A weekend with the “Ancient Rat” or "How I spent my Labour Day"

A little background first – the “Ancient Rat” is Len Nicholson’s 1969 Camaro with an extremely early Alston Super Gas ladder bar chassis. The really “Ancient” part is the engine – a 1967 closed chamber rectangular port 427 with stock heads and pistons and a whole lot of stuff added that shouldn’t even work with this combo. It has a tunnel ram with two 1050 dominator carbs, a .770 / .791 roller, a turbo 400, 5500 convertor and a set of 5:13 gears. The best part is it has been running 9.50s at 140+ for a good many years now with this unlikely combination. And I must mention we have no delay box, throttle stop or air shifter – just a trans brake.

The track is Raceway Park in Prince Edward Island, Canada and has been operating continuously since the late 1960’s. I’ve been going there every Labour Day weekend since it opened and his is our tenth straight Labour Day trip with the Camaro. It’s two lanes separated by a grassy median that has claimed quite a few cars over the years.
Saturday AM saw a ferocious headwind that one wind gauge showing a 32 MPH constant breeze with gusts as high as 40 MPH. While everyone was off a few MPH and a tenth or two the “hook” more than made up for it. A few time trials on the old girl gave us a dial-in of 9.63 for the first round of the Gamblers race.

Len caught and passed the first guy with a 9.72 to advance to the next round but fell victim to a 9.61 on a 9.93 breakout in round two.

Sunday AM was a little bit warmer and only slightly less windy. ET’s dropped through the day along with the windspeed and we adjusted the dial-in slightly to a 9.58 for the first round of eliminations. First round he chased down and caught a 10.60 Chevy II for the win(a .503 light helped there).

Second round we drew a 7.70 Dragster which put us out of competition for the day. Len said “I didn’t see him so I lifted a bit – next thing you know he went by me at 175 MPH right at the stripe” Margin of victory was .003 so we didn’t feel too bad about the weekend after all. Plus we found a couple of great pubs on both Friday and Saturday nights LOL. Hope everyone else had as fun a weekend as we did……….