2000Black:
MCCANDLESS REUNITES WITH “BEST EVER” CAR
My dad is Herb McCandless, raced for sox and martin for a few years. Ronnie lived here locally. My 65 barracuda was a car he had for years as a drive around. Lots of *** history around here. Cool to see you so into it.
Small world. That's a great story, thanks for sharing. Gotta love the ol' school drag racers, lots of great ideas. Anyone who's a fan of those days knows who your dad is! One of my first project cars was a 64 Barracuda 25 years ago, but it'd be cool owning what Ronnie owned. If you have some rare old pics of your dad and cars, that'd be great to see.
I have a Hemi related story to share, apology in advance to the OP if this is too much in your thread.
In the late 90's I was working at the R&D Chrysler Centre in Windsor, Ontario (across the border from Detroit), small facility, they did all sorts of projects there, from NASCAR stuff to experimental manufacturing and vehicle dynamics, probably 100 or so people worked there. At the time, my hobby was restoring an all original 70 Hemi Road Runner.
There was this old fellow that delivered stuff back and forth across the border from Auburn Hills to Windsor working part time in his retirement years. They had a cubicle setup for him in our facility, he would come in once or twice a week, and nod off reading books to kill time waiting for the next delivery. "Old Fred" they would call him, a thin old quiet man in his late 70's.
One day I was flipping thru a Hemi picture book, and the magazine wrote about the original Hemi lead designer who worked on the drafting board who worked for Bill Weertman and Mel Capentier, and his name was Fred Shimpton. I knew that name!
I talked to Fred, and sure enough it was him. At the time I was a Hemi nut, and couldn't believe it. I talked to the guys in our office, and was like "do you know who Fred is?". Most weren't muscle car nuts in the office, and didn't realize why I was a bit excited. The was only one other fellow that knew why I was excited, John P., and he supplied 426 c.i. Hemi drawing blueprints, etc.. to Ray Barton, who was his friend going back to when he and Ray lived in Canada out in the East coast way back then.
Fred was originally assigned the job to start designing the first Hemi engine for Chrysler back then. I still remember the conversations. I wasked Fred "so how did you start designing it?", Fred said "Mel came up to me and told me to draw up a Hemi combustion chamber cylinder head". Fred didn't know what to do, he told me "shiiit, I don't know what a Hemi was, so I went down to the local public library in Detroit and started reading about them, and found a hemispherical combustion head engine designed in France around the 1900's and started from there".
I asked Fred to autograph some books, he gave me a copy of a presentation of the history of the V8 at Chrysler that Bill gave him, I scanned them many years ago for Moparts:
Moparts.com - 45 Years of V8 Power
An unusual piece of trivia, when I was working at Chrysler back then, one day the president showed up and there was a ceremony for the longest working term employee at Chrysler in history and it was for Fred Shimpton. Fred said that he **** in before the 18 year old age limit, started working for Chrysler when he was 17 years old.
Best regards, you have a cool dad, enjoy your holidays! Hope to meet one day.
Mike
maybe that was a Grand Coupe?
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