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[b]Under the Radar[/b]

Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car - FEBRUARY 1, 2010 - BY JIM DONNELLY

Small Cars, Big Competition, Vivid Memories

The Rumble Years." That would have been a good, ideal name. Rung right off your eardrums once they stopped buzzing. Everything on left-right courses at the outbreak of the Seventies had a whole bunch of cylinders, and Formula 1--as in Cosworth--was only the most obvious case. Come to America, and there were bangers in the Can-Am, Trans-Am, Formula 5000, Indy cars with stock-block V-8 and four-cam turbo Fords, and the welter of American muscle in at the top of SCCA's Production and Sports alphabets.

Except for one weekend. It began August 14, 1971, with a novel idea for two-fisted promotion by Watkins Glen in New York. First, bring in the SCCA Trans-Am Series for sedans and pony cars for their regular stop. Even in its withered, post-factory phase, the yowling Trans-Am was still a certified crowd-puller. Next, combine that race with an SCCA National, which would mackerel-net weekend racers into the Glen's paddock the same way. As an aside, the arrangement would allow the Under-2.5 liter category of Trans-Am cars, which usually escaped focused attention, to shine on their own.

"Maybe a third of the Trans-Am cars that were present that day were 2.5s," recalled Don Markle of Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, who was at Watkins Glen in two capacities that weekend, as he'll demonstrate. "The program for that weekend called it the 2.5 Challenge. They had the big stuff there for the Trans-Am, but a lot of really good little stuff was on hand, too. The V-8 cars brought in the people, sure, but I'd like to think that the smaller stuff had the interest of at least half the crowd that was on hand."

PHOTO 1

"When I was living in Oakville, Ontario, in 1971, one of the people who was in the same apartment building as me was Bob Tanner, who drove this Ford Escort, number 63, in the Glen Nationals that year. I think I first met him in the swimming pool at my complex. He mentioned my Mustang, and we got to talking. We learned that we spent a lot of time at the same race tracks: Bob driving, me taking photos. For this race, I was a member of his pit crew. Bob brought the Escort home in seventh. He imported this particular car from Britain as a race car. In Canada, as in the United States, Ford buyers looking for a small four-cylinder car didn't get the Escort, but instead the Pinto. Or as we called it, the Barbecue."

PHOTO 2

"In the pits, the Alfa GTAs entered by the Wetson's team are number 2, Bert Everett--another top Alfa driver--the number 3 of Horst Kwech, and the number 4 of Harry Theodoracopoulos. At the time, the Wetson's name didn't mean anything to me, because we didn't have those places in Canada. I remember that around 1972, Herb Wetanson got some money out of Pepsi-Cola and they changed the team cars' color to blue, at least temporarily. It never came close to having the same impact as the Wetson's orange that they started out with."

PHOTO 3

"Here was one of the BRE cars, the number 35, which was entered for Mike Downs, who finished third in the 2.5 Challenge. I believe that in earlier races, this car had used the number 27. I don't really know that much about Mike Downs, other than that he'd been a production-class champion with Bob Tullius at Group 44 before BRE hired him as a second driver to John Morton. In the season manufacturer's points, Datsun came in second to Alfa in 1971, with BMW in third."

PHOTO 5

"There it is, in the background, that bloody Watkins Glen guardrail. This BRE Datsun 510, the Peter Brock team's entry with John Morton as the driver, was a DNF that day for an unlikely reason--it ran out of gas. If you're on one side of the course at the Glen when that happens, and the pits are on the other side, that's it, Charlie. But this race, and these cars, had a pretty profound effect on me. The following year, 1972, I was 30 years old, and that was when I went out and bought a new 240Z. I think that in retrospect, Nissan--or should I say, Datsun--got some tremendous exposure in North America from both BRE's team and the red cars of Bob Sharp. The cars I had first before the 240Z were an MGB and a Bullitt-like Ford Mustang, but to me, the Datsun was really special, really nice."

PHOTO 6

"Horst Kwech drove this Alfa Romeo GTA, one of three cars entered by the Wetson's team, to the win in the 1971 2.5 Challenge at Watkins Glen. A second team car, driven by Harry T, whose real last name was Theodoracopoulos, was a DNF. Kwech and Harry T were the two primary drivers of these Alfas, which were entered by Herb Wetanson of New York. Herb's father was the founder of the Wetson's hamburger chain, whose locations were mainly around New York City, and had an orange logo that was matched by the race cars' colors. Herb Wetanson, then, obviously had a few dollars to spend on racing."

PHOTO 7

"The guy with the clipboard, standing next to the pit wall, is Peter Brock. The other guy, with the straw hat, is obviously one of his pit crew guys. Unfortunately, the camera angle of this particular image doesn't allow you to distinguish John Morton, who was strapped inside the Datsun. I think it's a nice shot, anyway, especially since it shows the BRE symbol on the pit board. The success of this team sold a lot of cars. I can remember that when I bought my 240Z, a Porsche was twice the money. Datsun had a dealership near me, a glorified gas station that could only accommodate one car in its showroom. At the time, that car was an orange 240. The dealer told me five people wanted one, but none of them would buy it in orange. So I bought it."

This article originally appeared in the FEBRUARY 1, 2010 issue of Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car.

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