I am very interested in the skid plate. Do you happen to have dimensions you could share. Widthe, thickness, hole locations and sizes? Thank you in advance.
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I am very interested in the skid plate. Do you happen to have dimensions you could share. Widthe, thickness, hole locations and sizes? Thank you in advance.
Any updates --- or adventures . . . with The Olive Tart?
And --- you might wanna consider entering Porsche's '50 Years of 911' . . .
http://www.porsche.com/microsite/50y...eeplink=site_1
Make one heck of an entry! . . .
We got up early to make the 6 o’clock with Bobby’s mother. Beneath our Sunday best we wore school bus yellow tee shirts emblazoned with a black imprint of a Goodyear Sports Car Special race tire tread down the back and faded jeans. After church we stripped down to our track garb in the car on the way back east towards their place in Northwest, just beyond the usually quiet potato fields of Bridgehampton.
Even though the sun was just up and still hung low on the horizon behind a sultry August haze above Peconic Bay, the earth was already starting to cook when Mrs. Straub dropped us off around 7AM on the corner of 27A and Millstone Road. We were deep into the woods when her ’62 Biscayne wagon glided away down the two lane and left us in a silent glade of summer green, making our way over the collapsing wire fences towards the scrub pines on the outside of Thunder Valley.
We worked our way under cover of the pines that stretched along the sandy banks on the perimeter of the track. We paused at the Light Bulb to watch the corner workers laze about the sheds and flag stations, sipping coffee and taking long drags on their smokes waiting quietly for the loud speakers to blare the alert for the start of warm ups. Maybe they were still bleary-eyed and hung over from the usual infield antics on Saturday night for they seemed not to notice us when we dashed across the chute and scrambled up the dirt embankment and hopped the fence into the paddock.
We did our best to look like we belonged and nonchalantly blended into the early morning routine of the paddock, first helping the short-handed to pull and fold tarps, still laden with morning dew, then haul gas cans to the pumps and roll tires to the Goodyear and Firestone trucks for fresh rubber. The thick necks and bulging arms of the tire busters poured sweat in the morning heat and their sour smell mixed with the odor of vulcanized rubber and carbon black fresh from the tire molds in Akron.
At the Goodyear truck we stopped to get a good look at a stack of impossibly wide Speedway Specials mounted on what looked to us like champ car wheels. The magnesium had oxidized to a crusty black with long exposure to humidity and brake dust courtesy of Ferodo DS11s. But the plain font on the machinist tape casting mark confirmed what we already knew: Halibrand Eng. Torrance, Calif.
We had arrived.
Arrived, that is, at that moment when race tire technology over took the chummy world of sports car racing and the AC Bristol, the old stand by for sporty car guys competing in D Production, rose like a Phoenix from the ashes, now transformed into the sine qua non of A Production racing: Cobra. The rules readers employed by Shelby at Reventlow’s old shop in Venice made sure that “mud guard extensions” and those pin drive Halibrand champ car wheels made the list of allowable options for the Cobra in production car racing.
We gaped in wonder at the ludicrous width of the back-end of Tom Payne’s Cobra in the paddock that Sunday morning. The impact of that Rangoon Red 289 comp roadster was such that we knew for certain that ever after flares would be mandatory on any ride we could ever covet. Flares were the new big thing. Really big.
By the time 1970 rolled around we had helped plenty of friends bond Thumper’s flares onto Stingrays, Porta Powered early Camaros and Mustangs to take TransAm rubber and tweaked the fenders of MGBs and yup, even 356s and 911s. But we longed to see a 911 with really wide body work and complementary rubber, the kind that would fill the arms of even the burliest of tire busters.
On the 1970 FIA homologation form for Type 911S, I guess the photo of the ST flare doesn’t look like much, just an unfinished form in primer attached to an erstwhile narrow body lightweight.
But for the hot rod Porsche crowd, it was cause for celebration. The new big thing had finally arrived in Stuttgart.
For me personally, it wasn’t until a couple years later when one quiet evening I walked from my apartment in Manhattan down to 72nd and 3rd and became acquainted first hand with the best flared shape there ever was: the wide body, slick-back coupe.
Cold air moved in over night and the summer birds had flown. Today only sharp beaked, blade winged birds huddled on the overhead lines, silent and intent on her movements in the pits.
