1981 Winston World Finals Pro Stock Round 1 

RIP Lee Shepherd. GREAT Driver+GREAT engine builders=Pro Stock Championships

Bob was a nice guy my father made his blocks at the Cleveland Plant for years! He always had time for the fans!

And Dave McClellan, made a great team, very knowledgeable about the sport.

You got that right happy days. I might be bias, but I think they were the best team ever.

Everyone but Top Fuel races the full 1/4 top fuel is getting so fast they can only race to the 1000ft mark for now till the safety equipment catch’s up to the speeds the cars can achieve

You're very welcome!

mann5353, hey, very nice car... Whatever happened to that special car?

Did your old trans am end up in Sand Springs Oklahoma. I think Vernon "Shakey" Harris bought it....

Met you once at your shop. Was fishing for oldsmobile stuff back then. I think you had the Calais car then

Dennis Schell. I got to see Bob Glidden in Fremont California in 1980 for the winter nationals. Got a poster of him autographed. Also saw all the other big names like Shirley M. Big Daddy and so on.

So do I.

Hoods weren’t stock my dude 😂😂. 99% of the car wasn’t stock.

Hell most dipped the body in acid to shave weight. And at this time they didn’t use a temp on the cars so they moved body parts around to get less drag 😂🤣

@@ScooterLee-ei1ep they look more stock bro they do lol

Hell yeah when it more then just chevy

They’re also much slower than what we have today

@@LexicalNoScope Yeah it took these prostock teams years to get to the speed and power they have now .

Hahaha good example of what cars look like today, made me laugh!

I go further back to when the original Funny Cars were door slammers. No use for them after that.

You bet, they had a real good shape!..many Mopar racers like Butch Leal and Glidden ran them.....one of the saddest times I recall, was calling Dave Koffel in '83 about some parts for a motor I was building, and I asked how John Hagen was.....Koffel choked up and said Hagen died driving his hemi fired (500 cubic inch) Omni a week earlier...apparently John didn;t tighten his harness up anywhere near what it should have been.....and the rest is, well, you guessed it....I still have a problem to this day with this. I met with John at the Fallnationals, back in 1981. Just a real nice guy....still sorely missed. By the way, the hemi in Hagen's car was not a big displacement motor; it was based on the 383 wedge block, reworked to fit hemi heads....was about 366 inches. Wish the announcers would do their homework.

Yet nobody complained about it until almost 40 yrs later. Cuz our country wasn't full of a bunch of pussy bitches back then.

Sox & Martin had an Omni with huge slicks on the rear. Had no idea they could run the hemi in '81. But cool!

That Fairmont is incredible. It's a shame NHRA had to change the rules again to give other manufacturers a chance.

@@daleostrom3613 Actually Bob did really well with the new rules and his Ford. Won several championships as I recall. Also the RMS guys were beating Glidden before they changed the rules.

@@eda8877; Before the larger engines were legal, the ONLY reason the RMS guys were competitive is because of the weight brake rules. The Cleveland powered cars had to run heavier that the chevys or anyone else for that matter. Bob had to sandbag or NHRA would just keep adding weight. Just remember, if Chevrolet isn't competitive, time to change the rules.

@@daleostrom3613 Well Dale, as you know - the NHRA went to the 500 inch engines in 1982. There were no weight breaks. The RMS guys kept right on winning. The big inch Chevy beating the Big Ford for the championship 1982,1983 and 1984. Then, sadly we lost Lee and that was it. Now, I'll give credit to Bob, he could and did win in anything, not just a Ford. My point was that Bob did just fine with the new 500 inch rules. If anything- the 500 inch rule favored the Mopars. Thinking back, I recall the RMS small inch Rat did just fine vs. the Clevelands.

What are you talking about? My Dad raced at an 1/8 mile track starting back in 1962.

OriginalGamerOnline - All NHRA classes are still 1/4 mile except the nitro classes which had to go to 1000’ for safety reasons due to speeds getting to high for many tracks.

@@capriracer351 My Dad was racing in the 60's & 70's as well. He owned a speed shop and would sponsor races. Now in my area we had , 75 & 80, Capitol Raceway, Hagerstown Raceway & MIR (Maryland Int. Raceway). All those tracks were 1/4. I'm not saying everyone was that way, but I was raised on 1/4 mile racing, which on the East Coast was the norm. 1/8 mile to us is more like "Light to light" street racing. Don't get me wrong, racing is racin. But I'm more of a 1/4 mile snob.

