We’re fortunate to have among our regular contributors Joe Oldham, an automotive journalist whose career kicked off during the golden age of factory muscle. During the late 1960s, Joe worked as a writer for High Performance Cars magazine, a publication dedicated to the many hardcore gearheads who hung out at the drags on weekends and drove hot street cars every day of the week, as was common then. High Performance Cars was based in New York City, and the tri-state area was a hotbed for racing in those days, both legal and otherwise.
As a native of the area, Joe had grown up with hot rods and racing in the streets, so when he had the opportunity to sample the latest from Detroit, he felt a legitimate test of a car’s performance was determining how it stacked up against the local competition. That meant he regularly took test cars to the Big Apple’s infamous gathering points, to see what might turn up and how his mount of the week might fare.
This is probably a good place to state that
we do not condone street racing, and for that matter, neither does Joe at this point. It’s illegal, it’s dangerous, and the potential for catastrophe is fairly great, especially in tight urban settings. These days, the legal consequences of street racing in most metropolitan areas are stout, and not to be trifled with: stiff fines, confiscated vehicles, possible jail time, and so on. Suffice it to say, it’s a bad practice, so know that our recounting of these events is purely for historic purposes… and a little entertainment value.
Recently, Joe wrote a column for Hemmings Muscle Machines about a particular evening spent with a then-new 1968 Dodge Super Bee on loan from the Chrysler Corporation and outfitted with a 426 Hemi and a TorqueFlite automatic transmission. The account of that Friday night can be found on page 52 of the October 2012 issue (HMM #109), but when you flip to that page you’ll find nothing but copy – there aren’t any accompanying images. Which is a shame, because Joe actually sent some along, though we couldn’t fit them on the page because his writings ran a little long. Normally, we’d trim the copy to make room, but in this case, the story was too good for slicing and dicing – we left it alone.
That means we’ve still got those images, so here they are. One shows the Super Bee pulled up at the Big Bow-Wow in Queens, a long-gone hangout for street racers; another shows the Bee along the curb with some regulars under the bridge on Union Turnpike below the Clearview Expressway, a spot known as “the pits” according to Joe, as it was the place where plenty of clandestine speed contests were arranged. Our favorite of the bunch is the one leading this post showing the Super Bee squaring off against a 1968 Road Runner, which is clearly a Hemi car – you can just make out the presence of the tiny “Hemi” badge on the left side of the decklid, the Hemi-specific exhaust resonators are clearly visible beneath the bumper, and this one is wearing the full wheel covers that only Hemi cars wore in the B-body line, as they were 15 inches in diameter and borrowed from the C-body Fury VIP and Chrysler New Yorker. What makes the shot laughable today are the snow tires on the back of the Road Runner, complete with big fat whitewalls. More evidence that the cars we treat as mechanical deities today were often daily drivers when new, no matter how fast they might have been.
For Joe’s full account of that evening, check the aforementioned issue of Hemmings Muscle Machines, and for more of Joe’s experiences during the era, pick up a copy of his book, Muscle Car Confidential: Confessions of a Muscle Car Test Driver, published by Motorbooks.
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