Alexandria, LA Races

[jrome]

wayne,I think some of these guys were pretty tuff on you in the early days.I am glad you stoped driving runabouts and Louis Williams quit the hydros.Louistold me to tie him to a tree if he ever wanted to drive a hydro again.Idont remember you saying any thing like that. joe

[Master Oil Racing Team]

After I hit the bank and flew out of my C runabout on the Neches River I almost hit a big tree. That kindof put the idea in my head. I didn't need a rope to hold me back.

[Master Oil Racing Team]

Part of the pit area north of the judges stand.

[Master Oil Racing Team]

In 1967 we were pitted around the corner in a little cove left of the judges stand.

My Dad had some partners in the Aloe Vera business. It was in the early years of those kind of home treatments and a lot of people were skeptical They had 10,000 hectares of land in Mexico where the plants were being raised. They also manufactered a 99% pure product and some hand creams, etc. The shelf life turned out to be a problem and my Dad was tired of all the rat tests the government wanted so he got out. One of the products that went into the hand cream was the base oil used in the manufacture of MX-237. My Dad had some great chemists working with him to develope the Aloe products and the oil. The best chemist now has a very successful business in the manufacture of a wide range of Aloe products.

In the course of talking in the pits at various races, one of the drivers wanted to know if my Dad's chemist could get his hands on some exotic fuel additives. He checked with the chemist and George came up with hydrazine. It is a liquid fuel for rockets and I think it's primary purpose is an oxygen scavenger to get more air into the fuel. Some of the fuel experts out there could probably tell us how it works.

Anyway, I think it was Tommy Wetherbee that my Dad rounded it up for. We delivered it to Tommy? at the World Championships at Alexandria. He was pitted about two or three teams from us back toward the judges stand. The hydrazine came in a well built wooden box approximately an 18" or so cube shape. Inside it was filled with curly-cued wood shavings and in the middle was another box with a dark glass jar about pint sized. It was not anything like nitroglycerin, but it did carry shock warnings and also heat warnings. It warned about mixing with certain types of chemicals and also the percentage not to exceed when mixing with other solutions. If forget about all the different warnings that came with it. Of course you know it can get pretty hot in Alexandria in July, so I think Tommy had to go get a separate cooler and ice to keep it in. Other racers became curious as to what Tommy was fooling with and checked it out. Tommy was asking us how to mix it and what George might have said about it. We didn't know. Just told him to be careful with it. Before long we had lots of elbow room to our right and Tommy was just kind of isolated. The racers on both sides just quietly packed up and tried to find space somewhere else. There was a huge crowd that year so they didn't make the decision to move very lightly. Tommy never really found out if the hydrazine would have been any help or not. I think he ended up scaring himself out of adding enough to do any good. The best I remember was that he was supposed to use an ounce or two per gallon, but I think Tommy may have just used a teaspoon for the whole tank.

[Master Oil Racing Team]

It full name is dimethylhydrazine and was a much more stable cousin of hydrazine the best I remember. Tommy kept the literature on hydrazine as that was the one he chose. Looking at the product information it shows that dimazine had flammability limits in air from 2.5 to 95%, so it would burn in just about any atmosphere of air. What I didn't realize is that with volatile chemicals, contaminants can turn them into being shock sensitive. These tests show that dimazine isn't shock sensitive even with deliberate contamination of rust, copper, magnesium or aluminum shavings. Don't know about hydrazine.

But the thing that got everyone scared was the flash point was so low. On Dimazine it is 34 degrees farenheit. I think it was probably the same on hydrazine. They probably thought it may spontaneously combust, as hot as it got at Alexandria. It doesn't do that until over 400 degrees (that's heat without a flame). I bet if someone sent methanol in a package like that and had all those warnings, you might think twice about how you handled that as well. Don't have my chemical handbook any more. Anybody know what the flash point of methanol and gasoline is?

[Master Oil Racing Team]

This is a story about the 1967 NOA World Championships in Alex by Gina Mishey. Had no idea of some of the retired powerhouses there as spectators. Have to go to Corpus now. Will post photos and results by class of the top three later.

[Doug Hall Y51]

Wayne, I was reading the posts while sitting here at the fire station and I looked up the flashpoints of gasoline and Methanol. Gasoline is -45F and Methanol is 52F. We have some guys here that could have told you without looking anything up but I am far from knowing alot about Haz-Mat and plan to keep it that way.

[Master Oil Racing Team]

Doug--Fire stations are a long way from us out here.

When you were here, I don't remember if my Dad still had those caliche rock planters or not. They were in a quarter round shape about 12' long and 18"-20" high on either side of the drive way. The rocks were only stacked. No mortar, and one cold winter some rats made a nest deep in the rocks in the one outside my room, which was an apartment off the garage.

We had some methanol left over from the previous season and my Dad decided that he could dispose of it by pouring it on those rocks and driving the rats out. He poured about 5 gallons all the way around the side where the rats were hiding. We knew they were there because his bird dogs would bark at them. By the time he finished pouring all the methanol out, some had already started to evaporate and there was no breeze to dispel the vapors.

My Dad was six or eight feet away when he struck a match and threw it toward the planter. A little more than halfway there, the fumes ignited. BOOM! and a couple of rocks blew out. Suddenly a rat came running out. You know how you can't see methanol burning in daylight. Well this rat came running toward us and we see the hair on his back curling up into little black balls, and an occasional speck of yellow flash. The rat saw us and headed back toward the planter, but when he felt the heat he turned left and was headed for cover toward my room. I don't know why, but I had left the door open and the rat was running toward it. My Dad and I ran to head him off, but he was dodging us pretty good and still zig zagging for the open door. Don't know what the result would have been had he made it and gotten under the bed, but I was able to kick him back toward the driveway. He found a corner of the rock pile that wasn't burning and made his escape. He didn't burn up because I found him limping around that afternoon, most of his hair singed off. I felt sorry for him and put him out of his misery. The next day the rocks were hauled down to the shoreline and placed as a barrier against erosion. Glad we didn't have any old leftover gasoline.

[John (Taylor) Gabrowski]

At an Alky meet up here in the later 1960s some team evidently kicked a fuel tank into the river real quick when it got hot and was reputed to have started to either got steaming or smoking getting people nervous. The talk was that the fuel had been mixed with hydrazine (solid rocket fuel) crystals and left too long before use and had become unstable. What ever unstable meant?

Now we have the odd 3 eyed catfish sometimes coming out of there from time to time!

[Danny Pigott]

Wayne, I will try to find where I got the info. about Alex. I was going by memory so I could be off on the date.