[Jeff Higgins]

Oh, absolutely - Grumpy won with a bunch of other cars before he went into Pro Stock. He ran both Cameros and Chevelles in classes like SS/B, SS/C and the like. The SS/B Camero ran a 396. If he ran a 427, he would have been in SS/A, facing the Hemi cars of the same cast of characters. So, he avoided that by running the smaller motors in the lower classes. SS/A was absolutely dominated by the Hemi Cudas and Darts in those days, so no one even tried with anything else.

Everyone ran Super Stock, which theoretically had classes all the way down to SS/Z. Where any given car was placed was dependent upon the manufacturers' claimed horsepower and weight, with the lightest and most powerful in SS/A, which was effectively the precursor to Pro Stock. Super Stock ran (still runs) a handicap system based upon each classes' national record. During eliminations, it's like bracket racing, but using the class record as the handicap. If you run faster than the class record, you are disqualified. In the final, however, you start on the handicap, but you can break the class record and establish a new one.

It's a real game that they play. The idea has always been to find a class with a "soft" class record. It makes it easier to get through eliminations if your car can beat the record. You should see the wailing and gnashing of teeth, however, when two cars with "soft" records line up for a final. I had seen guys bury their class record by two or three tenths, thereby rendering useless every other car in their class, and raising the ire of those cars' owners. Essentially, the trick was to have a car that you could put many different motors into, and move classes as required. That's what Grumpy and everyone else did.

Pro Stock, in contrast, was straight "heads up" racing, with no handicap. Everyone was in the same class. It started out with SS/A cars that were now allowed to swap cams, port heads, increase compression, run any intake, etc. There was no "Pro Stock" class until late in the 1960's, maybe even early 1970's.

It was thought that with "open" cams, intake, and heads that the Chevy Rat and Ford Semi-Hemis could compete with the MOPARS, where they had not been able to do so in SS/A. It only took a few years to figure out that simply wan't going to happen. The Hemis, on a level playing field, continued to dominate. So, enter the weight breaks for everything else. That's the only way Grumpy was able to win with his Vegas.