Near Death ExperiencesExcerpt:
My car, an old 1951 Ford that my dad had given to me the year before for my 16th birthday, was in the shop of a guy named Joe Tolomei. He owed my Dad a lot of money for all the tires he went through as a circle track racer so Dad made a deal with him to fix up my car. The motor was a flat-head 8 and was fine for any 16 year old at the time, but Dad had other ideas.
Joe had built an engine for his race car from a 1953 Ford truck engine. He went though it and did every thing he could to squeeze more power out of it including balancing and blueprinting. When he took it to the track the racing committee said "NO!" It was too much for the track and so he was stuck with this monster. So now he needed another engine to rebuild and to make less deadly.