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Joker Journeyman Parts Store------------------------------------------------ 42 1965 Chevrolet Impala Sport Coupe V8 ...pg 8
Joker Journeyman
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Story by John Gunnell
One of the definitions of the journeyman level of experience is “a person who has completed an apprenticeship program or is an experienced worker, and not a trainee, and is fully qualified and able to perform a specific trade without supervision.” That description fits Clayton Rogers, a 22-year-old man who Greg Stelse trusts with not only very important jobs in his shop, but also with the performance of his gasser-style race car at the track.
Stelse owns a five-year-old specialty-automotive business called Greg’s Speed Shop LLC (www.gregsspeedshopllc.com). It’s there that Rogers works as a full-time mechanic—a job he seems to love. But while you might think a young mechanic would want to get away from cars on weekends, Rogers spends many Saturdays and Sundays traveling to drag strips to wrench on Stelse’s ’57 Pontiac quarter-mile muscle machine.
Stelse calls the two-tone green ’57 Pontiac Star Chief “The Joker.” The car is usually found inside Greg’s Speed Shop. But the work that involved turning the “Poncho” into a nostalgic drag racer actually got off to a dismal start, according to Greg’s wife Leah.
“Greg purchased The Joker from a man who had it stored away in an old garage in Missouri,” Leah told Musclecars Plus. “It had suffered in terms of rust and deterioration from all the years it was stored. In fact, the ’57 Pontiac body was just a shell back then.”
Plucked from what Leah describes as “the depths of despair” in 2014, the Star Chief fit into a vision that Greg had in his mind. “He wanted to make The Joker a worthy vehicle again,” Leah recalled. “And he wanted to be the one behind the steering wheel when it was racing down the track again.” Clayton is helping Greg reach for that dream. The car has been torn apart and rebuilt numerous times. It has lots of outer patina and Clayton’s job is to make The Joker’s innards work well. Years before Greg opened his speed shop, he brought the Pontiac into his old GS Trucking Co. in New London, Wis. where it got its first teardown and a new lease on life. He and his truck
An artistic photo of the Joker at the annual Symco Rod & Kustom Weekender event in 2021. With its focus on “old school” hot rod, Symco is the perfect Joker venue.
mechanics ripped the car apart and put it together as a straight-axle dragster. Now, he takes the car racing during the warm months. On those weekends, Clayton goes to the drag strip with the car.
The Joker has been successful in racing. Leah reports that it “has participated in many races over the years and will continue to run many more years.” After Clayton and Greg met in October 2019, Clayton was hired to work at the shop. Today, he does mechanical restoration on everything from Plymouth GTXs to Studebaker Hawks.
Clayton also travels with The Joker. “When we blow an engine or tranny during a race, we have spares in the race truck,” Greg exDespite having only three years of hands-on experience at Greg’s Speed Shop, Clayton says he’s been into old cars for more years than that. My father and grandfather are old-car hobbyists,” Clayton
explained. “Grandpa has a ’69 Mercury Montego and Dad has a ’53 Ford. I grew up in an old car family and muscle cars are in my blood, too.”
In Feb. 2020, The Joker underwent another complete redo that covered work such as replacing the OEM glass windows with lighter weight windows better for drag racing.
The car sitting inside Greg’s Speed Shop LLC in 2019. Since redoing this main building that year, Greg Stelse has added four additional buildings to his campus.
In late-2018, legendary customizer Gene Winfield visited Greg‘s Speed Shop and helped decorate The Joker’s windows with vintage drag racing stickers.
Clayton Rogers has swapped engines and transmissions in the Joker many times right at the race track. He said he learned a lot from drag racing The Joker with Greg. Clayton owns two Fords—a ‘31 Model A hot rod and a custom ’51 Tudor Sedan. He says that both cars need more work before he will consider them done, but they look like very good builds in photos he has. “They’re getting there,” Clayton admitted. “And I’m learning a lot from working on cars at the shop and tweaking The Joker at the dragstrip.”
Clayton learned his basics from working on vintage cars with his father and grandfather. “I also took automotive technology classes at Mid States Technical College in Wisconsin Rapids,” he said. “I learned to do a lot of things in school, but I also learned a lot at Greg’s Speed Shop over my three years there. We deal with lots of different cars.”
Clayton says his talents are best applied to mechanical repairs, rather than body work and paint. “I’m most comfortable with the mechanical side of things,” Rogers admitted. “I like solving problems that cars have when they come into the shop and I also like traveling all over the country to events where we take The Joker.” Greg Stelse added, “Someday Clayton will probably be running the shop, rather than just working in it.”
While he seems to be a “Ford Guy,” Clayton admitted that his “dream car” is a 1968 Dodge Charger R/T. “I love the looks of the R/T and they seem rare.” He’s correct. The R/T (Road/Track) was introduced in ‘67 as a special muscle car version of the mid-size Dodge Coronet (there was no R/T model offered for fastback Chargers in 1967). Out of almost 100,000 Chargers sold in ‘68, 17,584 were ordered as R/T models.
While writing this column, we wondered if Clayton Rogers was named after the famous Clayton dynamometer that William Clayton designed to simulate the inertial and load forces encountered by a performance car. We never got the answer, but we can tell you that Clayton Rogers is a real dynamo when it comes to enthusiasm for old cars and for making The Joker fly down the quarter-mile a little faster each time. “He really knows that old car and knows how to make that big Pontiac V8 flex its legendary racing muscle.”
The Joker gets another redo on April 7, 2020. As Greg and Clayton are learning, race cars are never done, they just keep getting better.
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