It's a tribute, it's an 81' Camaro clone car of the Lee Shepard Reher-Morrison Shepard
81' championship car.
It was driven by the late Lee Shepard, two-time world champion, the only car to win both NHRA
and IHRA in the same year.
About seven years ago Good Guys were going to try to do a nostalgic pro stock, I jumped
in, I was buying Reher-Morrison motors for a gasser car that I had and I talked to David
and he thought that it was a good idea and while there is a lot of pictures in old hot
rod magazines, David had the really good ones and he sent me a lot of interior shots, it's
pretty close, pretty close, and then David also provides the horsepower and this is a
throwback, there's no power glide in these.
These are old fashioned Lancos.
So you are shifting three times, you are leaving in first gear and you are shifting three times
in a period of probably five seconds and then reaching up and pulling the parachute.
Just like the old days.
This is my 6th Hot Rod Reunion, Holley Hot Rod Reunion, and I started out match racing,
I have a Bill Jenkins tribute car as well and the first two years we just match raced
each other and then they said hey if you bring more cars and kind of formed this group here
and so we have been together, I've been doing this about seven years and the group has been
here about three years.
Take two, ready.
So it's a tribute car, it was built to honor the memory of Bob and Etta, the whole Glidden
family, all their accomplishments that they did for not only for Ford but Pro Stock and
bringing family into Pro Stock racing, you know Bob did a lot of stuff, set a lot of
records and did all that but one of the nicest men you would ever want to meet and the whole
family.
Like I said they brought family back into racing and so that's kind of cool.
I've had so many people come up in the stands and they get emotional, they get a tear in
their eye, and they say I remember when you beat Bill Jenkins, I remember when you beat
Billy the kid and I remember when you beat Butch and all these guys and they get really.
I have people come back the next day and show me pictures of the car, the real car that
they took and so it's a lot of fun and that's what it's about for us, we're not trying to
set any records, we're trying to keep these things as close to what they were then as
we can, we're running about the same speeds and it's not really about going 2000 miles
an hour, it's about bringing back memories and putting on a show because that's really
what we are.
There's nothing better than staging, bumping in with a Lanco and letting the clutch out
and pulling the levers, there's nothing like it.
People in the stands always go, that was really cool, and I say you should have seen it from
where I was sitting.
I drove a Grumpy Jenkins Grumpy toy 16 car for Mark Happis a couple of years ago and
then I got this car, this has been here twice, but we go all around the country with these
things but this reunion is the best, I mean look at it, just walk around, you'll never
see these many people anywhere else.
I look at these national events, I look at football stadiums and baseball and they're
all talking about they can't fill the stands, they got just the opposite problem out here,
both sides of the stands are jammed packed, there are cars everywhere and you see all
this unique hot rods and gassers and street rods and front engine fuel cars, it's very
very cool.
What we are looking at here is a 72' Chevy Camaro, all steel bodied minus the hood, full
tube chassis, 500 plus cubic inch big block engine in it for power plant.
Runs pretty consistently 8.60s, 8.70s, somewhere in that nature.
When we initially started to get into this group with Mark Papis and the rest of the
guys, a lot of guys were building clone cars, and that's cool, I really totally respect
that, but there's also a lot of guys that were out there that helped the guys like Grumpy
Jenkins and all these other fellas get to where they are at, if there weren't backyard
built cars that were out there competing as well so that's kind of what we wanted to do,
we wanted to build just something that reflected the 1970s, possibly something that somebody
would have built at their own house or their own shop, that they were just out there trying
to be competitive with.
Yeah I'm a car guy from the get-go, I've been drag racing with some other groups and different
bracket racing and such since 1994, I have another second-gen Camaro that I've had since
94', I still own that car, we do a little bit of racing with that but mostly it's all
with the mid-west nostalgia pro stock.
These guys have been awesome, we get booked on these great venues you know what I mean.
You come out, what more can you ask for, you come out and do a big long smoky burn out,
dry hops, the crowd is going crazy, I have the most fun before I'm even past the finish
line, granted there are some interactions with which driver is crossing it but for me
it's not that big of a deal, we're just out here trying to preserve what was going on
through the 70s, you know what I mean, and show what the pro stocks were and try to keep
that vision alive.