By John Gunnell
Barry Bartz works at Clintonville Bearings LLC in Clintonville, Wis. That’s the city where the first four-wheel-drive system was invented and where FWD Trucks and Seagrave Fire Apparatus are made. Bartz offers the best selection of bearing, bushings, seals, belts, pulleys, chains and sprockets in that area of the Badger State. Last summer, Barry showed up at an area car show with one of the bitchin’-est rides we’ve seen lately.
In fact, Barry’s Model A Ford hot rod coupe took the first-place trophy at the Manawa Downtown Car Show the very night he dragged the car home from another state. The five-window coupe is a drag racer known as the “Flying A Gasser.” The car ran in B/Gas drag racing classes in the ‘60s-‘70s and looks like it drove right out of that era and into 2021 through some magical time machine that takes cars from the past into today.
If you peek inside this authentic barnstormer you’ll see stickers from the various drag strips it ran at wrapped around the roll bar tubing. One sticker that’s shaped like the United States map is from the National Championship races at Detroit, Mich., held there long-ago on Sept. 3-7. There’s a sticker with a rail dragster on it from Milan Speedway in Milan, Mich. and an oval-shaped red, white and blue contestant sticker from the 20th annual championship drags in Indianapolis in 1974. The newest sticker dates from 1980.
White lettering on the side of the hood announces that there’s a 427-cu. in. V-8 lurking there. Naturally, the front suspension is set up “straight-axle” style with smaller Moroso tires on slot-type mag wheels. The “beer barrel” fuel tank is mounted between the front fender aprons, above the transverse leaf spring. Airplane type front shock absorbers keep the ride as smooth as possibly can be expected with a speeding drag racing car.
To lighten the coupe up for speed runs, holes were drilled in the front fenders, the lower edge of the hood lid and in the cadet visor above the windshield. The black metal running boards also have four rows of holes drilled in them. They must have done some good, because Bartz’s window sign indicates the car turned in a 130-mph, 12.20-second run. The sign asked when the 1930 Ford had been acquired and Barry wrote in “Today!”
Other features of the fast Ford include a black-finished hood scoop, drag slicks on the rear, a cowl-mounted tach, a dashboard-mounted fan and the aforementioned roll bar. It has a B & M straight-line shifter mounted near the shell style bucket seats. Updated instruments are neatly set into the chromed Model A instrument cluster. The date that Barry Bartz brought the car home was July 30, 2021. By Aug. 22, he had changed the wording on the cowl from “Tim Tuned” to “Big Time Racing” and he was doing wheel stand runs against Greg Stelse’s “Joker” ’57 Pontiac at Wisconsin International Raceway in Kaukauna, Wis. Which proves that “old race cars never die . . . they just drag away.”
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