Motorburg.com Garage

Jim Davis has once again granted Motorburg.com a glimpse into the great history of our hobby….

Back in the late ‘50’s and early 60’s I had a 1932 Ford 3-window coupe that I ran at the drags. I ran the car from about 1955 or ’56 up until 1963. When I first took the car to the drags it had a 286 cubic inch flathead in it with a Navarro 3-carb manifold and, I think, Weiand heads. I was running an Isky 400 Jr. cam in it. It had all the usual tweaks that guys were doing to flatheads back then. I was running the car in an NHRA class called B/Gas Coupe & Sedan. The class had a minimum cubic inch to weight classification of 9 pounds per cubic inch. So the car could have been as light as 2,574 pounds but I couldn’t get it that light. It typically weighed right at 2,700 pounds.

So the obvious solution was to build a bigger engine. I can’t remember exactly what the bore and stroke combination was but I eventually got it to 300.5 cubic inches, which then matched my car weight. This was considered a very large inch flathead at the time and I do remember that whatever I bored it out to, everyone told me you couldn’t bore a flat head that big.

The car was very strong for its day and I won a lot more races than I lost. I was running a ’40 Ford gear box with column shift and by keeping the shifter linkage bushings very tight I could slam shift the devil out of it…

Check out the rest of the story and the killer photos as well here at Motorburg.com.