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“My car did a big wheelstand and tumbled over backwards
at 1,200 feet. It broke both my arms, screwed up my neck and
shoulders. No wheelie bars in those days, everybody was weight-conscious.
I had a wing on the front, for plenty of down-pressure, but
the car was so strong on fuel … it would run 180 mph
on gas, so you can imagine how fast it was on fuel,”
Grimes says.
At that time, a dragster --- front-engine, of course; Don
Garlits would perfect the RED much later --- had to weigh
a minimum of a thousand pounds, so Hoyt put a sheet of lead
under his seat upholstery to pass tech. The car without him
in it weighed less than 900 pounds, and that was with an iron
motor in it. “I built the whole car, everything but
the ring gear, the pinion and the whole chunk. The rear housing
was made out of fabricated aluminum and magnesium, and the
bell housing was magnesium. I built the front axle. The only
things I bought were the wheels, the spindles and the rear
axles,” he said.
He remembers only leaving the starting line. Grimes woke
up a week later in a Bristol hospital. “It got my neck,
shoulders, broke both my arms and tore up both hands real
bad. Buster Couch was in the tower then, announcing, and he
almost tore his head off. They said he tried to run out of
the tower with the microphone cord wrapped around his neck.
They said my parts either went over the beam or the car tumbled
over the beam. Bill (Mullins) said he saw my front wheels,
but didn’t know what it was. There was so much smoke
coming off the slicks of a fueler in those days … my
car would smoke ‘em all the way through the lights,
and I’m sure his would too.”
It took two years to recover. Grimes had four bone grafts
done in the right arm and one or two in the other. It jerked
this hand out of the socket. He quit racing for good after
that. “My equilibrium never came back. I still have
problems with it today,” Hoyt says.
Ironically, good friend and partner Pete Robinson was firmly
set on the “light-is-best” racing philosophy,
the same as Grimes, and it may have cost him his life. Racing
a lightweight fueler with Ford’s newest powerplant,
the infamous “cammer” engine, Robinson was killed
at Pomona years later when his car flipped and hit the guard
rail, Grimes says.
“Pete and I were partners when I was recuperating.
We had won the World Finals against all the fuel dragsters
in the country, at Tulsa in 1967 or ‘68. Then it was
Pomona. I wasn’t with him when he went to Pomona. I
was back in the hospital undergoing another bone graft. I
would have been there with him when he got killed,”
Grimes said.
Someone called him from California. “I don’t
remember who it was, it shocked me so bad. But I was kinda
expecting it. The tracks were so bad, the cars were getting
faster, ill to handle. The slingshot-type cars are hell to
drive anyhow, and that guard rail that he hit wasn’t
more than three feet high. If it had been higher, he would
have made it. He would have hit the rail and bounced back
and turned over, and he would have been hurt, but he would
have lived. The car was a good car but it was real light to
have a cammer on fuel. The car would wad up, it was so strong.
I was back at Emory hospital at the time,” he said.
After that, Grimes did some motor tweaking on the first dealership
hemi ‘Cuda to come to Georgia, took it to Southeastern
Dragway to break it in; then the owner towed the car to a
big Pro Stock race in Florida and won. Son Garry started racing
Pro Stock in a Camaro, then a Vega, then another Vega that
was top-of-the-line in 1974. With an aluminum big block in
it and at a big Pro Stock race in the South, he went into
a super wheelstand that banged the car down so hard it broke
a disc in his back. “And that was the end of that. We
still have the car. The motor damn-near went through the frame
onto the track. It busted the bell housing, the motor supports,
bent the car up. I fixed it back. We still have the car,”
Hoyt says
Grimes was inducted into the NHRA Division 2 hall of fame
12 years ago, and then the East Coast Racers Association of
Henderson, North Carolina, then the Gulf Coast Old Racers
Association. Hoyt, now approaching 84, still has his long,
wavy hair, is still a machinist and engine builder, and is
still in love with ’40 Fords, of which he has three,
all built by himself: an original; a hot rod with a blown
and injected Boss 429; and one in the making that will carry
an LS Corvette engine.
“We don’t do much drag racing anymore because
it got so damn expensive. And sponsors! The big sponsors and
the big 20-, 30-, 40-man crew for one car. Back then, it was
me and my wife, Ruth, and Charlie Moulder, and Gene Wilson,
who is dead, and Garry and Larry [Grimes' two sons]. Garry
was no bigger than that [three-feet-high, from the bottom
of Hoyt’s hand to the office floor], and we used to
push him in the tank car back up the return road. We had a
station wagon back then, and the kids slept in the back,”
Grimes says. 
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