2008-06-17 07:48:56
Over the weekend, in less than 24 hours, the Bandit shot from show car to contender, and I soared from resignation to rejuvenation.
Because this blog is episodic, the back-story is in the previous posting. But here’s how it goes. My new motor guru, whom I can only reveal as MM, connected me to a new shop, Jim Estes’ Garage in Oregon City, near Portland www.jimestesgarage.com. Jim’s son Jay manages the place, and he’s a racer to the core: former circle-track driver in the Northwest, and now he’s crew chief for a professional offroad racing team.
We pulled the engine out of the Bandit last Thursday, and took it to the engine rebuilding shop of Roy Paolo and Guy Mitchell, also referred by MM. Respectfully known as the “Geezers” (though they're really no older than me, so I'll never call them Geezers, it's all relative, and anyone calls me a Geezer ... well, them's fightin' words), they’ve been building engines for a long time, are known to be perfectionists, and have a sterling reputation. An IROC Series engine like mine, built to Penske Racing standards, deserves no less. They pulled the heads on Friday, and by evening I had the good news: the broken parts from overheating at the Rose Cup were limited to a blown head gasket and a couple of stuck exhaust valves and bent pushrods. The Bandit dodged a bullet. The damage could have been many thousands of dollars worse.
On Saturday I took the Bandit, minus engine, to an event where it had been previously booked. The Maryhill Concours is held each year on the lawn of the Maryhill Museum of Art in Maryhill, Washington, located in the Columbia River Gorge, where I live.
Nearly a century ago, it was built as a mansion on a spectacular bluff overlooking the Columbia River, by the eccentric Midwest tycoon Sam Hill. His dream was to have his wife and daughter, both named Mary, come live there with him. They came, checked it out, said it was too isolated, windy, and lonely, and moved back to Chicago, never to return. Sam lived there alone for awhile, trying to bring Quakers to start an agricultural utopia—which also failed on account of wind. Now it’s a mecca for windsurfers and kitesurfers, like me.
The Maryhill Museum of Art was dedicated in 1926, at a big party hosted by Sam and attended by 2000 people, including his female friends, the Queen of Romania and French fan dancer Loie Fuller, who stayed on the train that brought her to the doorstep of the mansion, because she didn’t want to offend the Queen, or make her jealous, although it appears that Sam Hill, the Queen of Romania, and the Fan Dancer later all got together. Details of the intriguing threesome have been lost to history.
In this old photo, the Queen is releasing the pigeons, and that's Sam Hill with the white hair, to the left.
The Concours de Maryhill was held on the day before the Maryhill Loops Hillclimb, sanctioned by SOVREN, the Society of Vintage Racing Enthusiasts www.sovren.org. The Maryhill Loops Road was the first paved road in the Northwest, a snaking strip built by Sam to bring grain down to the river from Goldendale. It was a great turnout at the concours, and there were some terrific historic cars there. Richard and Judy Buckingham of SOVREN do a great job with that organization.
SOVREN also sanctions the two big races upcoming for the Bandit, the Pacific Northwest Historics at Pacific Raceways on July 5, and the Baxter Historics at Portland International Raceway on July 12.
The Rose Cup was important, but, all along, it’s been those two races that I’ve been gunning for, ever since I got the Bandit back last November. I never expected to be a front-runner, because I had been under the impression that the feature event, for Historic Stock Cars, allowed late-1990s Winston Cup cars into the field, and some of them have as much as 800 horsepower. But at the Maryhill Concours, I met Ken Bottini, the president of SOVREN, who injected me with adrenaline when he said that the field is limited to stock cars no newer than 1984! So the Bandit, a 1982 Oldsmobile once driven by the legendary Dale Earnhardt, should be a contender! At least it better be, or else I’m a wanker as a driver, or those boys coming up for the race from California have 700 or 800 cheatin’ horsepower under their old hoods.
But then the adrenaline drained away, when I heard that they couldn't get enough entries of the older cars, so looks like it'll be recent Cup cars after all. No matter. First we have to get it back together in time and have the opportunity for a test day. So that’s the flat-out mission, from now until the test day and media day at Pacific Raceways on July 2.
It was a terrific day at the Maryhill Concours. I took my two sons, Tai and Maks, 13 and 11, and my girlfriend Khia brought her lovely daughter and budding photographer Sophia, 10. Sophia took the photos in this blog. The kids, none of them much into cars, spent most of the day watching the peacocks that roam the grounds of the Maryhill Museum.
Meanwhile, I hung out by the Bandit, met and talked to some great people, and signed copies of my book “Fast Guys, Rich Guys, and Idiots,” a rollicking story about racing the Bandit in 1983, a memoir that the Wall Street Journal Book Review called one of the five best books ever written about motor racing.
PHOTOS BY SOPHIA BRANCH
Sam Moses
Previous Blogs:
Lightning Strikes Bandit at Rose Cup
2008-06-16 10:27:00
So much has happened since my last blog entry that I haven’t had time to do this update. Nor much enthusiasm, because mostly what happened is I blew a head gasket at the Rose Cup at Portland International Raceway on June 1.
Sometimes...
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1958
2008-05-17 07:30:30
I couldn't believe it when I got my copy of Vintage Motorsport magazine and read my father's name, from a race he ran in 1958. I had to write the editor, Randy Riggs (whom I've known since 1972, when he was an editor at Cycle World magazine and I...
Read More
Engine and Tranny Go In
2008-05-14 12:32:25
Weekends are long in racing. For example, I just spent a four- or five-day weekend working on the Bandit. There was a moment there, when Pat Boyle and I were working 12 hours a day to get the engine and transmission installed, that I thought: I...
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Challenges, not Problems
2008-05-13 12:59:39
Thanks mostly to Barbara Signore, the engine arrived in April, weighing 750 pounds in its crate. The car was in the trailer (moved from my yard to the driveway when the snow melted), and the engine was in the garage;...
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Scored an Engine!
2008-03-10 06:31:05
On Saturday morning March 8, I was in a hotel room in Laguna Beach with the ocean crashing just outside my third-floor balcony. I could see the horizon through the wide-open sliding-glass door, but my eyes were glued to my laptop screen. I was...
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The Latest Bandit Story
2008-02-16 18:22:52
This piece will appear in the April issue of BMW Roundel magazine, a sidebar to my story about driving a BMW M Coupe to sixth overall with Doug Mill and car owner Mike Helton, in the Four Hours of Pacific Raceways.
At 5:45 in...
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In Search of One Good Motor
2008-02-16 17:36:59
In the final chapter of “Fast Guys, Rich Guys, and Idiots,” the Bandit blows two engines in one day at Daytona. One of them was a 550-horsepower motor that came out of the shop of the legendary Junior Johnson, Tom Wolfe’s...
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