Good Guys Go Autocrossing

Frankly, I walked into the Good Guys expecting restored fleets of lowered hot rods and candy paintjobs, their owners drunk and posing with bikini-clad women for pictures. Okay, maybe it’s a stretch. It is a family show after all, maybe that’s why beer and alcohol were over 7 bucks a cup.

And when reality bites, it bites down hard. I was stumbling around snapping pictures like crazy when the beautiful serenade of high revving V8s ripping tires in caught my attention. They had an autocross event set up, old Hoon machines meeting asphalt on a figure eight course. The weekend just got tremendously more amazing.

The owner of this Mercury Capri ended up locking his wheels on the end of his first lap, hitting one of the barriers and temporarily disabling his car. I wasn’t able to catch the owner and he didn’t run the autocross event after his crash on Saturday.

The fastest time during the whole weekend were posted by a 1966 Mustang Coupe being driven by Mike Maier of Maier Racing, and coming in second was a prepped up 2^nd generation Corvette. Maier Racing also had a vendor presence in the market area, showing off Frank Stangaro’s racing-built ’65 Mustang Fastback. Both cars were at the top of the boards during the whole weekend and had their share of supporting mods.

From the minute I got there, this big blue bird caught my eye as roared around the figure eight. It was born as a 1968 Plymouth Road Runner, and sat until Dan Weishaar was able to get his hands on it. Not to adhere to the basic straight-line stuff, he set out to make this blue bird a course monster.

“Since I had it, I decided that I wanted to do a little bit more left-turn right turn stuff as opposed to the normal stop and go with drag racing,” said Wiseheart. His Roadrunner is mostly stock minus all new disc rotors with Wilwood brakes and supporting suspension modifications and a bit of weight reduction. His fastest time during the autocross street challenge event was a 32.2 second run.

Gary Miller, from Castro Valley, CA, races GTP cars at Laguna Seca and brought his 1963 Ford Falcon to the autocross challenge. Miller was having too much of a blast to figure out what his best time was. His Falcon had a full cage and was nearly gutted.

Rob McGregor, from No Limit Engineering, posted a 34 second run in the black 1946 Ford Convertible. McGregor says he beats the poor ol’ convertible, using it as his daily driver. Besides running with a bad cylinder, the car gets left out in the open and McGregor says it would be getting a new rebuild soon.

McGregor’s other vehicle there was a silver 1955 Ford truck, put together over 30 days on a custom chassis. Powered by a 392 Ford stroked engine and a five speed transmission from a Mustang. McGregor says it debuted at the Del Mar Good Guys event and even raced it with no doors and fenders while still winning in its class. His fastest time in the truck was a 32.208.

There were other amazing cars whose owners I couldn’t catch up with, like this LS powered Datsun 240z. Even the autocross announcer loved it

This guy was Billetproof, and even then I couldn’t catch up to him.

Or this 1960s era Jaguar. Between everything going on I couldn’t get more info on the car or the owner. Needless to say it liked going sideways.

The Good Guys was a big event for the Bay Area. Nearly 50,000 people attended during the whole two day event in the Alameda County Fairgrounds and almost 3,000 cars involved in the show. This is one of their smaller shows, one Good Guys employee said, their biggest show is in Ohio and attracts tens of thousands more and people line up the streets just to see cars leaving and arriving to the show.

There were just too many sweet rods and old muscle cars there to keep track of, and too many to photograph. Nothing like watching old hoon machines in action, kicking ass and taking names.

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