Alexandria, LA Races

[jrome]

The first picture of a start was on the cover of a program from Alex. Before there was a Southern or World Championship at Alex, it was a State Championship. Third picture is of the 1967 World Champions, next picture is the 1968 World Champions. The last picture is of Jack Marshall, Terry Rogers, Armand Hebert, and Deiter Konig. I know a lot of you have very fond memories of the races that we had at Alexandria. Hope that these pics bring back some fond memories and some of you will contribute some pics and stories. We can thank people like Cecil Johnson and Carl Rylee for the creation of Fort Buhlow.

[jrome]

This was a page in the program listing the brief history of racing on Buhlow.

[Master Oil Racing Team]

Joe...this is the best racecourse for the smallbore outboards in the world. I love DePue for the draw of competition, but Alex always assurred the competitors of safe water for all out speed.

[Master Oil Racing Team]

Check out all the heavyweights here.

[Master Oil Racing Team]

NOA World Championships Alex, 1967

[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?