The Story of My Engine (by Ray Larson

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   THE STORY OF MY ENGINE …... FOR GEAR HEADS 
(As printed in the 3/18/09 National American Motors Drivers & Racers Association news letter)

Last year I had to put a new engine block in my old AMX, and some friends were ribbing me about my plans to clear coat and paint the old block, and then make a bronze plaque for it.  So I told them that I couldn’t not do that.  For the past 37 years, that old 401 Javelin AMX and I had been through too much together.  I told them a little of that story.  Judging from the grins on their faces, I think even they began to think that old engine block deserved more than a trip to the junk yard.  Here’s “the rest of the story”…….

That old engine started life in my brand new 1972 401 cubic inch V8 Javelin AMX.  It was red with a gold hood decal and tan corduroy upholstery.  It was gorgeous.  Actually, it still is. 

I had started a construction business back then so in its first 7 years it carried my tools in the trunk, pulled trailers with trees on them, and piled on 90,000 miles.  I had so much weight in the trunk that in the winter, all I had to do was put snow tires on it and it would go anywhere. I used it as my truck and as my daily driver. But it was always fun and it was always fast.  I remember one day in May 1979, I was on my way to a job in Chicago.  As I sat waiting at a stop light, I remember looking off to the southeast and seeing a big plume of black smoke and wondering what was burning.  I had no way of knowing that a DC10 passenger jet had just crashed at O’Hare killing 273 people.  As I sat there, a red Pontiac Trans Am pulled alongside and gunned his engine.  You know what that means.  I looked over and saw the little chrome 454 on the side.  He had his hot chick girlfriend with him.   I had my tools with me.  They were smiling and looking confident.  There was a long stretch of open highway in front of us. The light turned green.  We both took off like crazy fools and… I blew his doors off.  At the next light she was still smiling but he wasn’t.  I love that car. Over the years, whenever I think of that Trans Am, I think of that smoke.

Later in 1979, I needed a pick up truck for the business.  I thought to myself, “I paid $4250 for this car, I’ve put 90,000 miles on it, and I’ve had it for 7 years.  I could give it away and I’d have still gotten my moneys worth out of it”.  But I always liked it, and I always wanted to race it, and it still really looked good.  I decided to keep it.  I’ve done a lot of dumb things in my life.  That wasn’t one of them.  

I had been racing motorcycles for years and I was getting too old for that so I decided to start racing the AMX in gymkhanas.  You know, parking lot races with pylons.  I didn’t win much at first but I kept on trying and that old engine kept on pulling.  I began winning more and more.  The car was pretty big, so squeezing between pylons on those tight little race courses wasn’t easy.

I had heard that there were some big tracks that I could race at, but that they were scary.  I decided to try it anyhow.  In 1981, I raced my first race at Blackhawk Farms Raceway.  Blackhawk is a neat track that winds through the woods near Rockton, Illinois.  It’s near the Illinois Wisconsin border.  Blackhawk has some of its own interesting history.  Since it was built, some pretty famous names in road racing have raced there: the Andrettis, Sterling Moss, Paul Newman, Walter Payton, Boris Said, and Alan Jones to name a few.  It’s a little less than 2 miles long and has 11 turns, kinks, and sweepers.  As I recall, the longest straight is around a third of a mile long.  The rest of the track is a lot of hard acceleration followed by hard braking.  It’s a track that’s hard on brakes.  But when I got my Javelin with its 401 V8 on that track, the first thing that went through my mind was, “This is what this car was made for!”  I began racing at other big tracks around the tri state area too, Road America in Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin, Gingerman in South Haven, Michigan, The Milwaukee Mile, and of late, the north and south road courses at Autobahn Country Club Raceway in Joliet, Illinois. 

It took a few years, but eventually I began winning with some regularity.  In 1984, I was racing at Road America.  Road America was the longest track in the country, over 4 miles long.  I was flying down the long front straight, the engine screaming.  I looked down at my tachometer for just a moment and noticed that the odometer was turning over 100,000 miles, but that day I won the race and beat a 454 Corvette, a Porsche and a new 84 Corvette. Not only that, I drove the car to the track the day before, and drove it home the day after

I should mention, the kind of racing I do is called solo road racing or high speed autocross.  It’s for folks who don’t want to bang up their fenders in wheel to wheel racing.  Lest you think that’s not really racing, let me quote the Sept. 2008 issue of Road and Track magazine.  It was an article where they were having a shoot out between 10 of the world’s fastest cars, from the new Corvette ZR1 and Dodge Viper to an Aston Martin and a Lamborghini.  They raced them against each other in 4 different forms of racing.  A short track road course, a long track road course, an autocross track, and an oval track.  When they described their tests of those cars in the autocross venue, they used the following words, “ ‘If road racing were any harder, they’d call it autocross’ goes the adage.  Road racers may disagree, but if there is a better test of precision handling, point-and-squirt power delivery, braking prowess and transient agility in tight quarters, we’ve yet to find it.”  With autocross you have to be on the ragged edge all the time or you don’t know if you’re going fast enough, and you lose.  In fact, I heard recently that Midwestern Council of Sports Car Clubs, the umbrella organization I race with, was becoming concerned because the number and severity of accidents with their high speed autocross races was greater than with their wheel to wheel races.  I’m not sure if that’s true or not.

One season that I was especially proud of, was 1987.  I was racing with Midwestern Council.  I was still driving to the races, racing all day, and driving home.  The car was 15 years old that season and had well over 100,000 miles on it.  Back then, the race officials, never knew what class to put me in so they stuck me in “A stock”.  When I got to the first race and saw the list of cars in my class, all I can remember was thinking “Crap!”  The list included four Corvettes, a Dodge Challenger, a Porsche 930 Turbo Carrera, a Porsche 928, a Porsche 911 SC, a ‘77 Lotus Esprit, a Ferrari Testarossa, and a couple Audi 5000 Turbos.  There were 19 cars in all in my class.   But when the season was over, I had won every race…. and the class championship.  I could hardly believe it.  

My wife, Mary, has always been my pit crew.  She cracks me up.  At the second race of that ’87 season, I was tinkering around with the engine between races and Mary was leaning on the fender watching me.  I think her eyes were starting to glaze over when some guy came over and started talking to us.  After a little bit, he said, “You know the guy with the Porsche Turbo Carrera?” I said, “Yeah.”  He said “I think he’s thinking of protesting you.”  I wasn’t sure what to say, so I just said, “Really?”  Mary was taking this all in and finally she asked why he would protest me.  I said, “I don’t know.  Maybe he thinks I put a hot cam in my engine or something.”  Mary thought about that for a little bit and then said, “Let me see if I understand this.  This guy’s got a $55,000 Porsche Turbo Carrera, and you’ve got a 15 year old Rambler, and he thinks that’s a fair race…… but if you put a cam in the engine of your 15 year old Rambler, he thinks that’s an unfair race?”  The guy and I thought that that was pretty funny.  I was almost wishing the Porsche guy would protest me, just so I could use that line.  He didn’t, and I won.  After that season, I would tell pretty much anyone who would listen about the cars I had beaten that season.  They’d just look at me and smile.  Mary finally said, “Why do you bother telling everyone that story?  No one believes you.”  I decided she was right, so I began carrying the race results for that season with me.  Then when I’d tell folks the story, I’d also show them the proof.

I retired from my business in 1991…kind’a.  I had more free time.  In that 1991 race season, I raced against a lot of fast cars.  Two guys especially were very good.  Terry Horst and Dan Giesen.  They both drove later model Mustangs and both were excellent drivers.  One race Terry would win.  The next race Dan would win and the next race I would win.  It went on all season that way.  When the track loud speakers would call B/P class (B/P stands for B/prepared and that was our class), I would try to wait ‘till the last minute before I went out on the track, so I could run over by the bleachers and watch Dan and Terry come through turn 4.  I wanted to see what they might be doing better than me.  Then I’d try to incorporate those things into my driving style, while continuing to do the things I thought I was doing better.  Anyhow, Dan and Terry would always come screeching and sliding through turn 4.  One day Mary and my brother Chip were in the bleachers watching when either Dan or Terry came screeching through.  Chip noted, sarcastically, “Gee, I think his tires stopped screeching for a moment there”.  Mary responded, “That’s because he was in the air.”  Chip thought that was funny.  When he told me later, so did I.  But as I watched those guys screech through the turns, I began to think, “ You know, maybe there’s a lesson to be learned here.  Unless you come through a turn fast enough to begin touching that point where you begin to slide, you don’t know how far away from that point you are, and so you may not be going fast enough.”  I learned a lot from those guys that year.  At the end of the season, out of 5000 points for the season, I had accumulated a few more points than either Dan or Terry, and I won the championship.  I was lucky.  A few years later, I told Dan Giesen that story, and how it was hard for me to force myself to push the car to the point of sliding without being afraid I’d slide off the track.  He said that he was a farm kid.  He grew up sliding around on gravel roads so he was used to that feeling.  I think I heard that was true about Terry, too.

