The Standard 1320's BIG Swede
 

We have discussed "Legs Under" Dragsters many times on the 1320 e-Group.
Here's a couple of pcxs of a "Legs Under" owned by Big Yohns back in the 60's.
 
Can you spot the clutch pedal?
A very famous "Legs Under" dragster built by Kent Fuller
was the Stellings & Hampshire Red Stamp Special.
Check out the Tee of it in the 1320 Store
Before I got my first car, Arvy Mack, part owner of The Big Wheel
Auto Stores bought this car from Ivo in the fall of 1962. It ran with a 454
Chrysler on gas normally. Arvy at various times ran an Enderle Barndoor,
a Hillborn 4-port and a Slot by Scott. At our urging Arvy put
Hillborn Stack Injection on it for the World Series in Cordova in 1963
and tried to run as a B/FD with 90+ % Nitro. However, it was a 9 to
1 gas motor and wouldn't fire much of a load so that was a one time only experiment.
 
A/Gas Dragster - 1963
 
On Gas Blazing the Slicks
Match Racing on Gas in 1963
Boy, Big Yohns, you sure moved the fuel tank higher or is it loose?
Big Yohns tells me that it's because of the Slot by Scott injector
it liked gravity feed.

For 1964 Arvy built a 392 Fuel Motor and added the nose piece.
He only ran it a few times, once was at Cordova for a match race with
the Guzler. The car made an abrupt right turn each run, right off the line.
Arvy parked the car when he got home and I took it over the
next year.
 
 
Mid-season we had a really bad clutch explosion and sawed the car almost in two.
No one was hurt. We repaired the car and stretched it about two feet from original I think
112" to 130 something. Best e.t. was a very low eight second and we ran about 198 best,
never could quite squeeze a 200 out of it.
The engine was a 392 + .030 with an Enderle Barndoor/Isky Cam etc.
I don't think we ever ran much over 90 percent. Ran the
same rods, pistons etc. all season, so we weren't leaning on it very hard.
This was my first effort to actually run a car and do all the maintenance myself.
I kept the car at home and did everything with no help during the week.
Doug mixed fuel etc. at the track. Normal Top Eliminator money was $100,
so my main objective was to run as hard as I could without breaking anything.
Hoover was the Big Frog in our small pond in 1965.
 
This is the Ivo-Pepmuller Car when I owned it.
We ran under the name of The Big Wheel. I only have one or two shots
of it during my ownership. Doug Paton was the driver and we ran the car during 1965.
 
 
Big Yohns' Second Car
 
Over the winter of 1965-66, my friend Lyle Haley found a uncompleted car while visiting California
Here are two pcxs of the car as it looked when he located and bought the car for me for $1,200
The chassis was a RCE small block car. I bought block, crank
and heads at a local Chevy dealer. The car was not finished until June of 1966.
We raced it at Minnesota Dragways, Winnipeg Canada,
Fargo/Moorhead and Rockford IL.
We finally got a few 200 mph runs with mid seven second e.t's. I don't remember any specific times.
We were the last entrant into Mickey Thompson's 200 MPH club.
 

"Doug Paton drove this car as well as the Chrysler car the year before.
He and his wife Beth and I and my first wife Joan were the track
crew. Joan drove the push car. Mid season Denny Preuss joined us as a crewmember."
 

The car was fun to run and we ran it all year on the same rods and pistons too.
We simply had no money for spares, so I didn't have even a spare rod and piston.
We ran 95% and up in this car with about 40 degrees in the mag and as I said it would
run 200 and 7:50's, but we kept it a little rich. These are the only pcxs I have of the car.
My driver, Doug Paton, moved to California in the fall of 1966 and I
wanted to run the car once more at Rockford.
Vern Anderson agreed to drive. On the first run, we lofted the blower and Vern got oiled in.
He couldn't find the chute release and was disoriented,
went off the left side of the strip but thought he was off the right side. he kept steering
left to get back on the strip and kept going further off the track.
He crashed badly and virtually destroyed the car. I never even tried to fix it,
however I gave what was left to Doc Halladay (Telstar) and he and Jerry Finn
revived it and ran the following season.
After the crash during the 66-67 winter , I sold what was left of the motor to Ky Michaelson,
who later became the Rocket Dragster Impressario.
 
Tom Hoover told me that a buddy of his, Keith Peabody had bought Zane Schubert's
small block Chevy RCS car, but had no scratch for a motor.
I met with Keith and we decided that I would build a motor and put in his car and he would drive.
The car was painted Black by Jon Kosmoski owner of House of Kolor.
His shop burned down and our aluminum body panels were somehow not damaged.
Big Yohns' Third Car
 
This is the ex-Zane Shubert/ Herbert Cams RCS car.
Zane was the first to go 200 with a "Belly Button Motor" with this car.
If the small block was a Belly Button Motor, I hesitate to think what the Big Block Motor
might be. Anyway, Keith "The Pea" Peabody was driving and we had a 427 Chev in it,
our second Big Block car.
 

