This is nothing new. Henry Ford figured it out long ago when he started paying his employees enough to afford the Model T's that they were building. Of course, auto workers aren't getting paid sixty bucks an hour, in this day and age it would be un-American to pay the workers more than 1% of what the boss is making!

Let's hope that the new President and his crew really can walk on water and save our poor, ailing, Mother Mopar (and the other two) from demise in 2009. We've come too far; we finally got that pony car we've been asking for for thirty years! It even comes with a Hemi!

Here we are getting carried away again, this time with our '70 Chrysler Town & Country project that I told you about last month. We decided to get rid of the dash board altogether. We measured and ordered a ten-point cage conversion kit from Art Morrison Enterprises so it will be safe and legal into the nine-second zone! We've decided to make it a "button" car and run it in Super Pro, Super Street, and maybe even Super Gas!

We've got all kinds of MSD two-step and three-step modules kicking around for some reason that we can use for the cause. We also have Mark Maez, our ace transmission builder, ready to build us a stout transbrake style 727 when we are ready. We're hoping to get it to the track around the end of April for some testing at the local tracks with a "mild" 440 that should get it some eleven-second time slips.

One advantage of working so hard on the stocker in 2008 is that it's basically ready for action in 2009. All we're doing is replacing the valve springs, giving it a tune up, and loading up the trailer with all the spare parts we can find. Sometime during mid season we're going to start playing with a stock legal 383 single quad motor to use as a back up. It will make the car legal for K/SA competition as opposed to C/SA that it runs with the Max Wedge engine.

We want to have a back-up motor but even Bill Gates himself would think twice about owning two Max Wedge race motors--they are second only to the Hemi in terms of expense! So we figured that the low deck might be an affordable alternative. If we get it right it will be flying at one second slower than our current set up. I'll tell you all about that and more next month.

Good Luck in 2009!