At one race, I came through turn 4 in the Horst/Giesen style and my car started to slide.  I kept my foot in it and kept right on going.  I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but apparently my rear wheel started hopping violently.  I didn’t even feel it, but Mary saw it.  When I got back to the pits, Mary said sternly, “I don’t want you to go so fast.”  That was probably the only time in the history of the world that a race driver’s pit crew uttered those words.

In the middle of the 1992 season, I was racing at Blackhawk.  I was coming through turn 4 a little too fast and a little too wide.  I slid up on the outside speed bumps but kept my foot in it and kept right on going. I hadn’t realized it, but when I straddled the rough surfaces of the speed bumps, they rubbed on the bottom of my engine oil pan and unscrewed my oil plug.  Oil began pouring out as I continued to race.  I had gone almost a mile when I looked in the rear view mirror and saw clouds of blue smoke from oil spraying all over the hot exhaust pipes.  I pulled into the pits.  I really didn’t know what had happened.  Before I turned off the engine I looked (finally) at the oil pressure gauge.  It read “0.”   I immediately turned off the engine. I looked under the car.  No oil pan bolt.  “Crap!”  The track officials had to shut the whole track down and start spreading oil dry over all my oil.  I was a very popular guy!   I walked out onto the track and followed my oil trail all the way to turn 5 where the oil trail stopped.  I looked around and sure enough, there was my oil plug laying on the track.  I picked it up and ran back to the car.  I jacked it up and screwed the plug back into the oil pan.  The oil pan wasn’t damaged and neither was the  plug.  Amazing.  An old friend, Dennis Duddles, had an extra case of oil.  He gave it to me.  I poured it into the engine and started it up.  It clanked a little but it ran, so I raced it the rest of the day.  It still pulled like a freight train.  I won.  I was really busy that summer so I raced the car for the rest of the year like that.  It still clanked a little but I won the rest of the races and the class championship again.  When I pulled the engine apart, the following winter, all the moving parts looked like they were coated with gobs of solder.  When I think of finishing the rest of the season on that engine, racing wide open down the track with its insides looking like that, I must admit, I get a, “little engine that could” feeling about it.  

I brought it in to my friends, Mike Yank and his sons at Speed Performance in Wauconda, Illinois.  They do great work.  They have the only engine building shop I know of where you can eat off the floors.  That’s important to me.  That’s the way I keep my engine bay.  I remember at one of the races, I was going through tech inspection.  The tech inspector said, “Okay, pop the hood.”  When I opened the hood, he staggered back and said, “I’ve eaten in dirtier places than that!”  At any rate, Speed Performance rebuilt it in time for the next season.  The only trouble was that the cylinder walls were scored so badly, that we had to bore them out .037 inches in order to clean them up.  AMC’s 401 V8 is a small engine, and I had always heard that their cylinder walls were already bored out close to the limit, and if you bored them out more than .030 of an inch, you could have heating problems.  Mike Yank got a feeler gauge with .018 of an inch on it.  He said we would be taking a little more than this off each side of the cylinder walls.  It looked like almost nothing.  We decided to try it.  When I got the engine back in the car the next season, sure enough it overheated.  Not when I was driving or racing, just when I was idling.  I dreaded long stop and go lights, but it really ran great and was very strong, and after a lot of screwing around and figuring, I designed an aluminum radiator that Fluidyne agreed to build for me.  I think they only charged me $470 and it’s beautiful.  I put my old stock fan shroud on and that solved the overheating when idling problem.  It always ran cool as a cucumber when racing.  

After winning the 1991 season championship, I began an 8 year win streak.  I won 37 straight races, broke 10 track records for B/P class and took home 7 class championships.  

At the September 20, 1997 race at Gingerman Raceway in South Haven, Michigan, I slid off the track and bent the right rear axle.  I could still drive it, but the rear wheel would wobble.  The car had 120,020 miles on it at that race.  That was the last race of the season so I had all winter to fix it.  I had come out of retirement that year to design and build a building/business that my brother and I would own and run.  It was a project that turned out to be much more difficult and take much longer than I had anticipated.  Because I was so busy, I decided to pay somebody else to do the axle work.  That, also, turned out to be an odyssey that was much more difficult and took much more time than I anticipated.  Usually when I would spin out and bend one of my rear axles, I’d get another stock AMC axle and stick it in myself.  They were easy to work with and reliable …. except when I would slide sideways across a rough field.  Then it was not unusual for me to put a little kink in the axle.  I had heard of a company that was supposed to make some strong heavy duty one piece axles that would fit my car.  I always liked the idea of doing well at the race track with mostly stock AMC parts, but those AMC axles were getting very hard to find and very expensive.  When I called one of my AMC guys, Ted Richoz at Lou’s Jeep in Geneva, Illinois, he said he could only find 6 left in the whole country.  So I had a set of those “after market” axles sent to the shop I had chosen.  That shop had been highly recommended, but for the next seven years I raced with constant rear axle problems.  Because I was so busy with my business project, I continued to bring the car back to the shop for the axle repairs.  Looking back, I don’t know whether it was the fault of the shop or the axle manufacturer, but it made those years of racing difficult and frustrating. The new axles had pressed on steel collars that were supposed to hold the axles in place.  I had started racing on Hoosier tires in that 1998 season.  The tremendous side forces the car could generate with those sticky Hoosier tires, would overpower the grip of those steel collars and the axles would begin to slide out further and further as the day wore on. When I’d turn right, the left wheel would be pushed into its correct position, but the right wheel would be pulled out from under the fender a little.  When I’d turn left, the right wheel would slide back in and the left one would be pulled out. When that happened, those collars would begin rubbing against the oil seals and oil would begin leaking onto my rear brakes.  Pretty soon, I’d have no rear brakes.  The first time I tried braking when that happened, I found I could go through corners faster than I thought.  By the end of each day’s racing, the rear wheels and axles were sliding in and out further and further, and that tended to cause the car’s handling to become a little erratic.  Over the next few years, each race would be a scenario where I’d start to race with 4 wheel brakes, then I’d have 3 wheel brakes and then just front wheel brakes.  Front wheel brakes stop you pretty well, but 4 wheel brakes are better.  That uncertainty, however, caused me to became more and more cautious when braking into corners, a habit I’m still working to overcome.

In 2000 a fellow by the name of Bob Dudek came into my class.  He was, and is an excellent driver, very fast.  I lost 3 races in a row to him.  I raced as fast as I could to beat him, but couldn’t.  I’d roar through the corners with my rear wheels and axles swinging in and out, hoping my front brakes would perform miracles, but I couldn’t go as fast as Bob did.  I was going pretty close to as fast as I usually ran, but not as fast as I have gone, and with Bob Dudek, I would have had to go as fast as I had ever gone.  I still hold the track record for B/P class at Blackhawk, but Bob took home the class championship that year.

You know that old saying, “Timing is everything.”  That 2000 season was the only season my sister Lois ever came to see me race.  She had been diagnosed with cancer but was doing pretty well that summer.  We had a picnic at lunch and we all had fun, but I wish she could have seen me win.  I started to win again the next season, but Lois died that winter.  

As I mentioned, back in 1998 I began racing on Hoosier tires.  They have tremendous grip.  They’d allow me to come through corners so hard that I began cracking my front wheels.  It was a good thing I noticed those hairline cracks on the rims.  The cracks went from the front side of the rim to the back side.  It happened on both front wheels.  Had I not happened to notice them, it could have been disastrous.  I was able to get some forged aluminum racing wheels from Compomotive that are still working fine.  