@@danmyers9372 Oh ok, gotcha. Thanks for the information.

They STILL use that ridiculous phrase.

Wrong.

Maybe the wheelbase beside engine specs but need consult regs. Although those are supposedly representative rigs but yes the factory does enhance for track.

Bill McVeigh do you have a brother named Michael McVeigh? Now there is a real stand up guy. I just wish I could be half as cool as he.

@@mikemcmikemcyeahok4977 yes, but he joined the circus as chief clown. He's been real successful at it to.

@@billmcveigh5875 what a dick

I have seen 351 Cleveland’s put away a 1966 396 chevelle bb and a 1970 chevelle 454 on the streets!

NHRA Had to change the rules. Bob Glidden would go through a sea of chevys and mopar with the only ford. The next year Bob had to go around the country looking for used boss 429s so he could run against the new aftermarket chevy engines. NHRA has always been on the chevy payroll.

@@daleostrom3613 Just like NASCAR.

That's what I was saying!

Top fuel got to 2 miles with burnouts before they run!

They had a weight per cubic inch rule back then. In 1982 they changed to the 2350 lb 500 cubic inch rule

That's 2 entirely different classes of racing with entirely different cars. There's no comparison. They were still running those straight axle cars in the class they started in. It also has to do with the way the cars were designed and built back then,too. So tell me when pro stock cars had straight axles that sat 2 feet high. Because it never happened. When pro stock started in 1970, they didn't have 2 foot high straight axles lmao. They looked like regular street cars for the most part. www.nhra.com/sites/default/files/styles/news_galleries_x1_400px_/public/2020-02/now-then.jpg?itok=KVxNeZRv

@@J__C__ I guess they call them gassers they all used the stright front axles in the 1960's I never studed Drag Race Rules.. I am just going by photos and videos of the cars of the era and the same cars they still race today in nostalgia classes. Also my point about weight and Cubic Inches.. I am no fan of Fords.. but Bob Gliddehand n won so much the Drag association NHRA AHRA what ever one it was kept handicapping his car motor Combinations so much that he had to switch to MOPAR and even Chevy and he Still Won.. The early Pro Stock racing is the kind that Interests me.. I like Chevy and Grumpy Jenkins who won a lot too , but Bob Glidden had an amazing career and actually made a living at it .. These Top Fuel cars that cost $11,000.00 per pass don't Interest me that much other than the pure science invoved in making so much power and going so fast.. I am more intersted in classes where the owner can build his own car to try and beat others restricted to the same set of rules..

Adam Engelberth - They didn’t have sophisticated adjustable clutches like today. The launch was all on the driver. Too little RPM and they could bog, too much and spin the tires. The dry hop was the drivers way of verifying thee Ed best RPM for the launch. This was the time when the driver had to actually drive the car.

We've evolved away from the dry hop.

Dan Myers i worked for Goodyear in Akron Ohio for 21 years i was at the manufacturing plant in the motorsports division of the company. The reason for not doing anymore dryhops has nothing to do with drivetrain fatique or modern adjustable clutches. The tire compounds we have now are alot better where there is no need to do a dry hop. The dry hop had nothing to do with rpms or where to launch. After extensive testing the best and most consistent launches were right after the burnout. You do a burnout then stage. Doing dry hops will stress the newer modern type of racing tires Goodyear offers. Many other companies have taken the same approach.

That's what they were called before Pro Stock went all to shit. Factory body panels...

They still had factory sheetmetal but by this time they were all full tube chassis cars. Agree by this time the use of the term ‘stock’ was a joke. NHRA never should have allowed full tube chassis in the class.

@@danmyers9372 They had full tube chassis cars way back into the 70's. Do you think Bob Glidden had and stock unibody left in his pro Stck Pinto? These younger people don't understand "Factory Hotrods" were called that due to they looked just like what you could win on Sunday, and buy on Monday. Big deal it was just sheet metal. Way better than the crap they race today that looks NOTHING like anything built from a factory. Just stickers for looks.

@@RL-RLDo you know when, or over what period, using a real factory body with a VIN was phased out? I know some teams were using real bodies as late as 1985. Yes, I know the full chassis has long been scratch built since just after the advent of the class, but by when were no cars competing that ever had a factory shell? By what year were they just ordering a couple panels, headlights, and taillights? I'm curious of this for both Pro Stock and NASCAR.

