Disastrous 1971 Indy Pace Car Now Seeing Better Days

[Mr.DJ]

The track at the famed Indianapolis Brickyard is a 2-mile rectangle with two five-eighths-mile-long straightaways. It's 50 feet wide on the straights and 60 feet wide in each of the four one-quarter-mile turns, each banked at 9 degrees, 12 minutes.

Race driver Peter Revson won the pole position for the 1971 Memorial Day race with a qualifying speed of 178.6 mph.

Dodge's Challenger, at almost 16 feet long on a 110-inch wheelbase, was selected as the pace car that year and four Indianapolis area dealers provided 50 of them. All the cars were orange with white tops. The actual pace car had a 383-cubic-inch V-8; two other Challengers had 340-cubic-inch V-8 engines and the other 47 cars were equipped with 318-cubic-inch V-8 engines.

The three cars with the bigger engines had the pace car data hand-painted on the sides of the car. The flanks of the other 47 carried the same information conveyed via decals.

One of the dealers, Eldon Palmer, was selected to drive the pace car. He practiced diligently in the 275-horsepower car to get the speed up to where it needed to be. The tale is told that he used several orange cones located at strategic spots around the track as markers for braking points.

On May 29, 1971, with 33 snorting race cars trailing behind, Palmer began the parade lap followed by the faster pace lap. As he came out of turn four...
________________________

Read the rest of the story...

[BuBbABFP]

Here where i live i see a 1st gen Camaro that looks like that, same font and all im guessing its original.

[allhemi]

Thats not good

[WildKarrde]

It should have been illegal to have such a fast, heavy car equipped with only drum brakes.

[Mr.DJ]

Originally Posted by WildKarrde

It should have been illegal to have such a fast, heavy car equipped with only drum brakes.

Funny you should say that, as one of the announcers during last night's airing of the 'Barrett-Jackson Auto Auction' said something similar with regard to the poor performance of drum brakes vs. the weight of the older 'muscle cars'.

[Yankee]

Originally Posted by WildKarrde

It should have been illegal to have such a fast, heavy car equipped with only drum brakes.

Hey, that's the way muscle cars were "back in the day", so to speak. Most of your big-block GTOs, 442, Road Runners and such only had manual 4 wheel drum brakes - power brakes weren't very common back then, much less disc brakes even. Most of those cars were built for one thing, and one thing only - straight line speed. Period. Everything else was secondary (which is a main reason why many of these muscle cars lived a very short life). I know such a thing seems preposterous today (it was even preposterous back then, except we weren't smart enough to know any better). Hell, to some people, if it didn't make your car go any faster it wasn't worth ordering - power steering and brakes, air conditioning and such were for sissies as far as they were concerned.Interesting read about the Pace Car. I had always known about the crash at Indy, but never knew what really happened or why till now. Thanks for sharing.