"On The Line Now...Our Own Dickie Barnes..."

Dickie Barnes's '55 Chevy D-Gas racer, circa 2000, many years after he owned and raced it.

Before my first road race, I watched drag races.  There was a local track that I could hitch-hike to, or later, borrow my dad's car.  (Later still, I drag raced my own Datsun 510 daily driver.  With 18-19 second trap times, it was an exercise in brainless enthusiasm and obvious futility.)  

Our strip was off the beaten track for the NHRA, so we didn't see the marquee names like Don Garlits.  Chris Karamesines, "The Crazy Greek," made exhibition runs in his AA/F slingshot dragster, CHIZLER.  He ran in the mid-7's, with plenty of tire smoke for the fans.  It was bodied in unpainted aluminum, a lovely rail:

More interestingly, we saw dealerships and privateers run their Super Stocks.  I particularly remember Anderson  Pontiac's Arlen Vanke-driven 1961 Bonneville 421, the "Tin Indian." It had a sharp red/
gold/black custom paint job.  And a privateer's red Dodge 426 "max wedge."  These were honest 13-second cars that got into the 12's on good days.  In those days, they were, mostly, stock.  Tune the engine mid-week, bolt the racing slicks on, on Sunday, and take it to the staging area.  It was fun to watch them run.

But my favorite drag car was run by a local guy, Richard Barnes.  The track announcer always called him Dickie.  He built a blue '55 Chevy to run in D Gas Unsupercharged.  That is, four classes down from the top, running on pump gas, unblown.  He retained the original 265 cubic inches and added Hilborn fuel injection with long vertical ram tubes.  (The 283 was a 265 before it became a 283/327/350.)  Collector headers, of course, with the can dumping straight down onto the pavement.  Warner T-10 4-speed box.  Big chrome Sun tach bolted to the dash above the instrument cluster.  He replaced the front suspension with a solid axle and weak shocks, so the car leaped off the line.  There was a customary aesthetic to gassers in the early '60's, and Dickie's car checked all the boxes.

What distinguished his car was huge revs.  I'm sure he blueprinted the engine and installed high-compression pistons, along with ported and relieved heads.  He ran an Engle roller-tappet cam and roller rockers.  The shift point was 8000 revs when European DOHC racing engines couldn't spin that fast without blowing up.  Dickie's starting line technique was to run the revs up to 5000 and side-step the clutch.  Then he just drove it down the track, speed-shifting at 8000.  Glorious noises.

His only race that I recall clearly was against an olive drab B Gas Supercharged Chevy, also a '55.  It was 2+ classes "bigger" than his car.  The track spotted him two car lengths.  He won.  He won most of his races.  The car never failed to complete a run.  I have no idea if Barnes took his car to Nationals, or how he fared.  But he dominated the competition in and around his class at his own track.  The car was as fast as a Super Stock at 60% of the engine size.

Fast forward to 2007.  Sentimental old fool that I am, I Googled "Dickie Barnes Gasser" and came up with several sites and pictures.  Apparently the car has survived for 50 years, many of them racing.  Not to mention at least one hideous, '70's-style repaint in white and pastels.  It seems now be street-driven (mufflers), so the current engine is a lot milder than Dickie's screamer.  Its black paint is more appropriate than his Ford Blue, which was probably the original factory job.  Dickie himself seems to have dropped from sight.

But when I saw the picture at the top of this post, loudspeakers in my mind said, "On the line now, our own Dickie Barnes from Chardon, Ohio!!!"  We knew we were in for a fine pass.  I love the idea that this car is still around, and still an old-timey gasser.  And that some guy probably born after 1980 uncorks the headers and runs it down the track a couple of times each summer.