The Vault
FROM THE 5-10-32 BOOK – RACE CARS OR UFO’S?
Posted on: Thursday August 4, 2022
This excerpt appears in Joe Verdegan’s seventh book “5-10-32 McBride, Parker & Anvelink” and can be purchased at this website by clicking on the “books” tab in the upper left corner.
It was around 1980 when the dirt late model evolved into a behemoth of a machine.
Liberal body rules allowed huge, Plexiglas rear spoilers and wide bodies. Wide tires referred to as ‘humpers’ were commonplace. With all the added traction with the softer, wider tires combined with the extreme downforce from the tall spoilers the cars looked more like something from outer space than a race car.
Eventually those liberal rules packages that were rooted in the southern states eventually made their way up to Wisconsin and the rest of the Midwest. By 1980 only Shawano Speedway remained open in the greater Green Bay area of the half-mile dirt ovals. The other two half-mile dirt tracks located at county fairgrounds in De Pere and Seymour had closed their doors, in part largely to a race promoters feud.
Fairgrounds tracks at Luxemburg and Sturgeon Bay also remained open, but they were smaller third-miles, and typically drew far smaller car counts in the early 1980s.
The wedge car was big, bulky, and expensive. The bodies were out of control, and they were taking more aluminum, more horsepower, more tires, and more material than ever before. The aluminum bodies that originally were a saving grace in terms of cost had become much worse than the fiberglass bodies they replaced. Car counts were way down, track promoters were discontinuing the class, and the end seemed near.
“For us up here in Wisconsin the promoters pretty much just went along with what the trend was at that time,” said Mike Schmelzer. “It turned into a case of if nobody questioned it if you DIDN’T put those spoilers and wild bodies on the cars you’d be out to lunch. We’d buy a 4 x 8 sheet of plexiglass and put it on the car. You would break equipment because there was so much downforce, and they were hard on tires. I personally didn’t like driving the wedge cars.”
The wedge car era was good for Parker, where he experienced a lot of success. “Back then in the early ‘80s those NDRA shows were mostly $5,000-to-win and some paid even more,” Parker recalled. “That whole wedge car deal started around 1980. We ran those Camaro bodies with those big hunks of lexan on the back. It really hooked up the cars. It evolved so fast from a hunk of lexan.”
Parker recalls a two-day special at Proctor, Minnesota during the wedge car days. “We were pitting in some parking lot and guys were running around finding old signs and whatever they could get their hands on to use as a spoiler. It was a once in a lifetime type deal. After the spoilers came the extended noses, slanted roofs and even the sideboards were next. It became a problem just transporting the cars. It was hurting the local racers. The cars were faster but there was less side-by-side racing as a result.”
Pete Parker wheels the Tri-City Buggy 111 car during the “wedge car” era at Eldora in the early 1980s. (Pete Vercauteren photo)
Parker had success with the wedge cars early on. “I ran down south a lot and that helped obviously racing against those guys,” Parker confessed. “Running Speedweeks in Florida was good. I had Mike Randerson helping and between his knowledge and the knowledge he got from Howe Racing, I had a big advantage then having Mike in my corner. It was sort of my ‘ace in the hole’ so to speak. When racers get beat, they want to know why and how. That wedge car era didn’t last real long but it was good to me looking back on it. I put a lot of hours into figuring that stuff out.”
“One of the challenges during that time period was that frankly there weren’t many rules,” Randerson recalled. “One of the biggest problems we had was the cars were glued so tight to the tracks the engines simply couldn’t take it. As a result, there were a lot of engine failures along the way. I didn’t care for them much.”
With those engine failures came added expenses to the racers. “It wasn’t a very good scenario because you needed more horsepower and engine life went down,” Randerson said. “I remember we made some goofy compromises with those cars. Visibility was also an issue. I felt those type of cars made a so-so driver look better because those wedge cars were much more forgiving. Heck I even remember Charlie Swartz once build a car that had the motor in the back.”
Shawano Speedway followed suit and kept the exotic rules package for their top division in the early ‘80s with Luxemburg and Sturgeon Bay following suit. The same thing was happening on the western end of the state and the neighboring states of Iowa, Minnesota and Illinois where Parker would frequently travel for big dollar shows. Not every driver hated driving the wedge cars.
“Personally I loved driving the wedge cars,” said 1981 Shawano Speedway late model champion Lowell Bennett. “But you’ve got to remember 1981 was a real transition year of sorts. Everyone was supposed to go to the 9:1 compression motor with a two-barrel carburetor. Even on the dirt. It didn’t matter what you had for a motor you just needed a two barrel. We were at a disadvantage.”
’81 was the last year in northeast Wisconsin where a handful of drivers still raced the same car on both the dirt at Shawano and Thursday nights on the tar at WIR. Bennett was one of them. “Nobody realized the work we did in 1981 to get the car ready for Shawano Saturdays,” Bennett explained. “We had one chunk of lead that weighed 196 lbs. We’d take that off because on dirt all the lead went towards the back of the race car. For WIR our spoiler was eight inches. So, we built a whole other deck lid for Shawano with cables that attached to the roll cage for the bigger, 18-inch spoiler on the dirt at Shawano. We’d pull all the windows out and change shocks and springs too. It was a ton of work.”
