Minnick kidded us good-naturedly about our half-step attempts at producing a noxious, oily, smoker. I wised off: “You know anybody who can do one?”
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We put some air in the 10.50 Firestones. Minnick let go. He came out of the bleach box with the skins on fire. We registered the car at the starting line and he buried the throttle time and again until shooter Green felt he had it down. The rest of the mission got diluted. We
might have slipped across the street for a burger or two at that typical San Gabe Valley beer bar, hard by a rock quarry in some sterile, gray topography that had never been tickled by irrigation.
We thrashed the tune-up hard that afternoon but couldn’t better a string of 11-twenties. To maintain my fictitious, unreasoning contest (still unbeknownst to McCraw), our car would have to perform at least as well as Tritak’s ‘Cuda. It never did. But I said that it did by tenths. A little while later, Pete caught up with me, looked me straight in the eye and said: “Tell me how good that car ran again? There’s no freakin’ way it ran that good. It took us months to find out what the car liked. You couldn’a figured it out.” Then he puffed on his cigarette and smiled his “yeah, so what?” smile. I thank the Fates there was no Internet back then.
SOURCE:Head on over to http://www.carcraft.com for stories from the current crew at Car Craft magazine. Scanned pages from Car Craft - copyright Peterson |
Involvement with Coke spoke succinctly of the Car Craft Hemi Cuda’s destiny. It disappeared to Atlanta. A year later, we saw it at the Indy Nationals. It was a SS/DA car called the “Legal Eagle” (details unknown). The rest is way too sketchy to be reliable. The last I heard of the Hemi car, or what was left of it, a tree was growing out of the engine compartment. Maybe. It was basically tossed in field and left to rot. Maybe. Fifteen years after all this (1985), the phone rings. It’s a guy from Sunland, California. He says he’s got a bodyshop and the old CC Hemi ‘Cuda body is up on the roof of the building. Maybe. Did I know anybody who’d be interested in this gnarly lump of nostalgia? No. Did I know any cool stories about the car? No. There was no reason to harrow salted earth.
