Pedro Campo, besides being an enthusiast and antique car restorer and AACA Master Judge, was a circuit car racer.
Since the Caguas track was inaugurated in 1961 until it closed operations in 1965.
Ran the Gran Turismo race in a Corvair "Spyder" Yenko Tuned from Caribe Motors Nov 11, 1962, finished second place behind another Corvair "Spyder" piloted by Candy Figuera, also from the Escuderia Caribbean.
Built on a Cooper Monaco space frame chassis, the original Traco Chevy in the Hussein was replaced with a NASCAR 500+ hp Chrysler (Dodge) 426 ci motor. It is currently in the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Hall of Fame Museum
Considered to be the most powerful sports car in the United States at the time, "Hussein," as this special British-built Cooper-Monaco was called, was commissioned by Texas oil millionaire John Mecom, Jr. The bare chassis was shipped from the Cooper Car Company in Surbiton, England to Mecom's Headquarters in Houston, Texas, where it was outfitted with a special aluminum body crafted by renowned West Coast fabricator Jack Lane. Although the car had little success, and competed only a handful of times, normally driven by A.J. Foyt, it drew quite a lot of attention. The original 427-cubic-inch Holman & Moody V8 Ford engine was soon replaced by a 500-horsepower 426-cubic inch Dodge V-8 Chrysler "hemi" from Nichels Engineering, the engine currently in the car. With this combination, Foyt placed second to the Chaparral of Roger Penske in the 112-mile Governor's Cup race at Nassau in the Bahamas on December 4, 1964. The car's name came about due to the Mecom family's business relationship and friendship with King Hussein of Jordan, who was a great sports car enthusiast. Some historians have referred to the "hemi" version as Hussein II, inferring that there was a second car. There was only the one. https://www.flickr.com/photos/janellemartin/3432941702
To boost the Trucking Transition program for U.S. veterans, curb the driver shortage and create immediate jobs for transitioning military personnel, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation’s Hiring our Heroes Program, Kenworth and FASTPORT announced a contest today to give away a fully-loaded T680.
“We’re going to a young veteran driver… who has a tremendous record and really set that young driver off on their own entrepreneurial journey,” said Eric Eversole, president of the Hiring our Heroes program, at the Mid-America Trucking Show in Louisville, Ky. “It’s really a golden ticket for that young driver.”
The search for America’s top military rookie driver will educate veterans and America about the support from leading manufacturers and service providers that enhance the safety and comfort of the 3.5 million professional truck drivers while performing their duties — and provide an incredible head start to one veteran's entrepreneurial career.
During the nomination period, the truck will be shown at military installations around the country and at other trucking-related events.
The criteria for entering the contest:
1. A driver must be a military veteran or have served or currently serve in the National Guard or Reserve.
2. A driver must have graduated from either a PTDI-certified, or NAPFTDS or CVTA member driver training school and have a valid CDL.
3. The driver must have been employed by a trucking company who has made a hiring commitment and pledge to hire veterans on truckingtrack.org.
4. The driver must have been first hired in a trucking position between Jan. 1, 2015, and June 29, 2016.
The top 10 finalists will be recognized at the Great American Trucking Show in Dallas on Aug. 26 and the winner will be selected at the Pentagon in Washington on Dec. 16.
The Goodyear Highway Hero Award was established in 1983 to honor truck drivers who put themselves in harm’s way to help others.
After the Hero Award nomination period ends on Nov. 29, the list of eligible candidates will be narrowed down to three finalists. A panel of trucking industry judges will later select the Highway Hero and announce all three, and the award winner, at the annual MATS convention
Past Highway Hero Award winners include a truck driver who rescued a family of six from a crushed minivan, a driver who saved a woman from a gun-wielding attacker, and a driver who pulled an elderly man from a car before it was destroyed by an oncoming train.
Owner-operator Mike Schiotis was traveling down a Pennsylvania highway when he spotted a woman being followed by a gun-wielding attacker. Thinking quickly, Mike stopped his truck and stepped between the man and the woman. He ushered the woman into his truck and drove away as the gunman returned to his car and began following Mike's rig. Working with another truck driver, Mike evaded the gunman, giving law enforcement officials enough time to arrive on the scene.
An independent owner-operator, Orozco Sanchez was hauling grain on Oct. 28, 2008 on Highway 392, north of Greeley, CO, when an SUV suddenly crossed the center line and crashed head-on into his tractor-trailer rig.
As the vehicles stopped moving, a shaken Orozco Sanchez quickly jumped from his cab and went to the other vehicle. There, with flames already beginning to surround the vehicles, he saw two girls, strapped into their car seats and crying, and a woman up front who was not moving. Working with a passer-by who used a fire extinguisher to fight back the flames, Orozco Sanchez used his knowledge of child car seats – he has two young children – to rescue the two girls.
