The Staff of Motorsport Marketing
The Staff of Motorsport Marketing Writer
11/8/21 9:54 a.m.

Story by Preston Lerner

The car sat buried in the far reaches of a dingy Nissan storage facility in Nashville like a forgotten trinket destined for a yard sale or, even worse, the trash. 

By 240Z standards, it was an odd bird, with a long, rounded beak and a striking but somewhat strange stars-and-stripes paint job. The vintage hotrod-style Moon …

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sir_mike
sir_mike New Reader
11/8/21 2:58 p.m.

Great story...thanks

martybtoo
martybtoo
11/9/21 11:53 a.m.

Quite a surprise to see this article, because I was part of the crew that originally built the car.  The car was pretty stock when it arrived at Cecil Yother's shop.  Cecil was a long time customer of Racer Brown, as he always ran his cams in his drag race cars ( the later Melrose Missile cars).  He stripped out the interior, welded up the seams, installed the rollbar, added a fuel cell and built a belly pan for the car, while Racer was building the engine in his shop.  The engine was mated with the chassis, loaded on Cecil's truck and we headed for Bonneville.

As I recall there weren't too many issues (mostly tuning for the altitude), but ultimately we took off the belly pan and the car ran faster without it.  Racer Brown was driving, and one of the test runs started out okay, but he said the engine kind of layed over at the end of the speed traps.  We took off the valve cover, and one of the rocker arms was broken. Cecil and I were in the drag racer next-round mode, so we started to work on it, but when we turned around everyone else was getting ready to leave! It turned out the the Bonneville vets knew we couldn't run the car again until the next day, so they were going to eat lunch first. The car was repaired that afternoon, and set the record the next day.

a7pilot
a7pilot New Reader
12/30/22 2:10 p.m.

The article mentions a 2+2. Any idea what happened to that car?

David S. Wallens
David S. Wallens Editorial Director
1/10/23 10:17 p.m.
a7pilot said:

The article mentions a 2+2. Any idea what happened to that car?

I can ask around. This one was almost hiding in plain sight for a few decades. Maybe the 2+2 is still out there? 

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