Tuesday, June 10, 2014

Sneaky Pete Robinson anecdotes

In the recent issue of Hot Rod Deluxe, Drew Hardin retells a story from Dave Wallace, that Pete failed tech for being 200 pounds under weigh in, then came back about a hour or so later with everything looking the same... but at the right weight. He'd just went through the effort of pranking the inspectors with a hollow engine and blower. Nothing inside it.

When cars were weighed with the driver, Pete would be in the car with nothing on under the fire suit.

He started with the tires, talked about choice of tires and tubes, and contemplated filling them with helium rather than air. 

The only way he figured he could save some weight was to have his seat belts made to exactly the correct length so they didn't need an adjustment buckle!

While racing a SBC the new Ford Cobra 289 engine was released, he switched because it was 50 pounds lighter. He won top gas and beat Don Garlits.

At one match race at Lions, Pete was facing Garlits, and although Lions (Long Beach) wasn't a NHRA track, Don had stipulated that Pete could not use the jacks as a condition of the match race. The cars push started down the strip from the big end and made the 180-degree turn to approach the starting line. Pete stopped 10 feet behind the line, raised the car onto the jacks, let out the clutch. He calmly reached out of the driver's seat of his slingshot holding a wire brush in his hand, cleaning the dirt and pebbles off each slick. He then put the clutch in, stopped the tires from spinning and staged. Pete said Garlits looked over and saw what he was doing and got so psyched that Robinson managed to win the match race with a hole shot 30 seconds later. http://www.dragracingonline.com/features/peterobinson.html


After a lot of thought he came up with the "vacuum cleaner" concept. Attached between the frame rails was a piece of 15-inch wide by 4-foot long panel of honeycombed aluminum, parallel to the ground, directly under the engine. Then he fastened rubber "curtains" extending down from the panel, perpendicular to the track, around its circumference. They just brushed against the asphalt, making a closed chamber under the car. Then he built a piece of oval cross section aluminum tubing, one end of which fit snugly into the mouth of the Enderle injector atop his blower, extending forward. The tubing then curved down 90 degrees directly in front of the blower drive, with the other end scaled into a hole cut in the top of the chamber. Start the motor and you've got a chamber under the car sucking it down. The whole thing didn't weight 25 pounds.

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