Originally Posted by
smittythewelder
All good, Deano, except that Jeff Lowe won BSH at Prineville in '66. Jeff was the only legal starter in the first heat of the finals, so he cruised around behind the pack in the second heat to win the thing. Kind of too bad in a way, because Jeff was fast enough (even though his brother Stu said, "we were never less than 25-30lbs overweight in that class"), and a top-notch driver, and might have won anyway. Two years later at Greenlake, the Hedlunds did win. Yet I looked at all the heat times for BSH for the prelims and finals, and the two fastest BSH heat times of the weekend were run by Barry Lewis and Jeff Lowe, both in Marchettis (and both using 1:1 gears).
Even for a mid-pack guy (sometimes better, sometimes worse!) like me . . . young, very dumb, half-blind, couldn't make two decent starts at a race to save my life, even for shlubs like me, to be racing Stocks in Reg. 10 in the mid-'60s was just a blast. We never got to see much of the smart, fast guys like Jeff Lowe and Dennis Lee who could nail the start and keep the boat aired-out in the roughest corners, never wasting an ounce of momentum or a foot of their lanes. It was all still a gas! At least, since I didn't run the class, I DID get to watch Dean go at it against a very competitive pack of ASH guys every weekend. People who didn't know better might have dismissed A Stock Hydro as a slow, tame, beginners class, but anyone with eyes to see knew that this was pure deck-to-deck racing at its very best, every time. All the guys with big, fast, expensive alky rigs would stop whatever they were doing to watch A Stock. I'll never forget those days, those guys.
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