I built another 427 with parts from the local Chevy dealer.
This time we ran some new stock HiPo rods too.
We ran it mostly on about 90% and toyed with 200 every run but seldom got there.
It was a mostly stock engine, with stock crank and rods,
4-bolt block, MT Wedge Chrysler pistons of some sort
and basically stock heads. We ran a roller cam, but I can't remember whose,
the lifter galleries were drilled for a half hole for roller guides. Did more
than one cam grinder have this style of indexing in 1967?
It was really light, just over 1100 pounds. It looks like
The Pea was experimenting with a little clutch slippage.
 
The trailer rig in the background is Jim Lutz's deal for his and partner
Myron Lundbergs factory backed Olds fuel funny car.
 
That's me standing on the side of the track with my hands in my pockets.
 


We got the car together late in the spring and ran at Minnesota Dragways a couple of times
and then decided to go to Union Grove for their big Memorial Day blowout.

We got there and every touring pro in the country was there.
There were about 30 cars trying for 16 spots. Garlits, Schwartz, Kallitta,
Hoover, Robinson (all three with cammers), The Greek, The Guzler,
and about 23 more hitters, and us.

We decided to put 97% in it, 40 in the mag and sharpen it up a little with the jetting.
One run, we get in or blow it up and watch, or go home. Hoover volunteered to come up
to the line and set the barrel valve.

We had 2" headers on it and it was loud, I mean really loud and sharp.
Peabody sat there waiting for Tom to come up to the motor and just as Tom reached out with the wrenches,
Peabody whacked it. Hoover came off the ground and turned around and came back
to me and shook his head up and down and we waved Peabody to the starting line.

We ran in the right lane and the car went like an arrow and really hauled a--,
but Peabody, not being a featherfoot, busted the throttle pedal mount and went over centerline.
When he couldn't get off the throttle he touched the clutch and the motor blew and oiled him.

From the starting line we saw a huge dust cloud after the cars cleared the traps
and the announcers went nuts. We took off in a hurry, remembering
Vern's crash from the year before. When we got to the car it was in the left lane,
but the chute was gone from the shrouds, no cloth at all, just the shroud lines.
Peabody was pretty excited and babbling about weaving around and leaning this way
and that and steering into the lean. I just looked at the motor and wrapped
what was left of the chute on the car and we pushed around to the return road.

The car that had run the left lane was there and the guys were unwrapping
our parachute from their front tire. It turns out that Peabody crossed the center line
to the left and the car in the other lane ran into our parachute which
wrapped up in the tire and pulled the other car into the back end of our car.
The other driver apologized for hitting our car. I was incredulous, "what do you mean, hitting our car?"
He pointed to the seat in our car and it was dented,
and he said he hit us there and then went on past our car.

It was a pretty quiet ride back to the pits, where the first person we saw
was Jerry Finn, a buddy of mine, formerly of the Finn, Manke, Halladay "Padded Cell" top fueler.
Jerry told Peabody he had been coming in the entrance road just as we ran and saw everything.
He said that was the greatest job of driving he had seen.
He said that after the car spun around when the other car hit us, at about
190 mph, the way Peabody guided the car out through the light posts lining
the track and then around and back through the posts and onto the track simply beat
anything he had ever seen at a dragstrip.

Peabody and I were speechless. I looked at Peabody and he said he had already
told me about not being able to see, and when the car leaned he steered that way and when it
leaned the other way he steered that way. He had no idea where he was or what he was
doing. I decided then and there that I didn't want to do this any more.
That was the last run we made as a fueler.

The year before, Vern Anderson had broken his back in the
accident at Rockford, now this. It was too much.
We decided to finish the year racing, but as Top Gas so I built another 427 for gas.
We lightened everything we could lighten, and at best with cast iron block and heads
we weighed 1080 full of water, oil and gas. Peabody repainted the car yellow and green stripes.
Zane took all the weight off that he could when he was running 200 with a small block.
There wasn't any torsion bar inside the front frame tube.
The torsion bar arms were bolted directly to the frame tabs. No Suspension.
It had a Halibrand non-quickchange championship rear end with a tube axle
and one brake assembly on the right side.
On gas we had Donny Hampton prune the blower case and trim the manifold.
It had an aluminum can with no liner. One time we followed Ron Colson
onto the scales with his Stiletto car and we were like 30 pounds lighter,
he was incensed. He had titanium bolts and had drilled everything on his car for lightness.

We never thought of the Surfers trick of running without an idler pulley by
picking belt and pulley sizes to just fit, but we couldn't have run a bigger front pulley than we did.
It already hit the track during shutdown and we used a dolly to tow the car around cause the big
block was about two inches longer than the small block and the dump
angle was so severe that the blower pulley almost touched the ground at rest.