Derrick Harris was a Virginia truck driver who saved the life of an individual deliberately set on fire, then helped police locate and arrest the person charged with the hideous crime. Harris, a driver with Schneider since October 2002, was also recognized by his employer with Schneider's Presidential Citation Award.
Todd Forbush crawled on his stomach underneath and into the jammed open door of a pickup truck to rescue the young woman pinned behind the wheel after she fell asleep and slammed at full speed into his UPS truck in rural Ohio. Her truck burst into flames after hitting Forbushs' truck at least three times as the smaller truck spun out of control after the initial impact. Forbush, a career driver for UPS, took less than 10 seconds, according to his truck's computer, to exit the cab and reach the young woman to help her. Today, she has almost fully recovered.
In just over two months, Boyd Applegate participated in life-saving efforts at two accident scenes. Thanks to his quick thinking and willingness to be of help, two motor vehicle accident victims are alive today. In the first incident, Applegate climbed into a steep, rocky ravine in the middle of the night and rescued a driver, thrown clear of his vehicle and hidden among some rocks on the opposite side of the ravine.
In the second incident, Applegate cleared the breathing passage of an L.A. patrolman whose face had been crushed in a car accident that also injured his wife.
Curt Jones, then a resident of Blaine, Tenn., was cited as the first trucker to emblazon his tractor-trailer rig with huge posters of missing children, to point out the plight of runaways. He organized 10 truck convoys to call attention to the need for more awareness of missing children, and began a program of visiting schools urging youngsters to seek counseling instead of running from problems.
the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, or FMCSA, announced late last year that all truck drivers will be required to use the electronic logging devices, known as e-logs, by the end of next year.
The FMCSA has said e-logs would help enforce limits on the hours that drivers can spend on the road.
The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association,OOIDA, has previously won a challenge to a prior e-log rule in 2011, on complaints that the regulation did not provide adequate safeguards to ensure trucking companies wouldn’t use the logs to harass drivers.
“There is simply no proof that the costs, burdens and privacy infringements associated with this mandate are justified,” said Jim Johnston, OOIDA president and CEO, in the statement.
FMCSA spokesman Duane DeBruyne declined to comment about the lawsuit.
Overdrive has shown that a sizable majority of the estimated benefit that FMCSA noted in its required Regulatory Impact Analysis (which showed a net benefit of the rule) came not from estimated crash reductions, however, but from monetary values placed on driver time and paperwork savings.
For the purposes of the Fourth Amendment, the Supreme Court has previously ruled in favor of some intrusions into the business of commercial transportation operators in, famously, the case involving a drug-testing program decided in 1989 that argued a public “special need” in balancing concerns for safety versus the privacy rights of rail engineers. Programmatic drug- and alcohol-testing requirements followed for commercial truck operators in the 1990s.
But drug tests are not ELDs, and OOIDA argues that other Supreme Court decisions, incluing the 2015 Torrey Dale Grady v. North Carolina, affirm that prolonged use of a warrantless GPS tracking device on a vehicle is clearly an unreasonable search/seizure within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment.
He then used the Willys MB during and after the war. After the farmer could no longer use it, he hid it away. The Willys Jeep was recently for sale by the Musée de la Libération de Sainte-Marie-du-Mont, near Utah Beach, Normandy. The new owner of this Willys MB said he’s currently trying to restore it is good as possible. Gladly, he told us, he will keep the original paint and markings. His main purpose is to have the vehicle mechanically perfect again, add a new wire loom and perform other required works.
Thomas Grasser, 91, was visiting the New Mexico Museum of Military History last summer when he realized the museum’s ambulance was his “home on wheels” in Europe during World War II.
Grasser lives in Albuquerque now, but he grew up in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The Army drafted him just six days after high school in June of 1943, and although he didn’t know how to drive, he was designated as an ambulance driver and trained in California.
Grasser finished basic training at the end of 1943 and shipped out to England at the beginning of 1944.
The invasion of France on D-Day had begun. About three weeks later, Grasser and his unit landed on Omaha Beach.
When the strafing planes came to the ambulances, they pulled up and stopped shooting until they were back over supply trucks. The pilots “respected the red cross” on the ambulances, he said.
By the end of the war, Grasser had traveled through France, Belgium and Luxembourg to Germany. His company evacuated 25,000 patients between Omaha Beach and Aichach, Germany, and helped liberate two concentration camps, according to the Albuquerque Journal.
Grasser was driving an Army ambulance through some of the bloodiest fighting, including the Battle of the Bulge, in the European Theater of World War II.
For his service to his country and to France, Grasser, was awarded the Bronze Star and the French Legion of Honour.
These days, he volunteers at the visitors information center in Albuquerque’s Old Town.