She sat cross legged on the pit wall, a clip board mounted with triple Heuers in her lap. She wore a regal lion’s mane of honey colored hair, her slender limbs covered by a cashmere cardigan over a creamy silk blouse with a long soft pointed collar and tailored trousers. The long pointed collar and open buttons of her blouse took the viewer’s eye inexorably to a pagan display of devotion, a Spanish cross of Aztec gold that swung between her breasts, in turn just barely restrained by confetti colored underwear.
The society pages in Lisbon described her as a 28 year old Brazilian sugar heiress. Men stood awestruck in her wake. Women dismissed her as haughty, overbearing and heavy breasted. She knew all of this to be true.
Her husband’s rebuilt Group 4 car had been delivered track side the previous day, as crisp as a fresh pound note,its new identity documented by the Wagenpass in the open dash cubby. The car was simply driven up from the Werks by two young employees entrusted by Huschke von Hanstein: one a counter man from the race department and the other a vaguely familiar and curiously attractive woman with cornflower blue eyes. The pair left Stuttgart with instructions to deliver the car in good order and take especially good care of the aristocrat and wine merchant from Lisbon turned Group 4 privateer, a close friend of the factory.
The factory hands laid out the tools and spares in the pit before they ran the torque wrench over the lugs, checked tire pressures and completed the routine check list. A lengthy warm up in the paddock brought the fresh 2,5L up to operating temperature prior to being staged on pit-out for the early practice session at the Nordschleife.
Her husband stepped into the cockpit and fastened the belts. She saw him slot the shifter into the dog leg before easing out of the pit lane onto the track. As it hit the tarmac, she shared a pure kick of adrenaline. The suspension went to full squat as Pedro short shifted into second and gassed it hard. She touched the cross to her lips, set the Heuers running and noted the master time on the lap chart.
But the blade winged birds remained silent and intent. They watched only her hands, almost translucent in the flat light, cold with jewels and the colorless blood of serpents.
She was Castanza Castello-Branco.
Great thread and very cool car :)
They sat along a downhill grade where the trees seemed taller and the yards were all manicured to perfection. I guess there’s a street pretty much the same in all the burgs across the States. Its where the guys who are coining it can congregate and show the wealth a little, on the street of fine homes.
In the early ‘60s my usual bike route home from the candy store took me past their houses. I could coast along a twisting lane lined with big brick federals and cut stone colonials. You’ve seen the same homes in your town, surrounded by massive yards and accessed by stone cobbled drives.
But the fine homes were mere incidentals to me back then. I came home along that route because of the cars those guys had sitting in their driveways.
There was Percy the Factor who took a pink slip on a bright blue 212 Export to secure what turned out to be bum credit on one of his many 7th Avenue deals. Tan hides piped with blue and little crossed Pinin Farina flags on the chrome ashtray were always worth an ogle. My old man called him Percy the Shylock.
There was Mike Simone’s ermine white ’62 fuel roadster capped with a tuxedo black lid. It peeked out at the street from inside an overly tidy garage. The floor was painted gray with white circles in the each of the corners to detect errant dirt. There wasn’t any. My old man called him Mikey the Mobster.
And then there was Judge Rakoff’s place. He lived in the best house with a circular drive out front and a really swell detached three car garage. It had a wash rack inside and a one bedroom apartment on the second floor.
He was the only guy we knew with three cars. It was still post war USA and most folks were living like the Depression hadn’t ended. You know, frugally. But that was not happening at Rakoff’s place. That’s where I tended to linger on the way home, just to take-in his egg yolk yellow Super 90 B coupe and a gigantic, battleship gray 300S sedan. He called it an Adenauer.
His wife’s poppy red Eldorado rag top sported magnolia hides and was usually moored out on the drive. Mrs. Rakoff was no less spectacular in appearance. Her superstructure bore a striking resemblance to the dagmars perched out front on the bumper of her Biarritz.
Jim McCrady looped for the Judge up at the golf course and in the late afternoons after the caddy yard closed, kept Rakoff’s place and his stuff all straightened out and perfect. Jim was the first guy I met who knew how to keep a car really clean. In those days hardly anyone could make a car sparkle like a jewel. But Jim had that Super 90 coupe looking positively supernatural. All the glass was perfectly clear deep into the corners and even the wheel wells were Bristol.
McCrady was pretty relaxed about my visits. But the Judge would take one look at my ratty bike and say “Stay away from the cars, kid, don't touch the cars.”
Two years later he busted me for driving an unlicensed vehicle on public roads and had one of the village cops impound my go kart. My old man had to go up to the village court house to meet privately with Rakoff. It cost him $20 to liberate the kart. I can’t tell you what my old man called him after that.
