Every automotive enthusiast remembers how working on their car when they were younger involved throwing wrenches. At the time, it seemed like those car parts were out to get you – they were being obtuse just to rile you up. It’s this exact reason that John Phillips’s article on Hagerty.com/media (Hagerty, by the way, is SCCA’s official insurance partner) entitled Amateur Hour: Sometimes a Temper Tantrum Solves Everything strikes a chord with all of us.
The article begins with a bang.
“I walked halfway down my driveway, then set a modern record for hurling a Ford Motorsports finned aluminum valve cover into Langport Road, where it missed a landscaping truck, bounced twice, then collided with the far gutter,” Phillips wrote. “’Had your little fun, did you?’ I screamed. ‘Not so funny now, huh?’ At some point, my voice broke and I was croaking a susurrate whizzing hiss mixed with atomized spit.”
This was the early 1970s and at the time, Phillips was prepping a Mustang Boss 302 for road racing, although not for SCCA® competition, as he was living in Canada. Images of the car, though, show the racing class as “AS,” so it’s not a far leap to assume the Canadian racing group was using rules based on SCCA’s classes, be it A-Sedan or Trans Am.
Also at the time, Phillips was young – to the tune of 17-years old. He was also learning as he went – a combination that often leads to lessons learned in the most frustrating of ways.
“So, I was entirely self-taught, even as I began rebuilding the engine after every race,” he admitted. “Seriously, how hard could it be? To which I received the cosmos’s molten reply when I installed – all at the same time – a General Kinetics camshaft with more lift than a Wonderbra; a costly dual-point Mallory distributor; and twin Stewart-Warner electric fuel pumps. When I lit off that deranged Rubik’s Cube of time/space continuum – using a faulty timing light, of course – scientists in Greenwich lost 13 minutes on their atomic clock. It was vivid, especially when the 850-cfm Holley pulled a full Old Faithful, by which I mean individual blazing Walden Ponds of Sunoco 260 atop my prized Shelby intake manifold, which that week I’d polished to Hall of Mirrors sheen but thereafter resembled a festival of black scabs. Plus, another header fire, although by then such nether-region blazes didn’t concern me. My dad glimpsed me holding the garden hose. ‘Everything OK out there?’ he asked, although he knew enough not to await an answer.”
The stories continue. Broken parts, credit card debt, burned biceps, and the eventual sale of the car – it all happened, and given his young age at the time, it’s a story you, too, can likely appreciate thanks to how similar these tales likely are to your own automotive journey.
Photo courtesy John Phillips / Hagerty
