THE
Hemi Under Glass
COLLECTION
by KANE ROGERS
THE
Hemi Under Glass by
COLLECTION
Kane Rogers
photography by
Ti m Scot t Davi d N ew hardt
Steve Havel ock Sa m Murt augh
All four vehicles to be offered as one lot
Mecum Chicago Auction Saturday, October 12, 2013 Schaumburg Convention Center Schaumburg, Illinois U.S.A.
Mecum.COM 262-275-5050
The sensational Hemi Under Glass Collection will cross the block Saturday October 12, 2013 at the Mecum Chicago Auction, Schaumburg Convention Center, 1551 Thoreau Drive North, Schaumburg, IL.
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n 1964 George Hurst was looking for a car for the 1965 drag racing season, one that would serve as a test bed and promote the Hurst brand that included his aftermarket shifters and wheels. The answer came over dinner one evening with Hot Rod Magazine Tech Editor Ray Brock. Brock liked the new-for-1965 A/FX class, and explained to Hurst how putting a Hemi in the back of a Barracuda would give excellent weight transfer and be very quick off the line. Brock even had a name for the new creation: the Hurst Hemi Under Glass. He sketched the idea onto a napkin, which Hurst took back to his shop with the question, “Can we build this?” The answer was typical of any self-respecting bunch of hot rodders: “Sure, we can build whatever you want.”
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he finished car, however, was not what George Hurst wanted - at least not at first. “Exhibition Wheelstander” was not the car’s original mission; instead it was to be a major force in the A/FX racing that was then taking the sport by storm. But the Hemi’s mid-engine location and vast power reserves made it all but impossible to launch the car hard without instantly lifting the nose skyward in quite dramatic fashion. What looked like a major problem, however, turned out to be a huge hit with the fans, and so was born the most popular series of crowd-pleasing wheelstanders in drag racing history.
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he original 1965 Hurst Hemi Under Glass set the pattern for a succession of cars that appeared at major events across North America until 1975 and then again from 1992 until 2005. Bob Riggle was there every step of the way, first as a Hurst mechanic and fabricator and then, when the original driver Bill Shrewsberry left to campaign his own wheelstander, as the only other man ever to pilot the Hurst Hemi Under Glass.
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n the winter of 1965 George Hurst was already at work building another future drag racing legend, the Hurst Hairy Oldsmobile. He decided not to build a brand new Hemi Under Glass, which by then was nationally famous for its wild trips down the quarter mile. Instead Hurst had Riggle update the original Barracuda with all the new sheetmetal and trim pieces to prepare it for the 1966 season, during which the original dual carburetors gave way to Hilborn fuel injection. After the 1966 season it was parked outside Riggle’s shop and eventually destroyed. At the urging of his old friend and Hurst’s famous “Shifter Girl” Linda Vaughn, in 1992 Bob Riggle resurrected the 1966 machine in this faithful replica, which he has exhibited all over the country and even at the world famous Goodwood Festival of Speed in England. In 2005 Riggle sold it to collector Bill Sefton, who a year earlier had bought the replica 1968 car also built by Riggle.
Lot S145 1966 Plymouth Barracuda Hurst Hemi Under Glass
Scheduled to be sold Saturday at approximately 3:20p.m.
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lymouth restyled the Barracuda for 1967, prompting Hurst to build a brand new car for the 1967 season. While the original subframe and complete driveline were carried over from the 1965-66 car, development continued non-stop. As Bob recounted in a recent interview with Mecum, “Each time out we tried to improve the car, Paul Phelps and I, working in what we called ‘The Aquarium’ up there in Madison Heights (Hurst headquarters in Michigan). We switched to fuel injection and then from gasoline to alcohol to make it run cooler, and with that and the 4-speed it ran great all through ’67.” One of the highlights of that season was a Hot Rod-sponsored trip with Shrewsberry, Connie Swingle and their exhibition cars to Mexico City, where they introduced the locals to the joys of wheelstanding prior to the running of the Mexican Formula One Grand Prix.
Lot S145.1 1967 Plymouth Barracuda Hurst Hemi Under Glass
Scheduled to be sold Saturday at approximately 3:20p.m.