Anyway, I learned from McCrady that a Porsche deserves to be kept clean and Jim was my only friend on that street of fine homes. But my old man just called him The Looper.
I'm enjoying the serial format Tom, but my Milk Duds go stale anticipating the next installment ...... :D
I remember reading that Alexander Dumas wrote twelve to fourteen hours a day, c'mon! ;)
We gathered at dawn.
To most we appeared unshaven idlers and loiterers, drinking cheap take-out coffee and eating buttered rolls from brown paper sacks.
But we regarded each other as the most faithful of communicants, car guys worshipping at a fallen altar of speed. We kept our Saturday morning Sabbath in the parking lot behind the shop, amidst tall stacks of discarded race rubber with sidewalls checked and brown from years of UV light. A filthy pile of busted cranks and cracked heads rose from an oil slicked puddle by the downspout against the wall, waiting for a scrap metal pick-up that never came.
I still remember that October morning in ’69. A huge golden yellow sun swelled up from behind the projects overlooking our congregation. And then a new guy appeared.
At one time or another they all made their way to the lot: racers and rallyists; restorers and wrenches; paint booth Rembrandts and PCA pundits; top fuel engine builders in jet boots and the Gucci shod tifosi from across the river on Manhattan's upper east side. It was the rhythm of men’s lives played out on broken asphalt, behind a hard luck shop near the projects in Long Island City. We were car guys.
It took us a while but over the next couple of Saturdays we wormed it out of him. The new guy's father was out of El Paso and was a talented wrench. He re-upped more than once in the USAF and ended his career at the old SAC base near Rome, in upstate New York. Once back in civilian life he opened a machine shop and equipment repair business serving the rural communities up there and had a taste for horse power. For a while he dragged his infant kid to the tractor pulls on the county fair circuit and ran a twin hemi powered rig under the monicker Deere Slayer.
Once we learned the new guy’s story it was clear he never had a chance: he was going to be a car guy from the get-go. At four his father had him driving quarter midgets every Saturday and Sunday and for his first communion he moved up to shifter karts. By the time he was confirmed he had broken both legs, his left wrist and his right collarbone twice. But he had eight years of wheel to wheel experience and knew the setups for all the fairgrounds and bull rings across three states. He was the first guy we knew who talked about weight jacking and stagger. And he knew how to mix in a little fuel with the avgas for special occasions.
But there was a lot that we didn’t know and that he never told. We had to wonder about the time two junior torpedoes from a shop linen service came by to enforce a subscription. They breezed in wearing expensive haircuts, Members Only windbreakers and sharply creased slacks talking loud, wanting to know why the shop wasn’t on their list of customers yet. They weren't all mouth and trousers either, clearly they carried with them a veiled threat of violence. The new guy calmly stepped forward from our a little group and just gave them a dispassionate gaze.
They recognized him alright and looked mighty uneasy. Their dark eyes flashed like knife points, but they addressed him with respect when they left. Those guys never came back. And we feared it was out of professional courtesy.
We thought we had met every kind of car guy on that lot out back of the shop by the projects. But Nestor Delgado was different.
Loved that, thank you :)
It's a story that could never be told.
Bobby and I sat low and deep in the broken back seat of a dirty old Lincoln sedan. Tab had nosed over to the curb right behind an eighteen wheeler where two guys in Knicks jerseys were selling watermelon and ice cold pop to the motorists waiting at the stop light at the intersection on Bushwick Avenue.
We had all the windows down to catch what little air the afternoon had to offer but it didn’t help much. The temperature that day ran well into the nineties and the macadam at the intersection in the Bushwick section sizzled and turned soft beneath a sky ablaze in high summer.
We were intruders in that neighborhood, as our sweaty pale faces made plain to all. We had a brown paper bag stuffed with green right there on the filthy seat between us and our wheel man, Tab, and the seller both knew we had it.
I saw Bobby gently reach his fingers into the back of his belt beneath a clean white tee worn loose and outside over the waist of his jeans. His nerves must have been getting to him. I knew that because his constant companion, a sheath holstered 1911A1, stayed at home that day, locked up tight in his old man’s desk drawer.
We reluctantly agreed it was best to go on this junket un-armed. Even if we got beat silly and robbed, it would still be better than doing a mandatory five for carrying without a permit in New York. Besides, our pal Nestor Delgado told us not to worry and that everything would be fine.