Over the years, I had gotten into the habit of dropping the car into second gear in order to have the engine help the brakes slow me down for the corners.  When I bought the car, I ordered it with the “Rally Pak” option, so it came with disc brakes in the front and drum brakes in the rear.  When I first started racing, they were some of the best brakes on the track.  But as the years rolled on and my car stayed the same, the cars I raced against got newer and newer with better and better brakes.  I began dropping it into second gear earlier and earlier to help slow me down for the corners.  I couldn’t upgrade my brakes because it would have put me into a different class.  If I went into a higher class, I would have had to do a lot more work to the car to stay competitive and I didn’t want to do that.  Anyhow, at the July 28, 2001 race, I came roaring down the straight into turn one.  I hadn’t realized that all those years of dropping into second gear had been tearing my rubber motor mounts.  I don’t have a lot of time to look at the speedometer, but I think I get somewhere between 110 to 115 miles per hour on Blackhawk’s long straight, and I have to get the car down to 50 or so to get through the 90 degree turn at the
end of that straight.  Anyhow, I began braking.  When I got down to about 75 or so, I dropped it into second gear.  I heard a terrible loud grinding sound and what looked like steam started to ooze out from the edges of the hood.  “Crap,” I thought.  “Something’s happened to the engine.”  (No flies on me.)  The car began sliding.  I remember thinking “Damn, something’s coming out of my engine and I’m sliding in it.”  It was kind of funny.  It was like everything was in slow motion.  I began sliding down the track sideways.  I was looking out the windshield at  the spectators along the fence.  They were all looking at me with real big eyes and the kids were pointing.  Then the car started sliding backwards.  I thought, “Good, maybe I can coast backwards far enough to get off the track.”  I wanted to get out of the way before Erik Guldberg in the Corvette caught up.  I began looking in my rearview mirror to see where I was going.  It was unusual.  I’m not used to looking in the rearview mirror and driving 50 mph backwards, but I made it off the track before he caught me.  Then I thought, “Crap, he’s going to slide in the same stuff I was sliding in and plow right into me!”  (I know I say crap too often, especially at races.)  Anyhow, the flag men warned Erik in time and he was able to slow down before he got to the slippery stuff.  They had to shut the whole track down and get out the kitty litter again.  It made me a very popular guy with the racers… again.  After the emergency equipment guys towed me back to the pits, we discovered that the engine mounts had finally let loose, the whole engine had shifted forward, the spinning fan buried itself about an inch and a half into the radiator, and all my antifreeze poured out onto the track.  That stuff is really slippery.  I was very busy that year so I was unable to race the rest of the season.  I took the radiator out, the fan off, cleaned the car up so it was immaculate, and put it away ‘till the following spring.  When spring came, my schedule had slowed down and I was able to fix everything before the 2002 racing season started

In 2005, I lost all my races, so my neighbor Tom Thinnes and I decided to pull out my lousy after market axles and figure out once and for all what the problem was.  Tom owns his own trucking business and is a very knowledgeable gear head.  When we got everything apart, we were stunned by the buggered up mess we found.  We put things back the best we could.  The axle housing ends were such a mess that we ended up literally caulking the oil seals back into place and hoped they would keep the oil off my brakes until I could come up with some other option.  I vowed to replace the whole mess as soon as I got the chance.  

The caulk held and my brakes stayed dry and I won the first race of the 2006 season.  But I was having a hard time finding a good alternative to my rear axle problem.  The second race was the June 24^th race at Blackhawk.  I was still racing on those crummy axles.  I had had a couple of good runs, and was winning at that point.  Mary and I were watching my brother, Chip.  Chip is  21 years younger than me and he races now, too.  He races a 1979 401 Spirit AMX in B/M class (B/modified).  At any rate, Chip was coming through turn five.  Turn five is a very fast sweeper.  In my car, if I do it right, I can begin accelerating as I come through turn four and pretty much keep my foot to the floor all the way through turn five and all the way until I have to start breaking for six.  It’s a real white knuckle experience though.  You clip the apex of turn 5 and hang on, hoping like crazy that centrifugal force doesn’t pull you off the track before it straightens out again.  Sometimes I don’t succeed in keeping my foot all the way down through that turn because all the way through it, my brain is screaming, “SLOW DOWN YOU DUMB SON OF A female canine!”  But I do okay some of the time.  At any rate, back to my brother.  Chip was coming through turn five like a lunatic.  He had to be going 75 or so and, if I had to guess, his brain was in the process of screaming, “SLOW DOWN YOU DUMB SON OF A female canine!”  (If I ever read this story to my mom, I probably should skip this part.)  Actually, probably everyone who races through turn five at Blackhawk has his brain screaming, “SLOW DOWN YOU DUMB SON OF A female canine!”  As your car accelerates through the turn, you’re always worrying that, if you let the car go just one smidgen faster than you’re already going, the huge side forces will overcome your tires’ valiant efforts to hang on, and you’ll go sailing off the track into the weeds.  Probably, all the while this stuff is going through your brain, your tires are thinking, “ARE YOU CRAZY!”  Again back to Chip.  As I said, Chip was probably going 75 or so.  He was about a third of the way through the turn when his right rear wheel fell off.  HIS WHEEL FELL OFF!  He went sailing off the track in one direction and his wheel went sailing off in another direction.  Before the car came to a stop he was about a half a block away.  It was a huge relief when we saw him get out of the car and walk around the back to see what happened.  When the emergency crew got his car back to the pits, we saw that the end of the rear axle had broken clean off.

Chip had the same axle set up as I had, but he hadn’t had any problems with them… ‘till then.  He told me that, the previous month, the end of Scott Urban’s  rear axle fell off as he came down the straight at the Autobahn North Track.  Scott had the same axles as Chip and I did, and each of us had used different installers.  I decided that this was as good a time as any to stop racing on those crummy axles.  I had started trailering my car to the races by this time, so I loaded my car on the trailer and called it a day.  Luckily, I already had some pretty good runs in, so I still won my class.

I was so fed up with the company that made my crummy axles, I didn’t care if I talked to them again as long as I lived, but Chip was angry and had plenty that he wanted to talk to them about, which he did.  A couple of days later, Chip called me and said, “I know how you feel about the company that made our axles, but I talked to a pretty nice guy there who was knowledgeable and had a pretty good idea. Maybe you should give them just one more chance.”  I called the guy and he did have a good idea.  I always wanted to keep as much stock AMC stuff on the car as I could, but that was becoming more difficult as the years passed.  His idea had the advantage of keeping most of my nice light old AMX rear end housing and, in addition, keeping my bulletproof old stock positraction differential with its strong and seamless operation.  His idea was this.  I would send my whole rear end to them.  They would  cut off the ends of the axle housing.  That would get rid of my old buggered up ends, which were the only parts of the rear end where anything was wrong.  They would then weld on “old style” Ford nine inch rear axle housing ends.  That, in turn, would allow them to use tough Ford nine inch axles and bearings.  He said he would cut AMC splines on the inner end of those axles so that the Ford nine inch axles would fit right into my old AMC posi.  I’ve been hearing about how strong Ford nine inch rear ends are as long as I can remember, so this sounded good.  There was one other option that this set up opened for me.  It’s pretty hard to find some after market options for AMCs, but with Ford axle housing ends, I could put on rear disk brakes from Mustangs.  Disk brakes on the back would be a big relief for me when racing.  The problem, though, is that it would cost me two points.  You see, the Midwestern Council rule book only allows a total of seven points in B/P class or I get bumped into a higher class, and I already had seven points.  I thought, “I’m currently using two points for an after market carburetor.  True, it’s chrome and looks neat, but my old carb worked pretty well, too.”  So, I put my old carb back on, sent the whole rear end to the axle maker, and now I have rear disk brakes… and they always work.  (I just knocked on wood to be on the safe side.)

Remember when I was describing how “I” go through turn five at Blackhawk?  The reason I wanted to emphasize the “I” part of the story is because of something that happened when I first started racing at the bigger tracks.  I was asking for advice about the best way to handle the “kink” before turn seven from someone who had been racing for a long time, and was very good.  He said something to the effect that, “You know you’re doing it right when you can keep your foot in it all the way through the “kink” ….and then start breaking for the turn.”  I kept trying to muster the courage to do it that way for years, but it always seemed suicidal.  I mean, there’s only a space of a hundred yards or so between the kink and turn seven, and turn seven is a 90 degree turn.  I guess I never considered the fact that he was in a different class than I was, and his car was probably doing about 90 mph at that point on the track and my car was probably doing 110.  At any rate, one year I got out on to the track and decided that, this time, I was going to keep my foot in it through that kink if it killed me.  Probably a poor way of thinking about it.  So, on my next run, I roared thru the kink ….and then put on the brakes.  As soon as I put on the brakes, I knew this was a big mistake.  There was no way I was going to slow down enough.  So I just let off the brakes and turned.  Hell, I wasn’t even to the turn yet, but I figured I’d probably do more sliding than turning, and I figured I might as well get a good head start on that turning part.  I could hardly believe it.  I made it.  I bounced against the outer speed bumps and kept right on going.  When I got back to the pits, I fantasized that the corner workers were saying, “Man, did you see that guy?  He can really drive.”  Anyhow, ever since then, when I give other drivers hints on the best way through a corner, I’m always careful to make it clear that that’s what works best in my car.

