[TimBer]

Well, its been ten years now since my dad passed. This forum is one of the places I come to feel closer to him. And, I still drive the 1980 Targa regularly. Its hard to believe its been ten years, I cried as much today as I did that day, and many days in between. Anyway, I thought I would share one of his stories:

I got beat a few times in the GTO. It was very fast for the cars that were on the street in the San Fernando Valley then. The early ’60’s was the prime that American Grafitti was based on. The car didn’t have any options on it really. It was light weight for what it was and it was very fast. Of course, I was a real good street racer. But, I did get beat a few times. The two I remember, one I remember the most was a red 1963 Chevy Super Sport Impala with a 409. You reminded me of another one, a Buick that raced me, in fact he beat me pretty good. He had real low gears. While I was accelerating along in second gear he was shifting a couple of times. He had a lower rear axle gear ratio and you could reach your top speed a lot faster. Yeah, he beat me too.

Mainly, the 409 and a big engine 427 Corvette beat me pretty good. But all the other GTO’s and Chevelle’s I don’t recall ever losing to. The later 390 Mustang GT’s were pretty quick, but some cars are just faster than others. Some GTO’s are faster than others. I just ended up with a good one that was fast for what it was I guess. Even guys that had done some work on their cars; my car was still faster than theirs. I used to consistently beat Plymouth Road Runners and Dodge Super Bees and stuff. Of course, they had some real big engine ones – some Hemi ones – that I never ran up against, I’m sure those would have beat me.

This sort of thing has happened to me a couple times. I was on my way to work and at a stop light. It had to be across from Birmingham High School. Sitting at the stop light and a ’65 Mustang GT was next to me. I was aware of it being there, but wasn’t planning on racing it or anything. He revved his motor at me a couple times to get my attention. He was planning on racing, but I was ignoring him. I was probably thinking about something else, but I wasn’t even concerned. The light turned green and he took off and burned rubber. I left too, but I wasn’t racing him. It might have even looked like he was beating me, which couldn’t have ever happened. We got a couple hundred yards and the lights came on behind me. We both got pulled over by the traffic cops. They pulled us over and I wanted to know why. I guess I didn’t get a ticket, but he wanted to give me a ticket for exhibition of speed, which was burning rubber or driving aggressively. He accused us of racing. I told him that if I had been racing I would have been way ahead of him. So I couldn’t possibly have been racing him. I didn’t burn any rubber or anything. And it was all him. I was ignoring him. I’m pretty sure I didn’t get a ticket for that. I learned real early that Mustangs were no challenge so why take a chance.

I remember the night I got the [GTO] I filled it up with gas. All this time I had been trying to burn rubber in my old Ford and breaking things. The next car I had was the Chevy convertible and it had an automatic. The only time it would burn rubber was if you drove through water with it. But it would then because it had a lot of power. It had the hot V8 motor. Anyway, I got this GTO and I took it out and started dumping the clutch and burning rubber with it. It would just do it at will. I had so much fun with it that night. That’s all I did was drive and rev it up and pop the clutch out and fry those back tires. I left black strips everywhere I went. I looked for my friends all night long. For hours I looked for them. I’d drive around, then I’d go back and check their houses. I couldn’t find any of my friends any place. I was just so willing to show the car. I’m pretty sure they didn’t even know I had decided to get it. The next day my friend Dave Cox – his parents had told him I’d been looking for him all night in my new GTO – he was there at like 7 o’clock the next morning waking me up. “That’s your GTO! You got that GTO! Why didn’t you come tell me.” We had a lot of fun with it. I used to loan it to him too.

I loaned it to Dave one time, when he brought it back it wasn’t running very good. He had missed a shift probably and over revved the motor. It turned out he’d bent a push rod. I didn’t know what was wrong with it so I called Uncle Vic who was very good at diagnosing my problems. He knew what I was doing with the car so he could safely assume that it had been driven real hard or something that had caused the problem. That narrowed it down a little bit. I told him my friend had borrowed it and brought it back and it was not running right. He said, “I bet he missed a shift and it has a bent push rod.” The technical term was the valves float and the piston actually hits a valve and the shock goes back and hits the weakest part which is the push rod and it will actually bend it. It turned out that was right.