Johns, with his '63 Nichels...
Johns, with his '63 Nichels Engineering Pontiac at Riverside, California, in early 1963. This was one of the last Pontiacs ever constructed by Ray Nichels and Nichels Engineering, following GM's withdrawal from American auto racing in January of 1963.
HPP: How did you get back into Pontiacs for 1962?
BJ: It got to the end of the 1961 season and I was waiting for a Ford engine to go to Bristol for my first time. Jack Smith came by and said, "Do you want to drive one of my Pontiacs?" And I said, "Yes." So we hooked up our old Ford, towed it to Spartanburg, left it, hooked up his Pontiac-his second car, as he was running two-and we towed it to Bristol. Though I never saw the racetrack before, I put that Pontiac on the pole-I mean absolutely just scorched them with a qualifying time. I said, "Well, this is great." They dropped the green flag and we disappeared for 70 laps and then the rearend came out and that was it. Now that was a great car-Bud Moore's engineering and Jack Smith's car. I got hooked up with some Pontiac people, asked them about the 1962 season, and they said they'd get me a new Pontiac.
HPP: What did they give you and how did it perform?
BJ: They got me a street car. We drove to Nichels Engineering, got a bunch of parts, went back to Miami, put the thing together, and ran that car. We won one race with it-the Volunteer 500 at Bristol International Speedway-I'll never forget it. My dad and I changed gears five times to get a combination we thought would work best. We chose to run the bank right up against the wall. I think we qualified Second and Fireball maybe Third. But as the race progressed, we got the top of the track cleaned off with the high gear we were running. We couldn't run the bottom because we didn't have enough gear for it, but nobody could run the top because they were all geared for the bottom. And once we got the top clean, it was just sailing. We had a six-lap lead when the race was over. We led 430 of 500 laps, which was a pretty good indication that the car really had the capabilities it showed.
HPP: Which engine was in your '62 Pontiac Catalina on April 29, 1962, for your First Place win at Bristol?
BJ: It was a 421 Super-Duty. We used cast-iron headers, a four-barrel carb and a four-speed. The four-speeds were giving other teams a lot of trouble with seizing up, but not us. We fixed our transmission. It was pretty good and we didn't even use an aluminum case-just the stock cast-iron case. Unlike the others, we didn't use the motor mounts to hang on the transmission. A lot of racers were using the back half of the transmission as a motor mount and that was putting a lot of weight on its housing. I believe that was one of the reasons so many of them lost transmissions. We had motor mounts that supported the engine. We built a special cradle underneath the engine that carried the weight of it away from the transmission. The transmission just used that back mount as a damper to keep from vibrating the tailshaft. It was different from the other racers' cars.
HPP: Tell us about the suspension setup in that car.
BJ: We had a different layout in the back. While everybody else was using Panhard bars, we used a Watts linkage. It had two short bars coming from one framerail across to the center of the rearend to a bellcrank. It then continued from the other side of the bellcrank to the opposite side of the frame. If you've ever gone into the geometry of it, you'll see that it keeps the rearend centered up in the car so you get no rear-end steer. That put us in a position where the car was just about as easy to drive as you could make it. Nowadays, nobody uses it-I guess NASCAR doesn't let them use it-but it was a tip that we used for several years in our Pontiacs and they drove great. I'm not saying that's the only way to make it, but that's the way we made it. You could run the bank, you could run up three inches away from the wall and the car's got no steer, you didn't get behind your steering as easy. That was great.