Well, that brings us to the 2007 season.  A fateful year for my old engine.   I had won the first 3 races.  It was late July and I had a couple weeks until the next race.  I knew that I wasn’t going to have much time to spend on the car in those next two weeks.  Also, I had been aware of a vibration over the past couple months that I hadn’t been able to locate.  I had been racing 15 years on the engine since that rebuild after all the oil ran out, and that had been rattling around in my head.  As I would find out later, the vibration was not the engine.  It was the torque converter.  The bolts holding the converter to the flex plate had loosened.  That elongated the holes in the flex plate, and that allowed the converter to vibrate.  Unfortunately, I didn’t know that then.  One morning I woke up with a splitting migraine.  Excedrin didn’t work so I ended up taking an injection of some heavy duty stuff.  My headache went away, but I was still kind of drugged.  I didn’t want to waste the whole afternoon so I told Mary I was going to go out and work on the car.  She said, “Are you sure you want to work on the car in your drugged state?”  It’s women’s work to say that sort of stuff.  I said, “I think it’ll be okay.”  That’s what men usually say.  Big mistake!  At any rate, I had decided I was going to put some old, softer, stock motor mounts back under the engine to see what affect it might have on that vibration.  I jacked the car up and loosened the motor mount bolts and started to jack up the engine.  It didn’t seem to move much.  Then I heard a clunk.  I got out from under the car to see what that noise was.  In my drugged state, I had forgotten to open the hood.  “Crap!”  I opened the hood but everything looked okay, so I finished putting the old softer motor mounts back in and let the car down.  That clunk sound still bothered me.  I looked all over the engine bay, but saw nothing wrong.  I took the air cleaner off but that looked okay too.  What I didn’t notice, was that that big steel washer that held the top of the air cleaner from going down too far was gone.  It had been split and fallen down into the secondaries of the carburetor.  The nut that located it was still there but the washer was gone, and I didn’t notice.  I felt uneasy, but not seeing anything wrong, I buttoned everything up and decided to go out for a little test drive.  Everything seemed good.  I decided that I’d better get it out on the highway to make sure everything was good at higher speeds too.  I got out onto the highway and nailed it.  That opened up the secondaries and dropped the big steel washer into the racing engine…..and ruined it.  I’ve since told Mary that, if she ever again asks me if I’m sure I want to work on the car in my drugged state, and I don’t immediately respond, “I wouldn’t think of it Dear” she should give me a good swift kick in the butt.

So I took out the engine and brought it in to Speed Performance.  When Joey Yank got the engine apart we realized that the block was in pretty bad shape.  Luckily, about 25 years ago, I had the chance to buy a new 401 AMC short block which was still in the crate … for $900.  They were already becoming scarce and I figured, “With the abuse this engine takes, you never know when I may need a new one.”  While Joey was taking the engine apart, he systematically determined what engine parts were salvageable.  I told the guys that I had the new block, should we need it.  After Joey had the engine apart, I was talking with Mike.  I asked if he thought my old block was salvageable.  He thought a little, and said, “ If the right guy had enough time,  he might save it.  However, with the money involved in rebuilding everything and the fact that you have a new one, why risk it?"  It was hard to fault his logic, so I loaded the new block in my Jeep and brought it in to them.  The guys asked what they should do with the old block.  I said, “Let me think about that until tomorrow.”  That night, I thought about all the things that engine had not only survived but all the things it accomplished.  You know, all the things I just told you about…..and how I finally had to throw a steel washer into it, to do it in.  I know it’s only a piece of steel, but I felt I owed it a better end than just carting it off to the junk heap.  The next day, I told the guys to dip the block into the cleaning tank because I’m going to paint it and give it a place of respect…like I’ve done for the well over 100 trophies it’s earned.

EPILOGUE:

Mike and his sons Joey, and Tony did a beautiful job of rebuilding my engine.  They were able to use my old cast iron heads, my old intake and exhaust manifolds, and many other parts…but not the old block. 

To make sure that the new engine wouldn’t starve for oil on hard cornering and braking, I had Don Schmitz and his son Donny of Kenosha, modify an AMC oil pan.  They fabricated four swinging trap doors in the bottom of the pan to help insure the oil pickup would never suck air.  When I brought that pan into Mike’s office, there were some other guys there, too.  They all studied it over and were unanimous in pronouncing it a work of art.

I did a lot of racing before 1991, but in ‘91, I began keeping log books on the car.  As a result, my race records from ’91 on are more complete.  I raced in some other race venues, too, but most of my races were with Midwestern Council.  Between the 1991 season and the middle of the 2007 season with the council, the old engine raced in 69 races and won 58 of them.  It set and re-set the track record in B/P 16 times during that time, and won 10 class championships.  It holds the track record in B/P on the old configuration of Blackhawk, and always will.  It also holds the track records at Gingerman, the north track at Autobahn, and the new configuration of Blackhawk.  Records that I’m sure will some day be broken, but for now, still stand.

I installed the completed new engine in the car in the middle of the 2008 season and won the last three races of that season.

I’ve got some dialing in to make sure I’m getting all the power I can from this engine.  Mostly by experimenting with the distributor to see how much advance this engine “likes.”  Also, I’m hoping I have a little more free time this summer.  Maybe I can get some extra “seat time” when they have mid week “track days” where I can get a lot of driving time.  I need to recapture the braking skills I lost in those years when I didn’t know how the brakes would work.  

I’ll be 75 years old this season.  I’m sure my reaction times aren’t what they used to be.  I can hardly believe I’m 75.  I’m still me inside there.  I hate the thought of losing more and more races as I get older and older.  And I hate the thought of piling up this great old car.  But you know, when I get out on that track, it forces my brain to be absolutely focused.  And I think that’s good.  It keeps me young.  You know what else; it’s more fun to be alive when you really like stuff.  At some point I’ll probably quit and I’ll be okay with that, but for now, I’m crazy about my wife and I’m crazy about racing my old AMX….. Life is good.

