Carl Grimes’s 1954 “De Oldsley,” the first NHRA Nationals-qualifying dragster, sells for $22,000 Photos courtesy Barrett-Jackson. Somebody’s gotta be the first. And in September 1955 on an old airstrip that once saw B-26 bombers come and go, that somebody was Carl Grimes, who said he just happened to be first in line for inspections at the first-ever NHRA Nationals in Great Bend, Kansas, with his homebuilt 11-second wagon. While many others followed in Grimes’s footsteps as a competitor, nobody ever built another car quite like his “De Oldsley,” which sold at auction this week for $22,000. Grimes, a mechanic from Oklahoma who spent the pre-war years racing cars and motorcycles on the Muroc dry lake in California, moved to Arizona after the war to open his own garage. Sometime afterward the new trend toward drag racing caught his eye and he began organizing midnight street races in and around Phoenix, partly for fun and partly as a way to advertise his services. “It was just a bunch of guys together,” he said decades later. “We’d hold our own drag races until someone would call the cops and then we’d scatter. It used to be more like a friendly competition.” In about 1954, he began to put together a car specifically for drag racing, starting with a 1941 De Soto chassis, to which he added most of a 1948 Crosley station wagon body, a 1953 Cadillac 331-cu.in. V-8, a 1950 Oldsmobile rear axle, Model A fenders over the protruding rear wheels, and the grille from a World War II Dodge truck. When he heard that the NHRA planned its first Nationals for the following year in Great Bend, he and Lewis Rogers, his daughter’s boyfriend, gassed up the creation and headed east. The 1955 Nationals were by no means the first organized drag races nor the first NHRA event. Fran Hernandez and Tom Cobbs reportedly met in the first drag race in April 1949 near Santa Barabara, California; the NHRA, formed by Wally Parks in 1951, held its first race a couple years later in Pomona, California. It took the lobbying of the Great Bend Chamber of Commerce – which had found itself with an abandoned air force base and no clear purpose for the property – to convince Parks to bring the first Nationals to that former cowtown and its 8,000-foot runway smack dab in the middle of the country over four days in late September and early October of 1955. More than 200 cars and 15,000 spectators converged on Great Bend for the Nationals, and though heavy rain cut the event short by a day, only the two-way record runs for the fastest competitors were canceled. Grimes apparently only made one elimination run and lost – he later said that it proved too heavy for serious competition – but he apparently convinced Parks to reschedule the record runs for that November in Phoenix, leading to Grimes’s formal association with the NHRA as a regional advisor and as a dragstrip safety advocate. According to information compiled by collector Tom LaFerriere, Grimes soon afterward built a much faster Fiat powered by a Buick V-8 and using the first known fliptop body, so he gave the dragster to his daughter Sally, who would campaign it in drag races over the next year and apparently with some success. The wagon’s best quarter-mile time of 11.15 seconds at 128.93 MPH likely came during this period, when Grimes and Rogers installed a series of V-8s, including a Buick and the triple Stromberg-fed 1954 Oldsmobile 394-cu.in. Rocket V-8 that sits under the hood nowadays. Then in 1956, when Sally and Rogers married, they put it on the street as their everyday car. Rogers ended up selling the wagon in 1959 and though it made its way to California over the following decades, in 1990 he tracked it down, bought it back, and restored it. He later sold it to Chuck Rahn of Phoenix, and in latter years it made its way to LaFerriere’s collection on the East Coast. Grimes, who quit racing in 1961, was later inducted into the NHRA Hall of Fame despite his insistence that the presence of money in drag racing ruined it as a sport. Offered on Wednesday at no reserve at Barrett-Jackson’s Scottsdale auction, the dragster sold for $22,000. Barrett-Jackson Scottsdale will continue through Sunday. For more information, visit Barrett-Jackson. from Hemmings Daily - News for the collector car enthusiast ift.tt/1CvORIU Sourced by CA DMV registration services online. Renew your registration online in only ten minutes. No DMV, no lines, no hassles, and no appointments needed. Visit Quik, Click, pay, and print your registration from home.
Posted on: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 14:07:15 +0000
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