The Calspan Corporation in Buffalo is one of the pioneers in the field of automotive crash research and needed something to keep themselves at the forefront of that industry in the early 1970s. What they came up with was crash testing well beyond the limits of crashing a single car into a fixed object in the form of a wall, another car, or guardrail, etc.
The wanted to recreate real world accidents with moving cars and different angles among other situations. They devised a pulley and tow system using steel cables to propel the cars and called up Chrysler to order up all the horsepower that they needed to move the driverless vehicles. That call netted the lab three solid lifter, dual quad, top of the heap Hemi engines that would provide the last piece of their puzzle.
Back in 1965, ABC ran a television show called Wide World of Sports. On one of their shows they had a fireman's competition between different fire departments in the country. The competition involved putting five fireman on the back of a homemade firetruck and taking off from a dead stop and hooking hoses to fire hydrants, unloading ladders, etc. It was like a quarter mile of competition to see who could do it the fastest time.
the above Dart is an altrered wheel base wrinkle wall monster, a Super Stock Hurst special?
One of the fire departments on Long Island, the Central Islip Fire Department drill team used a 1965 hemi Coronet with a truck back end welded in place where the trunk would have been.
3 years ago Hemmings ran an article on one of these race cars, and called it a Fire Chiefs car.
The object is, a team of competitors board a customized vehicle that looks sort of like a fire truck. They line up at a starting line against another team and, on signal, race for 475 feet. The rigs halt, they dismount, and hook a hose to a hydrant before hitting a target with the water stream. Or, throw a ladder against a platform and scramble to the top.
So on one level, it's a car race. Today's hottest "trucks" are often based on tubular steel chassis originally designed for drag racing or paved-oval Modifieds. One team famously used to use a mid-1960s Corvette body turned around backwards, with the fastback rear window serving as a driver's windshield and the engine bay, less hood, as a hose bed.
Where these contests exist, almost all in New York, they're big, big stuff. Millions were first exposed to firemen's jousts during the 1960s when ABC's Wide World of Sports, which had a top producer living on Long Island, discovered them. Their proximity and low production costs made them staple segments on the program, like figure-eight racing and demolition derbies from nearby Islip Speedway. A Web site specializing in the drills, www.nysdrillteams.com, lists well over 100 fire companies with drill teams, about 75 percent from Nassau and Suffolk counties on Long Island.
It was left in the band in Eau Claire Wisconsin for decades, though it once made a try for life with a 318, but after 2000 miles that engine had problems too, and it was back into barn storage again
he tried selling it on Ebay, but instead of a million dollars he thought it'd bring, it topped out at only 155k
So he sold it to Fusion Luxury Motors in Chatsworth Ca. (just west of Burbank) and they are trying to flip it at $270,000 www.fusionmotorco.com/vehicles