Ray Larson
Trout Valley, Illinois
February 23, 2009

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billd Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Moderator Group Forum Administrator Joined: Jun/27/2007 Location: Iowa Status: Offline Points: 30894	Post Options Post Reply Quote billd Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Topic: The Story of My Engine (by Ray Larson Posted: Sep/01/2009 at 10:03am
	THE STORY OF MY ENGINE …... FOR GEAR HEADS (As printed in the 3/18/09 National American Motors Drivers & Racers Association news letter) Last year I had to put a new engine block in my old AMX, and some friends were ribbing me about my plans to clear coat and paint the old block, and then make a bronze plaque for it. So I told them that I couldn’t not do that. For the past 37 years, that old 401 Javelin AMX and I had been through too much together. I told them a little of that story. Judging from the grins on their faces, I think even they began to think that old engine block deserved more than a trip to the junk yard. Here’s “the rest of the story”……. That old engine started life in my brand new 1972 401 cubic inch V8 Javelin AMX. It was red with a gold hood decal and tan corduroy upholstery. It was gorgeous. Actually, it still is. I had started a construction business back then so in its first 7 years it carried my tools in the trunk, pulled trailers with trees on them, and piled on 90,000 miles. I had so much weight in the trunk that in the winter, all I had to do was put snow tires on it and it would go anywhere. I used it as my truck and as my daily driver. But it was always fun and it was always fast. I remember one day in May 1979, I was on my way to a job in Chicago. As I sat waiting at a stop light, I remember looking off to the southeast and seeing a big plume of black smoke and wondering what was burning. I had no way of knowing that a DC10 passenger jet had just crashed at O’Hare killing 273 people. As I sat there, a red Pontiac Trans Am pulled alongside and gunned his engine. You know what that means. I looked over and saw the little chrome 454 on the side. He had his hot chick girlfriend with him. I had my tools with me. They were smiling and looking confident. There was a long stretch of open highway in front of us. The light turned green. We both took off like crazy fools and… I blew his doors off. At the next light she was still smiling but he wasn’t. I love that car. Over the years, whenever I think of that Trans Am, I think of that smoke. Later in 1979, I needed a pick up truck for the business. I thought to myself, “I paid $4250 for this car, I’ve put 90,000 miles on it, and I’ve had it for 7 years. I could give it away and I’d have still gotten my moneys worth out of it”. But I always liked it, and I always wanted to race it, and it still really looked good. I decided to keep it. I’ve done a lot of dumb things in my life. That wasn’t one of them. I had been racing motorcycles for years and I was getting too old for that so I decided to start racing the AMX in gymkhanas. You know, parking lot races with pylons. I didn’t win much at first but I kept on trying and that old engine kept on pulling. I began winning more and more. The car was pretty big, so squeezing between pylons on those tight little race courses wasn’t easy. I had heard that there were some big tracks that I could race at, but that they were scary. I decided to try it anyhow. In 1981, I raced my first race at Blackhawk Farms Raceway. Blackhawk is a neat track that winds through the woods near Rockton, Illinois. It’s near the Illinois Wisconsin border. Blackhawk has some of its own interesting history. Since it was built, some pretty famous names in road racing have raced there: the Andrettis, Sterling Moss, Paul Newman, Walter Payton, Boris Said, and Alan Jones to name a few. It’s a little less than 2 miles long and has 11 turns, kinks, and sweepers. As I recall, the longest straight is around a third of a mile long. The rest of the track is a lot of hard acceleration followed by hard braking. It’s a track that’s hard on brakes. But when I got my Javelin with its 401 V8 on that track, the first thing that went through my mind was, “This is what this car was made for!” I began racing at other big tracks around the tri state area too, Road America in Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin, Gingerman in South Haven, Michigan, The Milwaukee Mile, and of late, the north and south road courses at Autobahn Country Club Raceway in Joliet, Illinois. It took a few years, but eventually I began winning with some regularity. In 1984, I was racing at Road America. Road America was the longest track in the country, over 4 miles long. I was flying down the long front straight, the engine screaming. I looked down at my tachometer for just a moment and noticed that the odometer was turning over 100,000 miles, but that day I won the race and beat a 454 Corvette, a Porsche and a new 84 Corvette. Not only that, I drove the car to the track the day before, and drove it home the day after I should mention, the kind of racing I do is called solo road racing or high speed autocross. It’s for folks who don’t want to bang up their fenders in wheel to wheel racing. Lest you think that’s not really racing, let me quote the Sept. 2008 issue of Road and Track magazine. It was an article where they were having a shoot out between 10 of the world’s fastest cars, from the new Corvette ZR1 and Dodge Viper to an Aston Martin and a Lamborghini. They raced them against each other in 4 different forms of racing. A short track road course, a long track road course, an autocross track, and an oval track. When they described their tests of those cars in the autocross venue, they used the following words, “ ‘If road racing were any harder, they’d call it autocross’ goes the adage. Road racers may disagree, but if there is a better test of precision handling, point-and-squirt power delivery, braking prowess and transient agility in tight quarters, we’ve yet to find it.” With autocross you have to be on the ragged edge all the time or you don’t know if you’re going fast enough, and you lose. In fact, I heard recently that Midwestern Council of Sports Car Clubs, the umbrella organization I race with, was becoming concerned because the number and severity of accidents with their high speed autocross races was greater than with their wheel to wheel races. I’m not sure if that’s true or not. One season that I was especially proud of, was 1987. I was racing with Midwestern Council. I was still driving to the races, racing all day, and driving home. The car was 15 years old that season and had well over 100,000 miles on it. Back then, the race officials, never knew what class to put me in so they stuck me in “A stock”. When I got to the first race and saw the list of cars in my class, all I can remember was thinking “Crap!” The list included four Corvettes, a Dodge Challenger, a Porsche 930 Turbo Carrera, a Porsche 928, a Porsche 911 SC, a ‘77 Lotus Esprit, a Ferrari Testarossa, and a couple Audi 5000 Turbos. There were 19 cars in all in my class. But when the season was over, I had won every race…. and the class championship. I could hardly believe it. My wife, Mary, has always been my pit crew. She cracks me up. At the second race of that ’87 season, I was tinkering around with the engine between races and Mary was leaning on the fender watching me. I think her eyes were starting to glaze over when some guy came over and started talking to us. After a little bit, he said, “You know the guy with the Porsche Turbo Carrera?” I said, “Yeah.” He said “I think he’s thinking of protesting you.” I wasn’t sure what to say, so I just said, “Really?” Mary was taking this all in and finally she asked why he would protest me. I said, “I don’t know. Maybe he thinks I put a hot cam in my engine or something.” Mary thought about that for a little bit and then said, “Let me see if I understand this. This guy’s got a $55,000 Porsche Turbo Carrera, and you’ve got a 15 year old Rambler, and he thinks that’s a fair race…… but if you put a cam in the engine of your 15 year old Rambler, he thinks that’s an unfair race?” The guy and I thought that that was pretty funny. I was almost wishing the Porsche guy would protest me, just so I could use that line. He didn’t, and I won. After that season, I would tell pretty much anyone who would listen about the cars I had beaten that season. They’d just look at me and smile. Mary finally said, “Why do you bother telling everyone that story? No one believes you.” I decided she was right, so I began carrying the race results for that season with me. Then when I’d tell folks the story, I’d also show them the proof. I retired from my business in 1991…kind’a. I had more free time. In that 1991 race season, I raced against a lot of fast cars. Two guys especially were very good. Terry Horst and Dan Giesen. They both drove later model Mustangs and both were excellent drivers. One race Terry would win. The next race Dan would win and the next race I would win. It went on all season that way. When the track loud speakers would call B/P class (B/P stands for B/prepared and that was our class), I would try to wait ‘till the last minute before I went out on the track, so I could run over by the bleachers and watch Dan and Terry come through turn 4. I wanted to see what they might be doing better than me. Then I’d try to incorporate those things into my driving style, while continuing to do the things I thought I was doing better. Anyhow, Dan and Terry would always come screeching and sliding through turn 4. One day Mary and my brother Chip were in the bleachers watching when either Dan or Terry came screeching through. Chip noted, sarcastically, “Gee, I think his tires stopped screeching for a moment there”. Mary responded, “That’s because he was in the air.” Chip thought that was funny. When he told me later, so did I. But as I watched those guys screech through the turns, I began to think, “ You know, maybe there’s a lesson to be learned here. Unless you come through a turn fast enough to begin touching that point where you begin to slide, you don’t know how far away from that point you are, and so you may not be going fast enough.” I learned a lot from those guys that year. At the end of the season, out of 5000 points for the season, I had accumulated a few more points than either Dan or Terry, and I won the championship. I was lucky. A few years later, I told Dan Giesen that story, and how it was hard for me to force myself to push the car to the point of sliding without being afraid I’d slide off the track. He said that he was a farm kid. He grew up sliding around on gravel roads so he was used to that feeling. I think I heard that was true about Terry, too. At one race, I came through turn 4 in the Horst/Giesen style and my car started to slide. I kept my foot in it and kept right on going. I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but apparently my rear wheel started hopping violently. I didn’t even feel it, but Mary saw it. When I got back to the pits, Mary said sternly, “I don’t want you to go so fast.” That was probably the only time in the history of the world that a race driver’s pit crew uttered those words. In the middle of the 1992 season, I was racing at Blackhawk. I was coming through turn 4 a little too fast and a little too wide. I slid up on the outside speed bumps but kept my foot in it and kept right on going. I hadn’t realized it, but when I straddled the rough surfaces of the speed bumps, they rubbed on the bottom of my engine oil pan and unscrewed my oil plug. Oil began pouring out as I continued to race. I had gone almost a mile when I looked in the rear view mirror and saw clouds of blue smoke from oil spraying all over the hot exhaust pipes. I pulled into the pits. I really didn’t know what had happened. Before I turned off the engine I looked (finally) at the oil pressure gauge. It read “0.” I immediately turned off the engine. I looked under the car. No oil pan bolt. “Crap!” The track officials had to shut the whole track down and start spreading oil dry over all my oil. I was a very popular guy! I walked out onto the track and followed my oil trail all the way to turn 5 where the oil trail stopped. I looked around and sure enough, there was my oil plug laying on the track. I picked it up and ran back to the car. I jacked it up and screwed the plug back into the oil pan. The oil pan wasn’t damaged and neither was the plug. Amazing. An old friend, Dennis Duddles, had an extra case of oil. He gave it to me. I poured it into the engine and started it up. It clanked a little but it ran, so I raced it the rest of