, on Oct. 9, 1965 at Bristol, he hit another first --- the first-ever dragster blow-over. It was against another now-legend, Bill Mullins of Birmingham. Fueler vs. fueler, small-block, ultra-lightweight against a de rigueur hemi, whoever got there first won. They say that pieces of Grimes’ car flew over the finish line first, but Bill took the win light.