Nestor Delgado, our Saturday morning car lot pal, had told us about what he called a unique 911 and set up the buy through Tab, who in turn had another contact who knew the seller. After nosing over to the curb and waiting a couple of minutes, Tab casually slipped out from behind the wheel and stuck out his hand for the bag of money. Bobby handed it over and then Tab stepped up back of the truck and engaged one of the street side vendors in idle banter. Then they walked back down Bushwick Avenue, behind where we sat in the Lincoln and disappeared.
We stayed put right there in the back seat of the sweat box for a very long 20 minutes. We were like startled birds and just about took off when the guy in the Knicks jersey came up from behind us, swung open the back door of the Lincoln and said “Get out.” He introduced himself only as Three Note and told us that Lucky Harris wanted to meet with us. Right now.
This was not the way it was supposed to go down. Bobby had borrowed his uncle’s car transporter and it was still parked a couple of miles away, across town at Tab’s place. Tab was to hand the baf to Lucky Harris and then take us back for the transporter and return to get the car loaded up. In for a penny, in for a pound. We dutifully followed along to where Three Note led.
Lucky Harris, aka Larry Harris aka Stephen Vanderburgh was an urban legend. He owned an eclectic assortment of old super stock drag cars, pre-war Alfas, early F-cars and other neat stuff . But he was not exactly the sort of guy you would happen across at the annual lawn party hosted by the American Bugatti Club in Newport.
We were in Bushwick that day to score the bones of an old 911 race car. Under exactly what circumstances Lucky Harris got it, no one was telling. But it came with a couple of crates of parts and a clean bill of lading out of Bremen. It was more or less complete according to our pal Nestor Delgado and he absolutely guaranteed that we would like it. The price was supposedly fair and there was no tire kicking permitted. But he wouldn’t tell us exactly what it was. Could be, we thought, Nestor didn’t really know. I still wonder about that because we didn’t know either, even after we bought the car.
Three Note walked us around the corner and then stopped in front of a graffitoed two story with a brick front. He rapped on a steel door and looked up at the wire caged windows on the second floor. When the door swung open he herded us quickly inside. Once our eyesight adjusted to the darkness, we were surprised to see Tab smiling at us, standing in front of a long line of dusty old race cars. What was wrong with this picture? It struck us immediately that Tab wasn’t holding our bag of money, that’s what.
Then we saw why Tab was smiling. There they were: Sox and Martin Ram Chargers, Grumpy Jenkins’ Nova out of the pages of Hot Rod; a metalflake blue Holman & Moody AFX Mustang with a Hilborn injected Ford SOHC. Further down was a lumpy TdF backed up by an 8C2300. On and on. It was a stash like no other. What was the common thread? Well, every one was factory built, factory sponsored or factory raced.
Back in a dim corner of the garage we saw a familiar shape, cloaked in a dusty film over Blut Orange paint.
But first business was to accept an invitation to go upstairs to meet the man himself. We did our best to decline as gracefully as possible this hospitality but you know, in for a pound… It was a long walk up those stairs with Tab following behind us.
Lucky Harris had a dry bar upstairs in his office and he insisted we drink a toast to seal the deal. He had a good manicure and you could have seen the cracks in your teeth reflected off the shine on his loafers. They say that in his salad days that entire room was knee deep in bundles of neatly stacked legal tender. It took us a while to realize that Lucky had been the other guy in a Knicks jersey selling soda pop along side Three Note off the back of the truck on Bushwick. He watched us before going back to the garage and changing his clothes to meet us.
It didn’t seem like the right occasion to dilly dally. We downed our drinks and then Tab took us back for the transporter. When we returned to Lucky's garage the car and three crates were outside under the watchful eye of Three Note. We loaded up and got out of Bushwick.
What was it? We weren’t sure back then. We made that 911 as just some kind of factory rallye car, a tarted up 69S missing its front carpets and rear seats. We were cheesed at Nestor because we had been hoping for an RSR or at least an ST.
Bobby stuck an ad in the Sunday Times and flipped it two g’s to the good. We handed the parts over to Nestor for setting up the deal. But when Nestor found out we flipped it he could only smack his big hairy mitt on his forehead and call us idiots, total complete idiots.
I guess we were slow learners. Thirty years on Cornpanzer taught us how to identify a 69S GT. Go figure.
I guess that Lucky Harris never made it to Pebble, but I bet that every now and then, one of his old rides makes the pilgrimage to the lawn by Carmel Bay.
It's a story that could never be told.
(This is a fictional story. Any similarities of characters or events described herein to actual persons, living or dead, or to historical events, are purely coincidental.)