In the fall of 1988, My friend John Wiser asked me to help locate a couple of dragsters for a movie being shot in Orlando. Long story short, it was the Ron Howard directed film "Parenthood" While my partcipation was limited to helping find the cars and watching over them at the track while filming, it was great fun to be involved in such a project. In fact, it changed my life and my life's direction.
We needed 2 cars for the film, 1 to use as a "picture car" or "hero car" and the other to crash. We even got Keanu Reeves, who played the driver of the car, to the dragstrip and let him make a lap in another racers S/C dragster. We pointed him down the track and basically told him..."Go that way...really fast. Having never driven a dragster before , we figured he would limp it through....He limped to a low 8 second 170 mph pass.....The cars owner (who shall remain nameless) damn near soiled his Simpson SFI 5's watching his car go as quick as it ever had gone....It was pretty funny actually.
Anyhoo....we got the 2 cars together and naturally, we needed to test them. I got to make a few easy laps on them. High 9's were about all these crate motored hot rods would do. It was lotsa fun, but it would be almost 20 years before I got to do that again.
Next Chapter: "Forward Into The Past" *
* All due apologies to The Firesign Theater
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