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Super Nats promise fun to the finish
SALEM
It’s the one everyone comes to see.
The 1967 Pontiac GTO muscle car was a top-10 finisher in last year’s Steel Valley Super Nationals – the weekend-long classic car show and drag race at Quaker Raceway in Goshen Township.
The candy-apple red beauty features mag wheels and a 400, four-speed ram air engine.
On the back panel below the trunk is a mural – of said GTO, roaring out of a grave. It had been wrecked into a telephone pole, then brought back to life.
That car was even responsible for a friendship. In the search for parts after the wreck, its owner, Kevin Baltes, met Dave Helmick.
They bonded over their love of GTOs. Helmick, his wife, Michelle, and their daughter, Erin, 14, were joining Baltes and his son, Jeremy, 13, at the Super Nats for the weekend.
Also with the group was Randy Reese, who lives in Palm Bay, Fla. A former Austintown resident, Reese comes back to Ohio “just for this. It’s a yearly ritual.”
He usully brings a car up, he said, though he didn’t this year.
The Helmicks, of Berlin Center, brought Michelle’s 1972 Ford XLT Ranger.
“It’s all original paint, with 54,000 original miles,” she said. You won’t see her driving it to the grocery store, she said.
The Helmicks have 25 to 30 cars. They, too, have a ’67 GTO.
“I like the GTO,” Erin said, sticking with the crowd favorite.
Jeremy said he wants a Trans Am when he gets his license.
He’ll be a “motorhead” like his dad, Baltes said. The two work on cars at a garage outside their home.
On the track, not far from them, modified street cars were constantly drag racing.
“I love it!” said Michelle about the noise. “And the smell of burning rubber!”
There were a few actual dragsters around, Reese said, but they were in a different class.
Across the grass nearby, a man named Jeff Wilson had a car really worth seeing, they said – a Corvette not to be missed.
Yes, the glassy red ’Vette had drawn a crowd. Wilson had the door open and a woman was climbing inside.
They wanted to hear it start up. Wilson knelt and poured a clear liquid into a jug.
Not gasoline. Methanol, they explained. That, upon closer look, was clearly no ordinary Corvette. That was a dragster.
Wilson poured the methanol into the tank. Someone cracked a joke to the woman not to put it in gear after she started it. It roared alive with all the power of a creature that uses 16 gallons of methanol per mile.
On the track, it blows by at 200 mph.
It’s street legal, too, Wilson said. But you can only go about a quarter of a mile before you run out of fuel.
Wilson’s got a lot of reason to be proud of it. He built it himself.
Wilson, who owns Wilson Construction in Boardman, does all the bodywork, metal fabricating and painting in-house at a shop behind his house.
He debuts a new car every few years for the Super Nats. “We have friends that come in from out of town, and we get together, and it’s fun,” he said.