Old Blue race car in a cube, the full story

Old Blue, a former US race car was flip crashed, flipped over and was all into pieces, they let crush into a cube, and kept it behind the Lyle Cherry’s shop, until we found it…

Some of you might have seen this phrase in a previous post while others might have seen Old Blue on the BBT display in EBI and Le Bug Show… We’ve made a promise to our visitors to put the whole story online so here’s the story written by one of his original drivers, Dennis.

This picture is the Old Blue Gas Car running in L/Gas at Green Valley Raceway here in North Richland Hills TX. It used to be called Smithfield TX. This was the blue square hulk of crushed sheet metal that lived behind Lyles shop for all those years after I rolled it over and over one night at Green Valley. A Camaro in the race before had blown up a torque convertor and the track crew did a poor job of cleaning it up. I got in the slippery ATF and the tires spun right at the finish line. Bad crash!  This shot was taken with me (Dennis) driving and is just past the finished line after I whipped up on that Chevy II Nova. Boy those were the “Good Old Days”. This was the old Mel Croan car out of Houston that Lyle bought.

The next picture is my favorite picture of the Old Blue race car. That shot was taken and a small East Texas Track called Hallsville. That track was so sticky that day after they had sprayed it with VHT that the 1st time trail pass I left the line at about 6800rpm and dropped the clutch and the car stood up so high it broke the stinger off the back and I almost took out the Christmas tree lights. Next round (when this picture was taken) we put another stinger on it and I raised the leaving RPM to about 7300 and it left like this the rest of the day. Man that car left hard and was a blast to drive. The fans would climb the fences and scream for that little bug when we came back down the return road from a pass!  That was way before Lyle built wheelie bars. It was a handful nut a blast to drive.

The last picture is actually the oldest one of the three. This is not me driving but Rick Johnson who drove the car before I did. He also had the Small Wonder University Volkswagen white chopped top car. This is also at Green Valley in Smithfield TX. Note that it had two of the four BRMS that the car came with. For that run the set of slicks that were used were on stock steel VW rims.