@@johnwilburn If I remember correctly, it was Bill "Grumpy" Jenkins who turned the tide when he built his first Vega Pro Stock. Must have been around 1973 or '74. I believe the rule book at that time said it had to have a stock floor pan but what da Grump did was to cut out parts of the floor pan where the tubes for the frame were, and then weld the floor pan to the frame tubes. Grumpy told the NHRA techs that the rule book did not say that you couldn't modify the floor pan, and that the rules did not say that you couldn't add extra support to the floor pan. Thus, it wasn't a "tube frame car", it was a car with tube reinforcements! He also chose the Vega because he calculated that with the cubic inch/weight breaks that he could build it light enough to run a high winding small block and be competitive with the big blocks & hemis.

How do you print shit?

@@OldFuddyDuddy69 shirts, my bad

Mo T VFL - yep, saw that!

I was not forced but I was starting to get copyright strikes due to the races I had posted being uploaded to NHRA All Access. I did not want my entire channel deleted for copyright infringement so I emailed NHRA directly and asked if they would like the content removed, which they said yes. Could I re upload it all? You bet. Why haven't others gotten the same treatment? Couldn't tell ya.

Cute, but no. It's more than just the classic races also.

Dave W, for me, I love the classic races of pro stock Cajun Nationals down in the bayou! That’s where I’m from... So, seeing them at State Capital back in the day, makes me see what I missed because, I was too young to understand what I was missing when my parents was taking me up old Airline Hwy to the races there... Thank you for adding any of them...👍🏾

Not sure, there was a weight per cubic inch rule in place then, the Chevy's were only running 427ci engines. Must have been using smaller, older style hemi.

some were bored out 383 motors. with massive work to the bottom

I hate it when people reply that have no idea, but still infuse confusion and misinformation.

@@johnwilburn It's been a few years, so correct me if I'm wrong... But when Pro Stock started in 1970 they just had a weight/cubic inch rule (the more cubes you ran, the heavier the car had to be). Then the Hemi's started to dominate so NHRA started making different weight breaks for Hemi's, big blocks, small blocks, etc. During this time the big Hemi's kept getting more weight added to their cars and Jenkins came out with his lightweight Vega with a high revving small block. That's when the trend to de-cube the big blocks/Hemi's got started. The idea was to keep the high flowing heads and intakes from the big motors and mate them with a smaller cube/higher revving bottom end. With the weight per cubic inch limits still in place, the smaller cubic inch allowed a lighter car. I think most of the "big" motors were brought down to the 360-380 ci range. It was the constant complaining about the weight breaks that caused the NHRA to throw up their hands and say enough! From now on it's going to be 500 ci max and all the cars will weigh the same.

That sounds plausible. Of course WJ’s DRCE made the switch a certainty. I liked the weight breaks, personally. Glidden’s Cleveland program was awesome. But now that you say that.... Glidden did run a small block W-2 headed engine in 1979 when they ran the Plymouth Arrow. Could he not de-stroke a Hemi or big block as those were no longer offered in 1979?

Up until 1982, 500 inches max. After '82, unlimited. There were some Plymouth Arrows that ran a 318 based engine at 10000 rpm.

radsdad1 Wrong! Pre 1982 the engines were variable cubic inches as long as they met the correct weight/cubic inch ratio for ProStock. Starting in 1982 they set a constant minimum weight and 500 cubic inch engine limit! This race was the last race before the 500 inch limit began!

IHRA ProStock had unlimited cubic inches

@@trailerparkcryptoking5213 ok! Thanks!

Glidden was running a cleveland engine for years doing well with it

joe quillun lol Glidden dominated this series for years in his Ford he's the reason nhr changed all the rules they were basically all against him!

@@donalderdbrink647 To the point where NHRA penalized him by having him put extra weight in his car to slow it down.

@@LeeFred78 Sort of what NASCAR did to the Hemis in early 70s, by making them run restrictors. The Chevy and Ford boys were complaining.

And yet it took 40 yrs for pansies to complain about it. Don't like it when everybody uses the best car available? Get you a Ford and go pro stock racing. Otherwise quit yer bitchin.

I'd say there are more than a few people who would disagree with your opinion. Those POS fox body cars became the most popular style of car to hop up for drag racing since the 55-57 chevys came out.

OCIR Orange county ca

@@Joetrout Thank you. That was my suspicion.

Trans Am had a 403 Olds engine stock in the late 70’s.

Yea... like a Hemi in a omni is

@@jerryhablitzel3333 yep. 1980 and 1981