Dale had barely finished securing the front clip, when he decided to take the gremlin for a test drive. James jumped into the floorboard on the passenger's side, and looked forlornly at the kirkey seat laying on the workbench. Dale had removed it earlier to allow himself room to work under the dash. They idled through the back yard and out onto the street, carefully avoiding the gas until he exited his neighborhood. Once out on the main road, he whacked it pretty good, and standing outside of his shop, we could pretty much hear every move he made on the throttle.
"He's going to get us all arrested", I surmised
"Probably in some little town in Tennessee", Darren added
"Probably tonight, in Owasso!" Boone chimed in. We all laughed, and went back to what we were working on.

Dale's friend Tom, had stopped by for the evening's festivities, and he decided to help Boone stab the steering column back in the Truck.
I made my way over to the Gremlin when they pulled back in.
"Front is too low", Dale shook his head, "We scraped the crossmember under the pan about four times in a mile and a half".
"Well, If you hadn't wanted the engine in there so low..."
"I wasn't going to let it end up like the AMX!" He interjected in a low growl.
We bought the 70 AMX backhalved racecar in 1997 with a BB Mopar/Glide combo already installed. The engine sits fairly high in it, forcing the Glide to run downhill to clear the stock tunnel. Dale has never been happy with it, but not so much that he wanted to invest in a new engine plate and new headers. The Gremlin was a 401/727 car, then converted to BBC/Glide, so Dale started with a clean slate by putting the crank/tranny centerline level, and making everything work around that, so now his dragster pan, and newly made crossmember were dangerously close to the road.

This is a pic from a couple of weeks earlier in the build to show the front suspension that was a concern to Dale. The hacked out upper arm, the cheap CE coil-over kits, and the modified support rods on the lower arm might last forever bracket racing, but driving through pot holes? A 440 source front-of-engine kit was modified to mount the alternator to the engine plate.