Tom Fuller's 1971 Mercury Cougar

Tom's Cougar has been in his family since around 1973. It's powered by a 351 Cleveland engine bored out .040, balanced and blueprinted. It has a roller camshaft, a Holley 750 carb and an aluminum intake. The original valve covers have been chromed along with some other pieces under the hood. The C-6 transmission was also beefed up to be able to take the modifications to the engine. It has been repainted the original color, and the vinyl top is the original.

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Capitol City Corvette Club
"...organized exclusively for charitable purposes..."

Click HERE to download a copy of the JANUARY, 2012 Palmetto Cruisers News Letter (.pdf document).

All, mark your calendars now for our next show, the FDTC Welding Rodeo Classic Car and Cycle Show on March 31, 2012!

Members, dues are due!

Click HERE for a list of gas stations in South Carolina with no ethanol in their gasoline.
Go HERE to add your name to a petition to halt the ethanol mandate.

    If we get a large enough response, we'll turn it into an online car show... complete with door prizes and trophies!
    * Although most photos will be resized, the larger the photo, the better it will appear on the page, and the format must be .bmp, .jpg or .gif.
    Join us and we'll put your car photos on our MEMBERS' RIDES page!

Beach Race

It was the summer of 1960 at the Blaney Drag Strip in Elgin, SC, the only NHRA-sanctioned quarter mile strip in South Carolina at the time, that I attended my first drag racing event as a member of the Florence Rods and Customs Club. I was not old enough to cruise The Sky View Drive-In Restaurant on my own, only fifteen, so I couldn't drive and had to bum a ride with another member. I ended up attending every Saturday race they had that summer, never saw a professional driver, just regular guys, and I loved every minute of it.

I can't remember now, when I last went to a real dragstrip, but about ten years ago, my grandson, Jackson, brought all of the excitement back to me by a purely serendipitous act, drag racing two little cars of the type you pull back to wind up, then let go to run. He was three years old and had no idea what drag racing was. I joined him. We were on our annual family vacation at the beach at the time, my wife, three daughters and their husbands, five grandchildren and me. Jackson had about twenty of the little pull-back cars, so pretty soon, the whole family had joined in. We had so much fun with it that it became a tradition, we improved on it each year and in a few years, "Beach Race Computerized HO Scale Drag Racing" was born...

We have a 1/64 scale quarter mile drag strip consisting of twenty sections of AFX HO scale slot car track (set up and take down in ten minutes) and thirty-two Johnny Lightning X-Traction® slot cars, so far. With Start switches we built into the first section, and MPH and Finish switches we built into the eighteeth section, the switches are connected to a laptop computer that sits over the track facing the "drivers." The laptop screen has the usual drag racing "Christmas tree" staging lights; when the green lights light, the drivers trigger their cars, the cars trip the switches and the computer displays the drivers' Reaction Times (RT), Elapsed Times (ET) and their scale miles-per-hour (MPH). We developed the computer program ourselves. The car bodies get switched every year, so nobody knows which car is the fastest until race day. We hold double eliminations and the winner gets to take the Beach Race trophy home to display on his mantle until the next year. This year, the trophy is MINE!... maybe.

Bob Liger

Got an interesting or amusing story about your car(s) you'd like us to publish in CRUISIN' "THE VIEW"? E-mail it to us at cruisersall@palmettocruisers.org. Click HERE to see previous installments of CRUISIN' "THE VIEW."

How well do you know your cars...      NEW QUESTION: One 1949 make and model American coupe "...cost hundreds more than comparable Fords and Chevys, but was a solid car that could be nicely optioned," according to the Auto Editors of Consumer Guide. To which make and model were they referring?     Good guess, but it was not the series 62 Cadillac Coupe DeVille, and it was not an Oldsmobile Rocket V8.     Nope, not the Buick Roadmaster Rivera.     Great looking car, but no, not the Oldsmobile Futuramic 98, either. Huh-uh, it wasn't a Hudson Hornet, though the business coupe did have plenty of add-ons.     Nope, not a Mercury and not the Plymouth 3-Passenger Businessman's Coupe.     Another good guess, but, although the Plymouth's 1949 Woodsided Special Deluxe Wagon fit the "hundred's more" part of the question, there were few if any options, so the Plymouth Deluxe wasn't it.     It wasn't the 1949 Packard, and certainly not a Packard Clipper, as Packard dropped the "Clipper" name in 1948.     Answers are anonymous, so if you'd like to get credit for your correct answer, add your name to the answer before you submit it. Click HERE to see Questions&Answers from previous months.