A NASCAR Shop Built 1934 Ford Street Roadsters For Bonneville | Daily News Byte

A pair of non-identical twin 1934 Ford hot rods, both built for Bonneville’s Salt Flats, got some attention at the 2022 SEMA Show in Las Vegas. Aaron Brown’s black-and-red roadster drew crowds at the Performance Plus booth, while a few aisles away, Vance Kershner’s dark green car was also being worked on at the Penske Racing Shocks booth.

The similarity between the two vehicles is no coincidence. Both were built at The Garage Shop in Catawba, North Carolina, where Aaron and his team build race cars. These two roadsters were built to be mechanically identical but technologically different, all to learn more about building a land speed car, and to set some records.

Aaron’s early career experience was in NASCAR racing, and his participation at Bonneville began in stock cars. NASCAR racer Bobby Isaac did the same in 1971 when he set 28 records on the Utah salt, driving a winged K&K Dodge Daytona. Isaac, a Catawba resident, died in 1977, but Aaron was a close family friend and promised Isaac’s brother that if the records ever fell, he would go to Bonneville to get them. Isaac’s flying mile record was broken in 2006. True to his word, Aaron and The Garage Shop, with cooperation from Vance Kershner, built a 2007 Dodge that went to Bonneville and broke the record from the previous year of 20 miles per hour.

Aaron liked the taste of salt as much as he liked NASCAR and built a few other cars, but told us he felt there was “always a little bit of drama because some of the Bonneville guys didn’t like the stock cars. ” In 2021, Bonneville tech inspector “Kiwi Paul” Gilbert urged him to build a car for the C/Street Roadster (C/STR) class. He built two.

“I told Vance that I wanted to prove to the racers at Bonneville that I could build and run a car in a class. Vance said he wanted to do it too. Vance’s motivation was that we were building him a blown gas streamliner to run on the lower side of 400 mph with state-of-the-art technology—MoTeC engine management, data acquisition, and all that. He wanted a roadster built with the same technology. I said I’d build my car to drive next to the seat of my pants. And that’s what we have. Technology versus grit.”

David Freiburger called the Roadster classes the most bloodthirsty at Bonneville. Within the Roadster classes, Street Roadster vehicles are, believe it or not, the closest to hot rods you’ll find driving on the street. Street Roadster rules are strict, requiring American production or exact reproduction bodies from between 1923 and 1938 equipped with headlights, taillights, brake lights, horns, and rear fenders, among other things . No dimensional or aerodynamic body mods are allowed. The C/Street Roadster designated V-8 engines between 306 and 372.99 cubic inches.

“Mechanically, the cars are identical,” Aaron explained. “Even the engines. We worked closely with Doug Yates and Jeff Clark from Roush Yates Engines. They built us a lot of horsepower. Both cars run Roush Yates Ford NASCAR 358 engines, which make approx. about 950 horsepower at the crank, turning at 9400 rpm.”

Both engines are backed by a C&R CR2C center-shift NASCAR transmission. “When C&R got out of the transmission business, I bought 40 of them,” Aaron told us. Dynotech Engineering driveshafts deliver torque to Speedway Engineering rearends. Earnhardt Technologies Group-modified Dirt Late Model rear suspensions feature torque arms, a birdcage four-link setup, and Penske racing shocks. Both chassis are built on the same fixture to ensure they are identical.

A reproduction fiberglass 1934 Ford body (with a 1932 grille shell) was chosen for aerodynamics, as the Street Roadster class rules did not allow aerodynamic body modifications. The steel hoods, aluminum side panels, and aluminum tonneau were made by The Garage Shop.

The big difference between the two mechanically identical roadsters is the data-acquisition technology used in the number 88 car. “The MoTeC system collects about 75 channels of information between the engine, suspension, and more,” Aaron said. By keeping the parts the same between the cars, they could reasonably apply the data collected from Vance’s high-tech roadster to Aaron’s “seat-of-the-pants” car.

As you might expect, safety is a big consideration at The Garage Shop. Roadsters are built around a driver pod and a front-to-rear center firewall that provides a barrier between the driver and oil tanks, batteries, and other liquids and hot elements. The engine in each car is mounted in six places and is wired to move to the right in the event of an accident.

The Garage Shop has been building roadsters for 6 months. Before the trip to Bonneville in 2022, Vance and Aaron and their respective teams tested the cars with multiple passes on dirt courses close to home.

“These two cars are a coin-toss speedwise,” Aaron said. “Mine was running in the 200s on the mile-and-a-third course we set. Vance was deep in the 190s.” Rain at Bonneville prevented any racing, but the ride was still a success. “We passed tech with two cars that were different to anything we’ve done before and we passed tech with no boxes checked.

“We’re newbies to these roadsters, but we’ve learned a lot and we’ll continue to learn as we go.” In addition to learning, proving a point, and maybe breaking a few salt records, Aaron’s goal is to keep the memory of Bobby Isaac and other racers like him alive—as Aaron says, ” all the drivers who came before us, who drove around the country in station wagons, ate baloney sandwiches and went racing.”

In season 3, episode 2 of HOT ROD Unlimited, Thom Taylor drives a channeled, topless Deuce roadster in winter from Nashville to Los Angeles, encountering what you’d expect in the middle of winter: ice, rain, cold, frost—did we mention it? the cold?? Watch the roadster slide, slide and spin for 2,000 miles as Thom takes Interstate 40 through eight states and 70 degrees of temperature change, making breaks for burnouts, breakdowns, bad weather and junkyards. Sign up for a free trial of MotorTrend+ and start streaming every episode of HOT ROD Unlimited now!