the day. It still pulled like a freight train. I won. I was really busy that summer so I raced the car for the rest of the year like that. It still clanked a little but I won the rest of the races and the class championship again. When I pulled the engine apart, the following winter, all the moving parts looked like they were coated with gobs of solder. When I think of finishing the rest of the season on that engine, racing wide open down the track with its insides looking like that, I must admit, I get a, “little engine that could” feeling about it. I brought it in to my friends, Mike Yank and his sons at Speed Performance in Wauconda, Illinois. They do great work. They have the only engine building shop I know of where you can eat off the floors. That’s important to me. That’s the way I keep my engine bay. I remember at one of the races, I was going through tech inspection. The tech inspector said, “Okay, pop the hood.” When I opened the hood, he staggered back and said, “I’ve eaten in dirtier places than that!” At any rate, Speed Performance rebuilt it in time for the next season. The only trouble was that the cylinder walls were scored so badly, that we had to bore them out .037 inches in order to clean them up. AMC’s 401 V8 is a small engine, and I had always heard that their cylinder walls were already bored out close to the limit, and if you bored them out more than .030 of an inch, you could have heating problems. Mike Yank got a feeler gauge with .018 of an inch on it. He said we would be taking a little more than this off each side of the cylinder walls. It looked like almost nothing. We decided to try it. When I got the engine back in the car the next season, sure enough it overheated. Not when I was driving or racing, just when I was idling. I dreaded long stop and go lights, but it really ran great and was very strong, and after a lot of screwing around and figuring, I designed an aluminum radiator that Fluidyne agreed to build for me. I think they only charged me $470 and it’s beautiful. I put my old stock fan shroud on and that solved the overheating when idling problem. It always ran cool as a cucumber when racing. After winning the 1991 season championship, I began an 8 year win streak. I won 37 straight races, broke 10 track records for B/P class and took home 7 class championships. At the September 20, 1997 race at Gingerman Raceway in South Haven, Michigan, I slid off the track and bent the right rear axle. I could still drive it, but the rear wheel would wobble. The car had 120,020 miles on it at that race. That was the last race of the season so I had all winter to fix it. I had come out of retirement that year to design and build a building/business that my brother and I would own and run. It was a project that turned out to be much more difficult and take much longer than I had anticipated. Because I was so busy, I decided to pay somebody else to do the axle work. That, also, turned out to be an odyssey that was much more difficult and took much more time than I anticipated. Usually when I would spin out and bend one of my rear axles, I’d get another stock AMC axle and stick it in myself. They were easy to work with and reliable …. except when I would slide sideways across a rough field. Then it was not unusual for me to put a little kink in the axle. I had heard of a company that was supposed to make some strong heavy duty one piece axles that would fit my car. I always liked the idea of doing well at the race track with mostly stock AMC parts, but those AMC axles were getting very hard to find and very expensive. When I called one of my AMC guys, Ted Richoz at Lou’s Jeep in Geneva, Illinois, he said he could only find 6 left in the whole country. So I had a set of those “after market” axles sent to the shop I had chosen. That shop had been highly recommended, but for the next seven years I raced with constant rear axle problems. Because I was so busy with my business project, I continued to bring the car back to the shop for the axle repairs. Looking back, I don’t know whether it was the fault of the shop or the axle manufacturer, but it made those years of racing difficult and frustrating. The new axles had pressed on steel collars that were supposed to hold the axles in place. I had started racing on Hoosier tires in that 1998 season. The tremendous side forces the car could generate with those sticky Hoosier tires, would overpower the grip of those steel collars and the axles would begin to slide out further and further as the day wore on. When I’d turn right, the left wheel would be pushed into its correct position, but the right wheel would be pulled out from under the fender a little. When I’d turn left, the right wheel would slide back in and the left one would be pulled out. When that happened, those collars would begin rubbing against the oil seals and oil would begin leaking onto my rear brakes. Pretty soon, I’d have no rear brakes. The first time I tried braking when that happened, I found I could go through corners faster than I thought. By the end of each day’s racing, the rear wheels and axles were sliding in and out further and further, and that tended to cause the car’s handling to become a little erratic. Over the next few years, each race would be a scenario where I’d start to race with 4 wheel brakes, then I’d have 3 wheel brakes and then just front wheel brakes. Front wheel brakes stop you pretty well, but 4 wheel brakes are better. That uncertainty, however, caused me to became more and more cautious when braking into corners, a habit I’m still working to overcome. In 2000 a fellow by the name of Bob Dudek came into my class. He was, and is an excellent driver, very fast. I lost 3 races in a row to him. I raced as fast as I could to beat him, but couldn’t. I’d roar through the corners with my rear wheels and axles swinging in and out, hoping my front brakes would perform miracles, but I couldn’t go as fast as Bob did. I was going pretty close to as fast as I usually ran, but not as fast as I have gone, and with Bob Dudek, I would have had to go as fast as I had ever gone. I still hold the track record for B/P class at Blackhawk, but Bob took home the class championship that year. You know that old saying, “Timing is everything.” That 2000 season was the only season my sister Lois ever came to see me race. She had been diagnosed with cancer but was doing pretty well that summer. We had a picnic at lunch and we all had fun, but I wish she could have seen me win. I started to win again the next season, but Lois died that winter. As I mentioned, back in 1998 I began racing on Hoosier tires. They have tremendous grip. They’d allow me to come through corners so hard that I began cracking my front wheels. It was a good thing I noticed those hairline cracks on the rims. The cracks went from the front side of the rim to the back side. It happened on both front wheels. Had I not happened to notice them, it could have been disastrous. I was able to get some forged aluminum racing wheels from Compomotive that are still working fine. Over the years, I had gotten into the habit of dropping the car into second gear in order to have the engine help the brakes slow me down for the corners. When I bought the car, I ordered it with the “Rally Pak” option, so it came with disc brakes in the front and drum brakes in the rear. When I first started racing, they were some of the best brakes on the track. But as the years rolled on and my car stayed the same, the cars I raced against got newer and newer with better and better brakes. I began dropping it into second gear earlier and earlier to help slow me down for the corners. I couldn’t upgrade my brakes because it would have put me into a different class. If I went into a higher class, I would have had to do a lot more work to the car to stay competitive and I didn’t want to do that. Anyhow, at the July 28, 2001 race, I came roaring down the straight into turn one. I hadn’t realized that all those years of dropping into second gear had been tearing my rubber motor mounts. I don’t have a lot of time to look at the speedometer, but I think I get somewhere between 110 to 115 miles per hour on Blackhawk’s long straight, and I have to get the car down to 50 or so to get through the 90 degree turn at the end of that straight. Anyhow, I began braking. When I got down to about 75 or so, I dropped it into second gear. I heard a terrible loud grinding sound and what looked like steam started to ooze out from the edges of the hood. “Crap,” I thought. “Something’s happened to the engine.” (No flies on me.) The car began sliding. I remember thinking “Damn, something’s coming out of my engine and I’m sliding in it.” It was kind of funny. It was like everything was in slow motion. I began sliding down the track sideways. I was looking out the windshield at the spectators along the fence. They were all looking at me with real big eyes and the kids were pointing. Then the car started sliding backwards. I thought, “Good, maybe I can coast backwards far enough to get off the track.” I wanted to get out of the way before Erik Guldberg in the Corvette caught up. I began looking in my rearview mirror to see where I was going. It was unusual. I’m not used to looking in the rearview mirror and driving 50 mph backwards, but I made it off the track before he caught me. Then I thought, “Crap, he’s going to slide in the same stuff I was sliding in and plow right into me!” (I know I say crap too often, especially at races.) Anyhow, the flag men warned Erik in time and he was able to slow down before he got to the slippery stuff. They had to shut the whole track down and get out the kitty litter again. It made me a very popular guy with the racers… again. After the emergency equipment guys towed me back to the pits, we discovered that the engine mounts had finally let loose, the whole engine had shifted forward, the spinning fan buried itself about an inch and a half into the radiator, and all my antifreeze poured out onto the track. That stuff is really slippery. I was very busy that year so I was unable to race the rest of the season. I took the radiator out, the fan off, cleaned the car up so it was immaculate, and put it away ‘till the following spring. When spring came, my schedule had slowed down and I was able to fix everything before the 2002 racing season started In 2005, I lost all my races, so my neighbor Tom Thinnes and I decided to pull out my lousy after market axles and figure out once and for all what the problem was. Tom owns his own trucking business and is a very knowledgeable gear head. When we got everything apart, we were stunned by the buggered up mess we found. We put things back the best we could. The axle housing ends were such a mess that we ended up literally caulking the oil seals back into place and hoped they would keep the oil off my brakes until I could come up with some other option. I vowed to replace the whole mess as soon as I got the chance. The caulk held and my brakes stayed dry and I won the first race of the 2006 season. But I was having a hard time finding a good alternative to my rear axle problem. The second race was the June 24^th race at Blackhawk. I was still racing on those crummy axles. I had had a couple of good runs, and was winning at that point. Mary and I were watching my brother, Chip. Chip is 21 years younger than me and he races now, too. He races a 1979 401 Spirit AMX in B/M class (B/modified). At any rate, Chip was coming through turn five. Turn five is a very fast sweeper. In my car, if I do it right, I can begin accelerating as I come through turn four and pretty much keep my foot to the floor all the way through turn five and all the way until I have to start breaking for six. It’s a real white knuckle experience though. You clip the apex of turn 5 and hang on, hoping like crazy that centrifugal force doesn’t pull you off the track before it straightens out again. Sometimes I don’t succeed in keeping my foot all the way down through that turn because all the way through it, my brain is screaming, “SLOW DOWN YOU DUMB SON OF A female canine!” But I do okay some of the time. At any rate, back to my brother. Chip was coming through turn five like a lunatic. He had to be going 75 or so and, if I had to guess, his brain was in the process of screaming, “SLOW DOWN YOU DUMB SON OF A female canine!” (If I ever read this story to my mom, I probably should skip this part.) Actually, probably everyone who races through turn five at Blackhawk has his brain screaming, “SLOW DOWN YOU DUMB SON OF A female canine!” As your car accelerates through the turn, you’re always worrying that, if you let the car go just one smidgen faster than you’re