Quote Originally Posted by Ron Hill View Post
At the APBA Nationals, 1956, I think, Lowell Haberman had an Anzani and Eric Molinar drove it. Very unreliable at the time.

When I saw Jerry Walin "The Phantom" run at the kilos, Modesto, 1963, was the first time I thought those motors migh have some potential. Jerry went like a hundred in a 350....
Ron; Modesto was quite an attraction back then for the Seattle area folks who were fast enough to try for records. Held early each year, maybe Feb. - March, gave another chance to make the books after DeLake in Sept. The drive was torturous if there was not time off from work. About 600 miles & a patchwork of short early freeway segments. I rode along to Modesto as pit help with someone about then, might have been Entrop but that is really a guess. There were a few rigs from Seattle. Walin was running strong in hydro & runabout too, had a newer hydro hull but not yet the final 100 mph record hull. That weekend had both a long record course and the kilo trials. Gerry ran runabout the first course race heat in the morning which was bothered by wind chop & rollers. It was not long before the day's event was canceled by strong wind. I think the kilo trials were set for early the next two mornings. A few began to set up their rigs but suddenly it was as windy as the previous day and forecast to continue so the Seattle folks had to just pack up and roll home. The one big take-home item was bags of fresh Almonds from roadside sales stands. Most of us had never munched Almonds that were not roasted, salted, and from a can.

I think it was later that same year or the following year that the Western Outboard Divisionals were run on Lake Merced in San Francisco. A small batch of Seattle drivers figured out how to stuff all sorts of boats onto one big trailer and camper pickup truck (which I think also had a runabout racked on top). Might have been Charles Walter's rig. I rode along as pit guy again, had time. Non stop, driver swap-out grind starting Thursday late afternoon. Truck differential began failing at Mt. Shasta and we made it to an auto wrecking yard on the outskirts of Redding. Lucky that they had a differential but it was geared for an automatic trans. That truck had a differential type that allowed an exchange without gear mating adjustment. Was lucky on that too. Laying on the boiling hot black pavement, wrenching on a still hot differential housing caused a sort of bucket brigade effect. Slide under on the cardboard heat shield, wrench until you couldn't take the burn, hand the tools to the next guy in line as a wet towel went on your back. Rolled the rest of the way to S.F. in second & third gear, (4th downhill), and then back to Seattle. Arrived back Monday morning just in time to drop off one or both Anderson's (someone ?) at their Boeing jobs. Lee Sutter was living in Hayward, CA at the time so there was a little extra fun after some pretty good racing.
R.R.
P.S..... Doing a little arithmetic to get the years better set. Those San Francisco Western Divisionals would have been some years after 1963 if we dropped the Anderson's off at Boeing jobs on Monday morning because first we need to let them finish their U of Washington studies which began sometime after 1960.