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t the end of the season Hurst decided to once again build a new car, dedicating the 1967 car to the show circuit. It eventually disappeared, but in the mid-1990s a young man approached Bob Riggle at an event, claiming to know its whereabouts. Riggle was skeptical, but invited the gentlemen to return with whatever documentation he had. Two months later he showed up with photographs of the car at its home in Montreal. It had fallen to neglect but there was no doubt about its authenticity. Riggle made an offer, and soon afterward was towing the remains back across the border to his shop in Arizona. It took almost eight years before he began the car’s restoration for Bill Sefton, but both Riggle and Sefton claim it was worth the wait. Says Bob, “I put new quarters in, a new floor… built a new firewall, did everything new to make it like it is now. There is a lot of work in this car. Everything that was bad was replaced. I’m real proud of the work we did on that and how we got it done.” Collector Sefton is equally pleased: “That car is beautiful, probably better
looking than when Bob drove it new. I own all four cars, but I bought them one at a time. Bob and I met at the Spring Fling in Van Nuys, California in 2004, I think; he had the ’68 car with him, and we started talking about it and I bought it. Then about a year later I bought the ’66 car from him, and when he did the ’67 it seemed a good place for the cars to go because I show them, the public gets to see them in action. Bob and I have done a lot of shows where he drives the car. It’s nice we’ve kept the brand together the entire time.” In addition to its many public exhibitions with Riggle at the controls, the 1967 Hemi Under Glass was also on regular public display at the NHRA Motorsports Museum in Pomona, California from 2011 to 2013.
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he 1968 Hemi Under Glass car embodied all the experience gained by Bob in his first 10 years at the wheel while also capitalizing on ensuing technological advances. The first point Bob makes is that unlike its predecessors, the ‘68 car was built without a subframe, solidly incorporating the driveline into the body structure. “The earlier cars all had a separate subframe designed to ‘walk out’ from underneath the car to make it go higher, but at the top end it can get scary sometimes because the whole thing is moving around. So both the ‘68 and the ‘69 cars have all the driveline solidly mounted in their frames, which I built
Lot S145.2 1968 Plymouth Barracuda Hurst Hemi Under Glass
Scheduled to be sold Saturday at approximately 3:20p.m.
myself. Also in 1968 I went looking for a new rear end that would take the beating without breaking, and I ended up with the rear end out of a 3/4 ton and 1 ton Chevrolet or GMC pickup; they’re both the same. They have an 11-3/4 inch ring gear and they are absolutely bulletproof. We also began using a blower in 1968, which you can tell right away by the zoomies in front of the rear wheels. The ’68 and the ’69 are both supercharged.”
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he 1969 Hurst Hemi Under Glass is the newest of the four cars being offered from the Bill Sefton Collection. Bob Riggle describes the project: “I built the car in 2010. We were actually going to put a late model 6.1 Hemi in it. I completely built the car with the engine, transmission, rear end and V-drive, roll cage, firewall, seat, nearly everything to get it completely done. Greg Ware and Warren Clutter at Bill’s American Muscle Car Garage did an excellent job to get it to that point, but it kind of sat in limbo for a while because he and I were both busy. Then we were together in Bowling Green, Kentucky, this year (2013); Bill said he’d like to finish it, and I said you know, the Hemi Under Glass has always been known for that big Hemi motor under the rear window, and that 6.1 is just a dinky little thing sitting in there, so if we’re going to do this thing, let’s put the real, big Hemi
Lot S145.3 1969 Plymouth Barracuda Hurst Hemi Under Glass
Scheduled to be sold Saturday at approximately 3:20p.m.
in there like the other cars. That’s the way they belong; that’s the way the ’69 car was – it didn’t have a 6.1 in it. And that’s what we’ve done. I brought it back to my shop, made new motor mounts and an engine plate, and I built a 468 CI Hemi for it. It has a BDS blower, Enderle fuel injection, an Art Carr transmission, Cassell V-drive and zoomie headers like the ’68 car.” Bill Sefton explains that the 1969 car is set up to enable someone without Bob’s vast experience to drive it in full wheels-up mode. “There’s a lot of new technology in the’ 69 car, in the shifting and steering systems and other areas that Bob used for that specific purpose so that I could drive it.”
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ow does one control a car at over 100 MPH while the front wheels are six feet off the pavement and the driver’s forward vision completely blocked? That was the question faced by the barnstorming wheelstanders of the 1960s and ’70s. In 1967, Bob Riggle’s partial answer was to install hand-operated brake controls for either rear wheel. Before that Riggle would control the direction by staggering the rear tire inflation to counteract the torque steer from the driveline. The setup would cause the car to steer left after launching, and then to the right with each gear change, reactions harnessed by Riggle during each
pass to keep the car running straight: “I was able to work it,” he says, “so I could make it through the quarter mile by zigzagging down the track at a hundred-and-some miles an hour.” Incredibly, he would look out the driver’s side window to keep the car on track and in its lane: “If I was in the left lane I’d watch the wall; if I was in the right lane I’d watch the center line. When I used a firewall window for the first time in 1972 and I could see where I was going, I thought ‘boy, have I been missing something!’”
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