already going, the huge side forces will overcome your tires’ valiant efforts to hang on, and you’ll go sailing off the track into the weeds. Probably, all the while this stuff is going through your brain, your tires are thinking, “ARE YOU CRAZY!” Again back to Chip. As I said, Chip was probably going 75 or so. He was about a third of the way through the turn when his right rear wheel fell off. HIS WHEEL FELL OFF! He went sailing off the track in one direction and his wheel went sailing off in another direction. Before the car came to a stop he was about a half a block away. It was a huge relief when we saw him get out of the car and walk around the back to see what happened. When the emergency crew got his car back to the pits, we saw that the end of the rear axle had broken clean off. Chip had the same axle set up as I had, but he hadn’t had any problems with them… ‘till then. He told me that, the previous month, the end of Scott Urban’s rear axle fell off as he came down the straight at the Autobahn North Track. Scott had the same axles as Chip and I did, and each of us had used different installers. I decided that this was as good a time as any to stop racing on those crummy axles. I had started trailering my car to the races by this time, so I loaded my car on the trailer and called it a day. Luckily, I already had some pretty good runs in, so I still won my class. I was so fed up with the company that made my crummy axles, I didn’t care if I talked to them again as long as I lived, but Chip was angry and had plenty that he wanted to talk to them about, which he did. A couple of days later, Chip called me and said, “I know how you feel about the company that made our axles, but I talked to a pretty nice guy there who was knowledgeable and had a pretty good idea. Maybe you should give them just one more chance.” I called the guy and he did have a good idea. I always wanted to keep as much stock AMC stuff on the car as I could, but that was becoming more difficult as the years passed. His idea had the advantage of keeping most of my nice light old AMX rear end housing and, in addition, keeping my bulletproof old stock positraction differential with its strong and seamless operation. His idea was this. I would send my whole rear end to them. They would cut off the ends of the axle housing. That would get rid of my old buggered up ends, which were the only parts of the rear end where anything was wrong. They would then weld on “old style” Ford nine inch rear axle housing ends. That, in turn, would allow them to use tough Ford nine inch axles and bearings. He said he would cut AMC splines on the inner end of those axles so that the Ford nine inch axles would fit right into my old AMC posi. I’ve been hearing about how strong Ford nine inch rear ends are as long as I can remember, so this sounded good. There was one other option that this set up opened for me. It’s pretty hard to find some after market options for AMCs, but with Ford axle housing ends, I could put on rear disk brakes from Mustangs. Disk brakes on the back would be a big relief for me when racing. The problem, though, is that it would cost me two points. You see, the Midwestern Council rule book only allows a total of seven points in B/P class or I get bumped into a higher class, and I already had seven points. I thought, “I’m currently using two points for an after market carburetor. True, it’s chrome and looks neat, but my old carb worked pretty well, too.” So, I put my old carb back on, sent the whole rear end to the axle maker, and now I have rear disk brakes… and they always work. (I just knocked on wood to be on the safe side.) Remember when I was describing how “I” go through turn five at Blackhawk? The reason I wanted to emphasize the “I” part of the story is because of something that happened when I first started racing at the bigger tracks. I was asking for advice about the best way to handle the “kink” before turn seven from someone who had been racing for a long time, and was very good. He said something to the effect that, “You know you’re doing it right when you can keep your foot in it all the way through the “kink” ….and then start breaking for the turn.” I kept trying to muster the courage to do it that way for years, but it always seemed suicidal. I mean, there’s only a space of a hundred yards or so between the kink and turn seven, and turn seven is a 90 degree turn. I guess I never considered the fact that he was in a different class than I was, and his car was probably doing about 90 mph at that point on the track and my car was probably doing 110. At any rate, one year I got out on to the track and decided that, this time, I was going to keep my foot in it through that kink if it killed me. Probably a poor way of thinking about it. So, on my next run, I roared thru the kink ….and then put on the brakes. As soon as I put on the brakes, I knew this was a big mistake. There was no way I was going to slow down enough. So I just let off the brakes and turned. Hell, I wasn’t even to the turn yet, but I figured I’d probably do more sliding than turning, and I figured I might as well get a good head start on that turning part. I could hardly believe it. I made it. I bounced against the outer speed bumps and kept right on going. When I got back to the pits, I fantasized that the corner workers were saying, “Man, did you see that guy? He can really drive.” Anyhow, ever since then, when I give other drivers hints on the best way through a corner, I’m always careful to make it clear that that’s what works best in my car. Well, that brings us to the 2007 season. A fateful year for my old engine. I had won the first 3 races. It was late July and I had a couple weeks until the next race. I knew that I wasn’t going to have much time to spend on the car in those next two weeks. Also, I had been aware of a vibration over the past couple months that I hadn’t been able to locate. I had been racing 15 years on the engine since that rebuild after all the oil ran out, and that had been rattling around in my head. As I would find out later, the vibration was not the engine. It was the torque converter. The bolts holding the converter to the flex plate had loosened. That elongated the holes in the flex plate, and that allowed the converter to vibrate. Unfortunately, I didn’t know that then. One morning I woke up with a splitting migraine. Excedrin didn’t work so I ended up taking an injection of some heavy duty stuff. My headache went away, but I was still kind of drugged. I didn’t want to waste the whole afternoon so I told Mary I was going to go out and work on the car. She said, “Are you sure you want to work on the car in your drugged state?” It’s women’s work to say that sort of stuff. I said, “I think it’ll be okay.” That’s what men usually say. Big mistake! At any rate, I had decided I was going to put some old, softer, stock motor mounts back under the engine to see what affect it might have on that vibration. I jacked the car up and loosened the motor mount bolts and started to jack up the engine. It didn’t seem to move much. Then I heard a clunk. I got out from under the car to see what that noise was. In my drugged state, I had forgotten to open the hood. “Crap!” I opened the hood but everything looked okay, so I finished putting the old softer motor mounts back in and let the car down. That clunk sound still bothered me. I looked all over the engine bay, but saw nothing wrong. I took the air cleaner off but that looked okay too. What I didn’t notice, was that that big steel washer that held the top of the air cleaner from going down too far was gone. It had been split and fallen down into the secondaries of the carburetor. The nut that located it was still there but the washer was gone, and I didn’t notice. I felt uneasy, but not seeing anything wrong, I buttoned everything up and decided to go out for a little test drive. Everything seemed good. I decided that I’d better get it out on the highway to make sure everything was good at higher speeds too. I got out onto the highway and nailed it. That opened up the secondaries and dropped the big steel washer into the racing engine…..and ruined it. I’ve since told Mary that, if she ever again asks me if I’m sure I want to work on the car in my drugged state, and I don’t immediately respond, “I wouldn’t think of it Dear” she should give me a good swift kick in the butt. So I took out the engine and brought it in to Speed Performance. When Joey Yank got the engine apart we realized that the block was in pretty bad shape. Luckily, about 25 years ago, I had the chance to buy a new 401 AMC short block which was still in the crate … for $900. They were already becoming scarce and I figured, “With the abuse this engine takes, you never know when I may need a new one.” While Joey was taking the engine apart, he systematically determined what engine parts were salvageable. I told the guys that I had the new block, should we need it. After Joey had the engine apart, I was talking with Mike. I asked if he thought my old block was salvageable. He thought a little, and said, “ If the right guy had enough time, he might save it. However, with the money involved in rebuilding everything and the fact that you have a new one, why risk it?" It was hard to fault his logic, so I loaded the new block in my Jeep and brought it in to them. The guys asked what they should do with the old block. I said, “Let me think about that until tomorrow.” That night, I thought about all the things that engine had not only survived but all the things it accomplished. You know, all the things I just told you about…..and how I finally had to throw a steel washer into it, to do it in. I know it’s only a piece of steel, but I felt I owed it a better end than just carting it off to the junk heap. The next day, I told the guys to dip the block into the cleaning tank because I’m going to paint it and give it a place of respect…like I’ve done for the well over 100 trophies it’s earned. EPILOGUE: Mike and his sons Joey, and Tony did a beautiful job of rebuilding my engine. They were able to use my old cast iron heads, my old intake and exhaust manifolds, and many other parts…but not the old block. To make sure that the new engine wouldn’t starve for oil on hard cornering and braking, I had Don Schmitz and his son Donny of Kenosha, modify an AMC oil pan. They fabricated four swinging trap doors in the bottom of the pan to help insure the oil pickup would never suck air. When I brought that pan into Mike’s office, there were some other guys there, too. They all studied it over and were unanimous in pronouncing it a work of art. I did a lot of racing before 1991, but in ‘91, I began keeping log books on the car. As a result, my race records from ’91 on are more complete. I raced in some other race venues, too, but most of my races were with Midwestern Council. Between the 1991 season and the middle of the 2007 season with the council, the old engine raced in 69 races and won 58 of them. It set and re-set the track record in B/P 16 times during that time, and won 10 class championships. It holds the track record in B/P on the old configuration of Blackhawk, and always will. It also holds the track records at Gingerman, the north track at Autobahn, and the new configuration of Blackhawk. Records that I’m sure will some day be broken, but for now, still stand. I installed the completed new engine in the car in the middle of the 2008 season and won the last three races of that season. I’ve got some dialing in to make sure I’m getting all the power I can from this engine. Mostly by experimenting with the distributor to see how much advance this engine “likes.” Also, I’m hoping I have a little more free time this summer. Maybe I can get some extra “seat time” when they have mid week “track days” where I can get a lot of driving time. I need to recapture the braking skills I lost in those years when I didn’t know how the brakes would work. I’ll be 75 years old this season. I’m sure my reaction times aren’t what they used to be. I can hardly believe I’m 75. I’m still me inside there. I hate the thought of losing more and more races as I get older and older. And I hate the thought of piling up this great old car. But you know, when I get out on that track, it forces my brain to be absolutely focused. And I think that’s good. It keeps me young. You know what else; it’s more fun to be alive when you really like stuff. At some point I’ll probably quit and I’ll be okay with that, but for now, I’m crazy about my wife and I’m crazy about racing my old AMX….. Life is good. Ray Larson Trout Valley, Illinois February 23, 2009
	http://theamcpages.com http://antique-engines.com

