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The All-time Dodge/Plymouth NASCAR Racing history thread

426K views 1K replies 34 participants last post by  Beentherebefore 
Well, OK.......a little more as I remember it. The "Rich Howard" referred to in the article was Richard Howard, owner (or part owner) of Charlotte Motor Speedway before Bruton Smith. He never gave up on the idea of bringing back Chevys to increase the crowds and his gate receipts. In 1971, he basically funded the effort by Jr Johnson to build what later became known as the Coca-Cola Chebbie driven by Bobby Allison. An essential element of this story can be heard if you listen very carefully when they play the "Back in the Day" series on TV and do the show on this car, namely..............Jr Johnson admitting that he knew that his big-block Chebbie would not really be competitive against the Hemi powered Mopars and Fords and so went to Ol' man France and asked him to make "adjustments" (the word he uses in the TV interview) to the rules so that his Chebbie could run up front with the top cars. The result was the first use in Nascar of restrictor plates, specifically to cut the hp advantages of the Hemis. The Howard backed Chebbie (I believe that Charlie Glotzbach first drove it ) had such an advantage over the choked down Hemis that a nervous Bill France threw a restrictor plate at it also, but always with larger throttle bores than the Hemi cars were allowed. There was so much arguing and bickering over who had an advantage that Nascar was changing the sizes of the rp bore holes every few weeks to try to keep the competition even. If you look at the results from the '72 racing season, you can see that the big races were fairly evenly split between that Chebbie, Petty's Plymouth, and the Woods Bros. Mercury. By the end of that year, all the big blocks had been throttled down so far that Nascar engine builders began to realize that an unrestricted small block could make equal or greater hp. By the end of '73, everybody was using small blocks and the big-blocks were then banned forever by Nascar when it set the current 358" limit.
actually the FIRST use of restrictor plates started at the 2nd Michigan race of 1970.
 
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