Gorman says he left for the airport that day with the intention of just checking out the car, so he left his checkbook at home. Then something made him go back at the last moment to retrieve it. It turned out to be a prescient decision. “I got up there, jumped in the car and thought, ‘Man, I think I have to have this,’ and I wrote him a check right there,” Gorman says. “Then we went back up there and had (Bickel) put my motor and transmission in it. He also put a parachute controller on the wheel for me and installed some nitrous controllers.” Gorman says Bickel’s shop was “unbelievably quick” in completing the job. |
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| He arrived just before closing time one evening, leaving just enough time to unload his engine and transmission from the trailer and set it in a corner. “They said they’d be back about nine in the morning, and I got there about 9:30 from the hotel and the engine was already in the car,” he says. “They were amazingly fast. They put the hood scoop on and had to move the isolator tray and that took maybe 20 minutes." |  |
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"They welded the headers up, that might’ve taken an hour and a half. I was there a day and a half, essentially, before I drove it out. Unbelievable.”
Both Feustel and Bickel obviously did a good job, too, as Gorman raced to a third-place points finish as a rookie in Outlaw Top Sportsman last year with one win, two runners-up and several number-one qualifier awards to his credit.
His trackside help comes from Lloyd Munroe and Joe Case (“They do all the hard work and I just drive it.”), and it was Munroe who steered Gorman toward ADRL action.
“He (Munroe) was down at the ADRL (season-opening) race in Houston this year and told me about the 10.5 class and said, ‘Let’s go try it.’ So we went out and got the tires, stuck them on the car and went to the ADRL race in Montgomery, AL, after testing one or two nights and had a tough time getting down the track,” Gorman admits.
JUST THE FACTS GENERAL CHASSIS & BODY ENGINE |
Rods/Pistons: MGP billet aluminum/JE Pistons INTERIOR SAFETY EQUIPMENT SPONSOR |