Not Quite 75 Cents

What’s this?

It is the remnants of one of the ATQMRA’s most successful cars, the Zrinski “Six Bits,” the Crosley-powered #75 driven to multiple race victories by Jack Duffy.

Included among those victories was the one-and-only automobile race run inside New York City’s Madison Square Garden more than 40 years ago.

It is now in the hands of Lou Zrinski once again, and Lou is undertaking a full restoration.  (Click the photo for an enlarged view.)  Jack has his helmet bag ready!

An interesting sidebar to this story is that Jack Duffy was the only driver this car ever had.  In the years when the driver was one of the parts most often changed in a race car, the relationship between car owner Zrinski and driver Duffy was solid.

Here is another shot of the car, with Duffy at the wheel, taken after a feature race win at the Freeport Stadium in 1975:

A Stock Car?

What’s this doing here?

It’s here because the smiling young driver in victory lane at Freeport over 40 years ago vacated the seat in this street stock Camaro and began racing with the ATQMRA.  (Click the photo for an enlarged view.)

He’s Joe Schaefer, who got his start in racing at the wheel of this Camaro in 1974, driving for Fred Tuski.  The team had quite a year, winning eleven features that season.  Those of us in the ATQMRA witnessed most of those victories since the TQs were racing at Freeport on a regular basis.

It was obvious that Joe’s success was due both to the advantages of the light and nimble Camaro – most of the Freeport street stocks were mid-size and full-size cars – and to his smoothness at the wheel.  Clearly, Joe had the knack.

But at the end of the year the track management – Don and Gino Campi at the time – told Joe that he could no longer race in the street stock class, that he was required to move up.  Problem was, he did not have the money necessary to advance, so he and Fred instead purchased the #18 TQ from Pete Petraitis.

They repainted the car white and burgundy and re-numbered it X-1.

Joe started the 1975 season in the ATQMRA but soon landed a Late Model ride, so he only raced the TQ when time permitted. He  won the Late Model Race of Champions qualifier that year so he headed back to the stock car world.  He later drove Modifieds for Lou Timolat, a former midget driver himself and helicopter traffic pilot for WCBS radio in New York, until injuries ended Joe’s racing career in 1983.

During the time that Joe had the TQ he raced it at the Long Island tracks as well as a time or two on the dirt at Grandview and an occasional trip to Pine Brook.

Joe Schaefer went on to become President of Konig American, and he contacted us to help fill in any blanks in the history of the race car, which is now restored as the #18 and participating with the Vintage Club.

42 Years Later

A few minutes before the doors opened for the annual Motorsports show in the Greater Philadelphia Expo Center in January of 2014, the freshly-restored Barclay #93 stands ready in the ATQMRA booth.

The car was looking extra-sharp and attracted plenty of attention during the weekend-long exhibit.

The ATQMRA and the Vintage Club occupied a shared display space, calling attention to both the 2014 racing schedule of the modern TQs and to the activities of the Vintage Club.

Below is a photograph of this same car, at New Egypt Speedway 42 years earlier, with Jim Barclay up on the wheel.  (Click either photo for an enlarged view.)

Show Biz!

When the Tom Cruise movie Days of Thunder opened on June 27, 1990, Rich Tolerico’s Badger TQ was one of two race cars on display in the lobby of the Blue Star Cinema on Route 22 in Watchung, New Jersey. The other was Larry Brolsma’s stock car, which was far more appropriate for the film but since the theatre manager was a friend of the ATQMRA, a TQ got in the door too.  (Click the photo for an enlarged view.)

Before the movie began a drawing was held to give away tickets to an upcoming race at the Flemington Fairgrounds.  Pine Brook had closed the prior October, and Flemington would be gone in another 12 years.  Today the Blue Star Cinema isn't around, either.

Rich Tolerico remains active in TQ racing.

Days of Thunder, by the way, was a movie that got middling reviews at best but which was savaged by Chris Economaki, who gave it one-fifth of one star.  It is perhaps best remembered for this 18-second exchange between Robert Duvall, as the crew chief, and Cruise, as the driver.

Ed's Derby

We can draw a line from the Vintage Club presentations at the 2013 ATQMRA banquet to that year's “Turkey Derby” at Wall Stadium.  At the banquet a new award was presented in the memory of Ed Enes, and it was Ed Enes who got the ATQMRA on the November schedule at Wall.