Bennett recalled the final race of the year in ’81 during the Shawano County Fair. “M.J. showed up with these big wide Hoosier ‘humper’ tires. He tried to get the track to run those tires. It was a big fight that night but the next year in ’82 that’s what they went to. It got to the point for us it was just too much to change over to race dirt any longer. So, I stuck with the pavement. But to sum it up I loved running those wedge cars.”
“I loved them,” said Tom Nesbitt, referring to the wedge cars. The Thunder Bay, Ontario racer was a friend of Parker’s and raced in northern and western Wisconsin frequently to compete south of the border. “But I’ll admit they eventually got out of hand. The nice thing with them was you could play with them. We’d change the bodies. The plexiglass was cheap. That stuff was fun to play with as we could get creative. Those wild bodies did help the cars handle well but drivers did wind up spending more money on their motors.”
“You’ve got to remember too that back during the wedge car days we had good tires that were made out of actual rubber,” Terry Anvelink said. “Not like today’s tires with all of that synthetic stuff in them now. We definitely had a lot of downforce on the spoilers. Basically, how it shook out the cars would get so tight with all that downforce. If you had a big motor, you were in pretty good shape. In my opinion those big spoilers took all of the setup out of the equation.”
“For me personally I thought (wedge cars) were a blast to drive and they were different looking,” said Shawano’s Tom Naeyaert. “They had that awful looking wing on the back. When I worked for Terry (Anvelink) we had a car that had obtained from Wayne Roffers and another car from Blair Laughlin. When we put everything together with stuff from those two cars, we dropped a motor from an old Blazer under the hood and went over to race at Luxemburg one night. We led the entire feature from the pole except for the last lap when we got passed by Mike Kelly. Kelly had a Tri City Buggy car at the time. In 1982 that was top notch stuff and I’m pretty sure Kelly had something a little better than a Blazer motor under the hood. We almost won one at Luxemburg with a junkyard motor under the hood.”
Naeyaert added “Those wedge bodies looked aerodynamic, but truth is they really weren’t. They were a lot of fun to drive. They weren’t tire eaters. They were mostly leaf spring cars. It was wheel spin if you were abusing the tires. They were a lot of fun to drive.”
The ‘Flying Farmer’ Roger Paul of New London last raced against McBride, Parker and Anvelink in 1980. That was the first year locally the cars started running the big plexiglass spoilers. “I didn’t really care for the big spoilers at all,” Paul confessed. “The cars just handled so much differently than what I was used to. It was very hard to see with them. I wished they would have left them the way they were.”
The other ‘Flying Farmer’ from the western side of the state – Leon Plank, wasn’t the biggest fan of the bigger spoilers either. “I remember Pete (Parker) and I raced with those things and traveled a lot to Iowa, South Dakota and even some of those NDRA shows together,” Plank recalled. “I didn’t really care for those big spoilers. It was tough to see when you were following somebody into the corner. It was like you had a 4 x 8 sheet of plywood in your windshield. It was really bad, and I was glad to see them scale the rules back a few years later. I felt it made for much safer racing without those huge spoilers.”
By 1981 the entire Midwest was into full-blown wedge car rules in the dirt late model world,” said dirt late model historian Bob Schafer. “While the cars looked like spaceships and were violently fast on some tracks it did not produce the best racing. Tied to that were rapid advances in motor technology and super soft racing tires of any shape and size. Plus, the cars weighed next to nothing, so the speeds were over the top. But with those speeds the fans overall saw less passing. And that’s exactly where dirt late models were in the early to mid-1980’s.”
According to Shafer the wedge body essentially sealed the deal for many to stop racing a late model in northeastern Wisconsin. “Guys like Pete (Parker) had all the technology and knowledge to make the body work on the chassis,” Schafer added. “Pete traveled all over the country and learned about that technology. M.J. and Terry (Anvelink) had it figured out to a lesser degree too. But then you’d have a guy like Roger Van Roy, for example. Roger would try to put one of those bodies on an older chassis and they would just be out to lunch sometimes. If you remember back to those times Shawano, and Seymour upon its return were down to 13 or 14 late models some nights. To me, the wedge car era did curtail car counts in our area. The cars were so big and boxy you couldn’t pass anyone.”
By 1985 the national and regional promoters like UMP (United Midwest Promoters) and that group’s chief Bob Memmer, along with Robert Smawley with the NDRA (National Dirt Racing Association) and sanctioning bodies like WISSOTA in the Midwest began to curb the body rules and started reigning in the wild and crazy dirt late model. “I believe it was Smawley who did it first,” Schafer recalled. “It was brought back to earth a bit with that and a tire rule with Hoosier. Soon you started to see car counts increase gradually across the country, too. dirt cars were so big and boxy that you couldn’t pass anyone. I would say that Bob Memmer and UMP did more to try and curb the wedge body along with the old STARS series out east.”
After sitting dormant for five years Seymour Speedway reopened weekly in 1983 and NEW DIRT was formed. The club operated the Sunday night program at the Outagamie County Fairgrounds. When Shawano Speedway adopted the WISSOTA rules package for late models in the mid-1980s Seymour followed suit. The days of the wild looking, big spoiler race cars were over with. The era was short lived – but remain a lively conversation piece in the local racing circles to this day.