SEdmonds Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Moderator Group Joined: Jun/21/2009 Location: Arizona Status: Offline Points: 8196	Post Options Post Reply Quote SEdmonds Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Posted: Sep/01/2009 at 10:16am
	GREAT story. Thanks for posting it. Gorgeous car - my jaw dropped with that first picture.

needafasterAMX Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List AMC Addicted Joined: Feb/20/2008 Location: TLH,Florida Status: Offline Points: 724	Post Options Post Reply Quote needafasterAMX Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Posted: Sep/01/2009 at 11:34am
	Awesome story, I didn't know people were seriously racing those old cars . After all these year of racing , It speaks volumes of how good these cars are, And this day and age, they are still a car to be reckoned with. And I would say ,He is one hell of a good driver. I would really like to see him race one day. Edited by needafasterAMX - Sep/01/2009 at 11:35am
	74 AMX, 401 Viper spec T56 6 speed trans Hydroboost brakes with rear disks from a Avenger 3:73 TG rear,now Trutrac with 3:15 A Turbo is in my future.

70 Donohue 390 Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Supporter of TheAMCForum Joined: Jul/11/2007 Location: S. Oregon Status: Offline Points: 4338	Post Options Post Reply Quote 70 Donohue 390 Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Posted: Sep/01/2009 at 5:21pm
	Thats the best story I've read on ANY forum in a long time. Great car & great history. Congratulations. Dad and I first went to Blackhawk (cool track!) in 1966 or 67 as gophers for Bob Graeffs DS Honda S600 and Danny Pohlabels EP TR3 for the SCCA Regionals. (Both went on to race in the run-offs in Atlanta in 1970). We spent most of our time at Nelson Ledges and Mid Ohio. We ventured to Elkhart Lake, Donneybrook, IRP and other tracks. Dad had sold his TR3 and wanted a newer sports car so he went to the Datsun dealer to order a new 70 240Z and they told him he would have to wait 6-8 months. He walked accross the street to the AMC dealer as he saw a r/w/b car inside. The 67 Cutlass S Convertible that I had for the first few months of my senior year of HS was history When he pulled in the driveway in a brand new 1970 Trans AM Javelin I about crapped my pants. We autocrossed it for two years in Dayton Ohio at the old Wright Patterson Air Force base Housing Area. The front straight was about 3/4 of mile as I remember and we got up to around 100 mph. What a great time we had. I finished first in year end points for 1970 AND 71 and Dad was second in 1970. Not bad for a Rambler Edited by 70 Donohue 390 - Sep/01/2009 at 5:22pm
	67 Rogue 290 Convert 70 BBO 390 5 Speed Javelin-under construction

idrambler Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Supporter of TheAMCForum Joined: Jul/02/2007 Location: Nampa,Idaho Status: Offline Points: 2942	Post Options Post Reply Quote idrambler Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Posted: Sep/02/2009 at 12:32am
	Thanks for posting this story....it was a good story the first time I read it and even better the 2nd time around......
	Jim....AMCRC Treasure Valley AMC Club, Pres 69 AMX 401/727 74 GremlinX 401/727race only 73 Matador 2dr HT 360/727

xtm10 Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Supporter of TheAMCForum Joined: Aug/12/2009 Location: New York Status: Offline Points: 173	Post Options Post Reply Quote xtm10 Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Posted: Sep/02/2009 at 5:00pm
	Great story, thanks for posting it
	68 SS/AMX clone 79 CJ7 Golden Eagle 304/turbo400 85 CJ7 w/chevy 350

amcrules00 Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List AMC Addicted Joined: Jul/02/2009 Location: EMPIRE STATE Status: Offline Points: 2488	Post Options Post Reply Quote amcrules00 Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Posted: Sep/02/2009 at 6:40pm
	A great read. Thanks so much for sharing this post. AMCRULES! Does anyone know if the author, Mr. Larson is member here? Edited by amcrules00 - Sep/02/2009 at 6:43pm

poormansMACHINE Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List AMC Addicted Charter Member Joined: Jun/28/2007 Location: Shoemaker-Levy9 Status: Offline Points: 12302	Post Options Post Reply Quote poormansMACHINE Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Posted: Sep/02/2009 at 7:01pm
	I don't believe he is but I can ask him.

AMCJOCK Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Supporter of TheAMCForum Joined: Aug/08/2008 Location: Salem, WI Status: Offline Points: 616	Post Options Post Reply Quote AMCJOCK Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Posted: Sep/03/2009 at 8:27pm
	BTW, look for a story on Ray and his Jav/AMX in an upcoming Hemmings publication. They recently interviewed him and took over a 100 pics of his car!
	Have fun with your AMC!!!

Racing Ray Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Supporter of TheAMCForum Joined: Sep/05/2009 Location: Trout Valley,IL Status: Offline Points: 35	Post Options Post Reply Quote Racing Ray Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Posted: Sep/05/2009 at 4:16am
	I'm the guy who wrote this story. I just became a member a few minutes ago. I want to thank Ron Hallack and the Web Masters for printing my AMX's story. I also want to thank you all for your kind words and interesting comments. I've made it to two of the first three races this season. I won them both. I missed race two when an old voltage regulator fried my coil and I was unable to quickly diagnose the problem. I'm racing at the Milwaukee Mile the day after tomarrow on Labor Day. Always intimidating! Very fast with that very hard concrete wall next to you. My wife worries that some of those 37 year old parts might break. So do I. I bought a new set of 275/50-15 Hoosier R6's to help me stay on the track...so here's hoping. Thanks again and wish me luck. Ray