The Turkey Derby began as a big year-end special for the Modifieds that raced weekly at Wall each summer, along with the support divisions that also raced weekly.  So it was a bit of a coup when Ed, as president of the ATQMRA in the 1970s, struck a deal with Jennie Nicol to add the TQs to the program.

The ATQMRA has been a part of the Turkey Derby ever since.

In this photo taken by Jim Smith at a pre-Derby practice session in 2013, then-new ATQMRA President Buddy Sload leads the TQs onto the track.

We need your vintage photos!  Help us keep the “Vintage Photo of the Week” going by sending us your pictures and information.  Use this email link – thank you!

Vintage Words

What follows is the text of Bob Marlow's opening remarks at the 2013 combined banquet of the ATQMRA and the ATQMRA Vintage Club:

The yearbook has a vintage TV Guide vibe to it this year.  But television can’t compare to racing.

In February, 1973, now almost 41 years ago, I accepted an invitation to go to the Can-Am sanctioned TQ races at the Daytona Memorial Stadium in Florida.  That invitation was extended by Alan Mollot and Ed Enes, about whom you’ll be hearing more later.  Alan and Ed had a state-of-the-art tow rig with which to take Alan’s race car to Florida.... Ed’s two-door Pontiac and Alan’s single-axle open trailer.  There was a toolbox in the trunk of the Pontiac.  What more do you need?

Well, there was a fuel crisis at the time so there was at least one if not more 5-gallon cans of gasoline in the trunk, too.

We left from Ed’s house in the Bronx during a snowstorm.

Why did I go on that trip?  Why not – if I had stayed at home, with snow falling, what would I do, watch television?  The top five TV shows at the time were All in the Family, Sanford and Son, Hawaii Five-O, Maude, and Bridget Loves Bernie.  Yep, Bridget Loves Bernie was a top-rated show.

Well, the week we were in Florida there was also The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Gunsmoke was still on the air, Ironside, Adam 12, or The Flip Wilson Show.  I could have watched Marcus Welby, M.D., The Waltons, The Carol Burnett Show, or even Monday Night Football with Howard Cosell and Dandy Don Meredith.

What wasn’t on TV in those days was racing.  The first start-to-finish Daytona 500 on television didn’t happen until 1979, the Indy 500 was shown on an edited tape-delay basis, and aside from the occasional race segment on ABC’s Wide World of Sports, there was virtually no racing on television.

The Partridge Family or Barnaby Jones weren’t going to keep me home when there was a race to go to, just slightly more than 1,000 miles from my home.  Alan, Ed and myself had a very memorable trip.  We wouldn’t remember a thing about any of those TV shows had we watched them.

Racing creates memories.  The Vintage Club is all about keeping those memories alive.

Chocolatetown

Every year we attend the annual Antique Automobile Club of America's Eastern Division Fall Meet, better known to old car enthusiasts simply as "Hershey."  We go every year, and every year we are saddened by the sight of the beautiful Hershey Stadium.  It's still a beautiful arena but today it no longer has the race track on which the ARDC midgets raced in the late 1960s and on which the ATQMRA raced in the early 1980s.

Today only the straightaways of the track remain, turns one and two having been eliminated in favor of a right-angle walkway, and turns three and four occupied by a large stage for concert performances.

The AACA uses the stadium for the race car demonstration runs that accompany the big gathering of the old-car faithful, but the cars can only tiptoe around the walkway and the stage.

In this photo from the ATQMRA races at Hershey now some 30 years ago, a remarkable seven cars are crammed into a small portion of the otherwise spacious Hershey track.  Click the photo for a larger view, and count cars.  There are eight if you include the tiny tiny piece of one just entering the frame from the right.

Ron Smith is the owner-driver about to test the roll cage on his #48, with two cars trying to occupy the same space beneath his car.  Ron's good friend Bern Bradley is exiting the scene in his own #32.  You guess is as good as mine as to who any of the others are.

Lest you think that no one showed up to watch these races, this photo was taken in turn two, and the seating area along the backstretch was not used for these races -- the fans sat on the frontstretch.  With 15,641 permanent seats in the stadium there was no need to open the bleachers along the backstretch.

Hershey Stadium (now officially called Hersheypark Stadium) is a great stadium that once held a great race track.