We went to Cordova for the World Series of Drag Racing the weekend before Labor Day
and as luck would have it, we drew Billy "The Kid" Scott first round.
Peabody was with him until we hit the bump in the bad lane that we were relegated to by the slower e.t.
Back into the trailer and go home.

We set the track gas dragster e.t. and top speed records at the last
scheduled race of the season at Minnesota Dragways Labor Day weekend.
Something like 7:85 and 187 mph. One of the stock rods snapped
and put a hole in the block. On the way home I decided I was done.
I told Peabody we'd unload the car at his place and he could pay me something
someday for what was left of the motor. I towed the trailer home
and sold it over the winter to Denny Darragh.
I still have the toolbox and some photos. And the memories, ah,the memories. Big Yohns

P. S. One day about two years later Peabody called me and said he had some
money for me for the motor. There is honor among racers. B. Y.
 
Jumping to 2000
 
First shot is me, son Kol and daughters boyfriend Marc in the trailer at CHRR 1999.

Second is me with my friend from Minneapolis, Jim "Sweddy" Swedberg who drove at CHRR99.
Jim has driven top fuel, Alcohol dragsters etc. for 30 years and now lives in
Grand Forks ND and has his own A-Fuel Blown Donovan FED.
Sweddy and I are about 8 years apart in age, but we learned at CHRR that we grew up
3 blocks apart and he was my folks paper boy after I married and left home.

We qualified twelfth at CHRR 99, our first race.
We drew the eventual winner second round, the McKray, Algire and Enriquez entry.
Sweddy cut a 4:08 light but we suffered a performance gap of about 6/10ths.
We lost, but we made it to second round at our first race.

The car lifts the front wheels every run, just like this.
And This...

Photos by Dawn Mazi
 
After CHRR we finished installing our Cygnus Race Computer
and in December we took the car over to Carlsbad Raceway.
Howard Haight helped install the computer and also came to the track
the next week to help us sort out operation of the computer and mentor
Kol in his quest to learn to drive a race car for the first time at age 43.
 
Howard gives Kol some tips.


Howard, who drives the Nostalgia Top Fuel car called the Circuit Breaker made a pass and ran faster,
at almost 172, than the car ever had before. Then it was Kol's turn.
Here's Kol's first time in the car on the track.

Our next outing was to Palmdale, LA County Race Track, for licensing.
Bob McKray took an interest in our efforts and offered to accompany us and help to get Kol licensed.
 
This was January 2000. Here's Kol and Bob.

This is after Kol's sixth and final run, all completed unbelievably within three hours on one day.
 

He has now qualified for his license.
 

I don't know which one of us was more relieved that this was over.
Kol, because he was showing great natural ability, or me because
nothing had broken and it didn't appear that I was putting Kol in harms way.
 
Here is 3/4ths of my crew. On the left is Dave Dewars, who partnered with Sweddy for years,
racing dragsters back in the Midwest.
Seated in the car is Dewayne Engness, former owner/driver of cars called Hot Sauce
from the Fargo /Moorhead area and also former owner of a dragstrip in that area as well.
On the right is the shoe, Sweddy. Bob Meyer, the chassis builder, came along as well to
assist with running the car, but he had wandered away.
At the Goodguys March Meet, Kol was unable to drive due to business conflicts,
so once again, Sweddy stepped into the car. Here
he's conducting a ritualistic experiment, quaintly called a "Burnout".
We went out first round here, but the car ran well. Here's Sweddy in a typical launch mode.
 
A race car has to have a place to rest, after the races are over, and be prepared for the next outing. Here's mine

Here is me and Kol and Marc after completing the
preparations for Pomona.

The next shot is of the workers creating a spot next to the garage,
gotta have a to park the motorhome and trailer.


Having everything at home is really a pleasure, instead of the way it used to
be with the race car and trailer at Kol's house and the motorhome in storage.
Everything was difficult. I can't say how much this has helped.
 
Kol's First Wheelstand
 
Here are pictures of the takeoff, gaining altitude and the landing at Pomona Goodguys meet.
This was a bad attitude and not something we want to ever repeat.
P. S. The first and last shots are by Cody Coleman.
 
oh...oh....
Kol doing his best impression of The Frantic 4's Norm Weekly or TV Tommy Ivo
Tires Flat, Chassis bent, but Kol doesn't lift... his Greek impression.
 
Check out the height of the wheelie bar, Kol don't need no stinkin' wheelie bar...
wheelie bars are for sissy drivers, right Kol?
Lee...
 
As of 8/01/2000 the car's best times are 7.70et @ 172mph and runs in Jr. Fuel Class
 
9/10/00 Sears Point, CA ~ 7.62et @ 175.6mph