Fel-Pro Gaskets came on as a sponsor early on. Its people approached Kloet after the big race in Brainerd , Minnesota, for sponsorship. Since he and Super Gas racer Sheldon “King Kong” Gecker were good friends, and since they were setting records and winning races, they soon made Fel-Pro Performance a big name in racing. The sponsorship lasted for 17 years, and the sponsorship included Dennis, Shelly Gecker and Buick Super Stocker Joe Covert.
 Fel-Pro team members Dennis Kloet, left, Sheldon Gecker and Joe Covert pose in front of their Fel-Pro trailer. |
We wanted to get Joe in, and he was a good racer, so I came back to renew the sponsorship one year and said I want to add another car. Fel-Pro said no, and so Shelly and myself gave some of our money to Joe,” Kloet said. He now has the Super Stock/AX Buick that Covert raced, and he and son Dana race it locally. “Shelly had his ‘King Kong’ Daytona, and he would go one way, Joe would go another and I would go someplace else, racing all over. We were tough.”
He and Covert were one of the first people to haul two cars together. They’d pack up the Renault and the Buick, and wherever they'd go, they would both run their classes. They’d usually win class, and on the off day, Covert would drop the “Z” car at an AMC dealership for display. They’d get $500, and it was enough to pay expenses.
Here’s the amazing thing about the Z/Stock Automatic Alliance -- it was truly a dual-purpose race car. “We used to use that car for the pit vehicle, even though it was all lettered up and decaled and had a real good paint job. We used to drive it all around, even to get something to eat,” Dennis says. “Goodyear made up some road race tires, and we used those. We didn’t use slicks much because it wouldn’t do a burnout. Joe took it one time and won class at Maple Grove, and he went way under the record, so NHRA was going to tear him down because he went so fast, and Joe said, ‘I have no idea what to do with this thing,’ so he then went to (former NHRA race director) Steve Gibbs and told him he didn’t know how to tear it down, and Gibbs quietly waived the tear-down.”
Kloet later raced a Super Stock/D Compact Buick for Fel-Pro.
At that time, the mid-1980s, Renault was real big into road racing, and Kloet was doing some of the road racing stuff, and he and the other engineers made special fenders for the cars. “We had aluminum fenders and hoods way back when. Then we’d put metal in the paint, so when they (SCCA officials) checked it, the magnet would stick and they’d think it was all metal. We did the same thing for drag racing, but the NHRA tech people never knew what they were looking for anyway. The fenders were real light. Same for the hood.
“There was one time that we set a national record up north, colder than hell, and we ran into a problem with valve springs. You could take these valve springs and compress them by hand. That’s how weak they were. NHRA threw us out once for springs, so I got a calibrated spring set from Chase Knight of Crane Cams, and the next time I went to a national race, before I did anything, we put their springs in and checked it against NHRA’s equipment, and found that their (NHRA’s) stuff was off. We ended up setting another record with the springs.”
The Renault finally ended up back in Wisconsin, where it came from, and one of Joe Covert’s buddies got it and drove the car as a streeter for five or six years after that – still with the fancy gear in the transmission and all the other mods. Kloet says he has no idea where the car is now. “The last time I raced the car was in the ‘80s. AMC wasn’t even in existence then,” he says. By then, NHRA had combined the four-cylinder classes and eliminated Z/Stock Automatic, and the Alliance finished its career in E Front/Stock Automatic. Kloet got a full factory sponsorship from Buick, and built his ’94 Buick Super Stock/AX car, and Covert built a new Regal Super Stocker plus another, a front-wheel-drive Somerset that fit into Super Stock/D Compact.
Kloet, now 58, still races to this day. “I never got out of racing. Dana and I have the ‘94 Buick, and Jason races with us. The Renault … ah, it was just another race car.” 
 wilson@dragracingonline.com |
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