FAST TIMES IN HOT CARS.

By Peter M. DeLorenzo 

Detroit. Creating the content for this Internet magazine every week can be a grind, as our readers well know. But it can also be pretty exhilarating at times too. Especially when I bring up remembrances of fast times in hot cars. I have regaled our AE readers with many of those stories from along the way, but the beauty of it all is that I never seem to run out of ‘em, even after 21 years.

Even though I had my own adventures with my blistering fast go-kart – the infamous “Orange Juicer Mk I” – that’s not how it all started. To say we had the opportunity to experience a charmed automotive life growing up is an understatement. My father, Tony, was leader of GM Public Relations in the company's heyday, from 1957 to 1979, so many of the GM legends you've only read about - Ed Cole, Bunkie Knudsen, Zora Duntov and Bill Mitchell - just to name a very few, weren't just historical figures, but they were living, breathing, larger-than-life figures who played a role in the cadence of our automotive lives. (You can read one of Peter's most-requested columns, about Bill Mitchell, here - WG) 

By the time my brother Tony got the automotive bug (he is eight years my senior), our household was crawling with the latest and fastest cars GM made. Bunkie Knudsen sent over a hot Pontiac for my mom to drive every summer, usually a red Bonneville or Catalina convertible with the highest horsepower drivetrain Pontiac offered at the time (at first 389’s with 3x2s, then a series of 421’s). Bill Mitchell customized a '63 Corvair for us that had the Turbo engine in it before it was even offered to the public (we, of course, immediately took it down to the Detroit Dragway to see what it would do). 

Ed Cole loaned us his personal driver one weekend, which was a '61 409 Chevy with a manual gearbox (how's that for an executive company car?). And then there were the Corvettes. My, oh my. There were so many I'm not sure I can recall them all, but suffice to say, the weekend Ed Cole sent over his personal driver for us to drive, which was a fuel-injected '63 Sting Ray Coupe in Sebring Silver - before the car was officially introduced - was one of many, many highlights.

But that's not all. Tony worked at Pontiac one summer - when the Pontiac Motor Division was actually in Pontiac - and discovered an interesting little black sports car in the executive garage. Lo and behold it was an early Shelby Cobra, so early in fact that it didn't have the side vents and it had the original Shelby Cobra emblem on the nose (pre-snake), and it was powered by the 260 cu. in. Ford V8. And it sat there week, after week, after week. Since John DeLorean was Pontiac's General Manager at the time - and another of GM's legends we were on a first-name basis with - Tony finally got up the nerve one day to send him a message through his secretary, asking if he could "borrow" the Cobra some weekend. And the answer came back, "sure." Needless to say, one weekend turned into damn-near every weekend that whole summer, and we ran the shit out of that magnificent Cobra, dusting everything in sight on Woodward Avenue and everywhere else too.

Tony's automotive bug started to turn toward sports car racing, and, well, we innocently asked "big" Tony if he could order a Corvette company car for the summer. As Tony says, "He made two errors: 1.) He agreed to do it and 2.) He let us order it!" And order it we did: A Black/Black 1964 Corvette Sting Ray Coupe with Heavy Duty finned drum brakes; Heavy Duty gearbox; knock-off aluminum wheels and radio delete. Little did our dad know that we planned to take it to SCCA Driver's School in Watkins Glen, New York, so Tony could get his SCCA license. So, the moment we got it we took the interior carpeting out, took the bumpers off, removed the spare tire carrier, and then we had a roll bar put in and we were good to go. Or so we thought. While Tony was sitting at his desk at Chevrolet Sales Promotion (his summer job) a few days later, the phone rang. This is how he remembers it:  

"Hello?" 

"Tony, this is Zora Duntov."  Yikes, it was the God of the Corvette calling. "Your father has ordered a heavy-duty Corvette. Who is going to drive it?"  

"Uh… He is?!!"  

Silence.  

"Who is going to drive it?"  

"Um, I am." 

“What are you going to do with it?”  

"Uhhh… I'm going to go to a SCCA driver’s school at Watkins Glen." 

“Ok.” 

And “God” hung up. But not before requesting that we drop the car off at Chevrolet Engineering in Warren so he could "take care of a few things." Two weeks later we went back to get the car, and Zora took us out to the little test track that sits inside the Tech Center. And there it was, it was the same Corvette but it sat lower and it was wearing the biggest Goodyear Blue Streak racing tires that could fit inside the fenders on the knock-off wheels. Zora also pointed out that the stock exhaust system underneath now had flanges just in front of the mufflers. Those flanges had been put on by Bill Mitchell's famous Styling Garage mechanic, Ken Eschebech, so that once we got to Watkins Glen, we could attach 4' long straight pipes designed to hang on special hangers, so that they would shoot straight out the back. Because, well, you can't run a Driver's School at Watkins Glen with standard mufflers, right? Zora was a genius.

But those changes were just the tip of the iceberg. The car had been completely gone through, including the brakes, the suspension and sure enough, the engine. In retrospect, we were convinced that Zora had yanked the engine and thoroughly went through it and tweaked it, because the thing was a rocket. 

That trip to Watkins Glen was an adventure unto itself. We arrived very late one night at the rustic Glen Motor Inn, and the proprietor - the one and only Vic Franzese - checked us in, but not before he could show us his beautiful Lotus 11 in the motel garage. The school went exceptionally well for Tony; at one point the Chief Instructor went to ride a couple of laps with him and emerged muttering something like "he's doesn't need any more instruction" - and that was the beginning of his racing journey. The return trip was eventful, too, as we were so tired by the end of the weekend that we said, "screw it" and left the straight pipes on, rattling hearts and bones all the way back to Detroit. 

There's more. It was getting toward the end of that summer, when dad informed us that the car had to go back to Chevrolet to be put back into stock condition (he had discovered that the “stock” Sting Ray didn’t appear to be “stock” anymore). It turns out that our oldest sister's boyfriend at the time, who lived in Chicago, had expressed interest in buying the car. We took the roll bar out, piled the stock components in it and voila! It returned two weeks later as if none of it happened, with dad saying: “When that car comes back to the house, don’t touch it!” We didn't. The sad end to this chapter? The guy in Chicago had it for two days. On the second night it was stolen, stripped - and totaled.

But as I said, that was the beginning of my brother’s Corvette racing adventure, and the beginning of many more “fast times in hot cars” stories to come.

And that’s the High-Octane Truth for this week.

(The DeLorenzo Racing Archives)
The infamous black "Zora-ized" 1964 Corvette Sting Ray coupe at the SCCA Driver's School in Watkins Glen, New York, June 1964. Note those wonderful straight pipes looming out the back; the crackling sound they provided is still fresh in my memory.