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When Mercury decided to go drag racing in 1964, it essentially had to start from scratch. Its new Cyclone, the performance version of the compact Comet, would provide a good platform for lightweight modifications, and the division could borrow some high-performance engines from the Ford parts shelf, but Mercury needed drivers. Fortunately, according to Charles Morris, writing in Factory Lightweights: Detroit’s Drag Racing Specials of the ’60s, GM’s formal exit from drag racing freed up a number of top drivers for Fran Hernandez to recruit: Ronnie Sox, Ed Schartman, and Nicholson. Of the 21 A/FX Comets that Dearborn Steel tubing built for Mercury in 1964, using 427-cu.in. High-Riser engines, all but one used Cyclone two-door hardtop bodies. The last one, Nicholson’s, used a four-door station wagon body for better weight distribution over the rear axle, and though he switched to a Cyclone partway through the season, he also recorded high 10-second passes and notched up 63 straight wins to go undefeated in match races that year.
For 1965, Nicholson returned in a Cyclone, this time built by Bill Stroppe Engineering using many of the same tricks as the 1964 A/FX cars: fiberglass front bumper, fenders, hood, and doors; custom traction bars; Plexiglas windows; and lightweight bucket seats. Instead of the pushrod 427s, however, Morris wrote that Mercury’s Al Turner convinced Ford to release a handful of its hemi-head SOHC 427 engines to the Mercury team, one of which ended up in Nicholson’s A/FX Cyclone, backed by a four-speed and 9-inch rear axle. With a single four-barrel carburetor, the SOHC was generally considered good for 615 horsepower from the factory, but with some massaging and another four-barrel from Nicholson, his engine reportedly produced somewhere in the neighborhood of 700 horsepower. Nicholson remained atop the match-race heap throughout the year, consistently turning in mid-10-second timeslips, not only by constantly tuning the SOHC engine, but also by altering the Cyclone’s wheelbase, leading the way for march of the funny cars in later years.
Source: Hemming's
2 окт 2024
