50-year Sportsman racer vet Gary Richard’s Terrible Two
As a 10-year-old, my father and the brainy big kid who lived across the road would scare the hell out of me with impressive, awful stories. This was at the height of the A-bomb threat and the brainy kid told me that if an A-bomb was coming down and you looked at it, your eyes would immediately turn to cinders. Wow! That made me think terrible thoughts for weeks. My old man proselytized about a variation on the atomic destruction thing, something he called a Cobalt Bomb--the TV images of the Nevada desert nuclear tests had burned indelible terror in my mind. According to my daddy, this Cobalt Bomb was powerful enough to initiate a chain reaction that would somehow set off every other atomic device around the world, thus crisping the globe, maybe rending it to space dust, but he offered no further explanation of how this cataclysm would occur.
Suffice that the images and the tales have never left me. Now, I see Cobalts every day and they don’t explode, but the ones Gary Richard drives do. Explode off the line, explode the records, explode the myth that only vintage iron makes the preferred NHRA stock-body doorslammer.
Gary has nine vintage and modern renditions. His veterans include a B/SA and C/SA ’69 Camaro, a Top Stock ’69 Camaro, and a S/G ’69 Camaro. His modern arsenal numbers a
Stock Eliminator C/FIA ’97 Camaro, Super Stock GT/DA and GT/EA ’01 Firebirds, Comp G/SMA ’04 Grand Am, the Super Stock GT/AA or GT/BA and the Comp G/SMA ’07 Cobalts you see here. For the ’08 season, the 67-year-old Gary will show up at nine NHRA national events, ten Lucas Oil Series races, five Northeast Division Sony/PCRichard.com Open series races, and six East Coast Stock/Super Stock Association events. Current NHRA records include C/SA (126.51mph), GT/AA (9.09/144.24), and GT/BA (9.25).
