Alexandria, LA Races

[Master Oil Racing Team]

The F runabout and A hydro were the final qualifying heats run on Thursday

[Master Oil Racing Team]

Five more classes left. Here are B Runabout and C Hydro

It appears Billy Seebold was the champion and set a record in B runabout heat 1, to be broken by Jerry Simison in heat two. This look like the order or finish

1 Billy Seebold
2 Bruce Nicholson
3 Jerry Simison
4 Louis Williams

Jerry Waldman dominated C hydro and appears to have set a record.

1 Jerry Waldman
2 Armand Hebert
3 John Griffin

[Master Oil Racing Team]

These are the qualifying and final heats of D Runabout, F hydro, C-1 runabout and X Hydro. Following the championship results are handwritten records. Some records broken in the first heat were broken again in the second heat. There were 13 records broken according to handwritten notes, and I think the six listed at the end were final results. The name on the C-1 records may be hard to read. It is Bud Cowdery.

Sure wish somebody that was there could tell us some stories about this big race. It was a who's who attendance in 1965. A lot of these top drivers drifted away from racing over the next several years. Just looked at a post at the beginning of this thread stating that there were 18 records broken and 475 boats. Thanks to Rog Dykehouse for these historical driver's list.

[Master Oil Racing Team]

...that it had been this long since anything was posted about the greatest racing course in the world for the PRO division. I came across this pic and was looking for the Alex thread. It took awhile for me to find it and when I did, I read it from the beginning.

We were running very late this day to get everything in. I would have to check the schedule to be sure, but this is probably D runabout.

[Allen J. Lang]

Hi Wayne- Looks great especially with the sun's colors on the rooster tails.
Ye Olde Desert Geezer

[jrome]

I had this picture on my boat racing room wall until the sun faded so bad I had to remove it. It always brings back plenty of memories.

[Danny Pigott]

Wayne, at the 77 world championship i think there were 36 drivers from Texas, where did they go.I guess they got old like me.That was something to have that many drivers from one state.It must have been a record at that time.

[Master Oil Racing Team]

Danny..as far as driving goes, Alex wasn't far from Texas. And most of them lived only several hours away. For us it was about 8 hours. I'll see if I can dig up a roster. In Fact, those days Texans played a role in Alex races. Around then they started using our lone Star clock, and earlier may have used the electric scales.

[Master Oil Racing Team]

You kind of threw me Danny and I had to look. There were several years between NOA and APBA that we didn't run at Alex. The first crossover was the 1973 APBA/UIM World Championships. We didn't run at Alex in 1977, but we did in 1978. I did not have a roster of all the drivers at the race...only the roster from the finals. I only found 20 Texans, but I guess more were there. That was a year when a lot of drivers were doing their second year of the Yamato 80 class. I think I will post some of those that I spied on the finals roster. In the meantime...here are some pics from one strip of a contact sheet.

[Master Oil Racing Team]

I was looking at this one contact sheet deciding which pics to post. I was looking at it in the context of the days I originally took them. Since I also raced, I was usually stuck in the pits near our boats and had to reach out with a 500mm lens for a lot of the racing pics. My relex lens with no F stops was not very forgiving on focus and exposure, so there were a lot of photos that were nothing but junk. And then there were those shots when you were following the action and just when you took the pic....something was in the foreground. With the tools of computers today, you can make something of pictures you would have normally thrown away.

Tonight, when I was going through some of my stuff, I thought I would try these pics. I am no way an expert. I wouldn't mess with some of these pics in a darkroom, but with a computer...anyone that learns how can make "junk pics" come back to life and can be the pic that you THOUGHT you took. So don't toss those Polaroids or Kodak Instamatic pics out of your shoebox. look at getting a scanner and play around with it. I knew absolutely nothing about this stuff when I first started.

I got the contact sheet posted last, but you can see how the difference with the computer can turn a photo around.