The “yellow” car started life as a match race car built by Donnie and Clyde in the North Carolina shop for Stewart McDade to drive. They raced it during the 1973 season and even showed up at a few IHRA and NHRA events to race in Pro-Stock. At the end on the season, the car came up to our Michigan shop and Dick Oldfield and I rebuilt the car changing it considerably – we pretty much gutted it and started over. We needed a test car for our “A” engine program. When we were done with it we took it to our first test session at Bradenton FL. At that test session, Clyde showed up with another “Don Carlton” car – like the one in the picture. Donnie was letting Clyde make passes in the car to get used to it and I think the intention was to let Clyde drive it some of the time. For the 1974 season we were planning only to do testing on the “A” engine stuff so we (Dick and I) were kind of out of the competitive racing business – Clyde was taking up the slack in that arena. At the end of 1974, the yellow test car and everything else from the Michigan shop was sent down to North Carolina. Donnie had just finished building his new shop on the family property (his son still runs his business out of the same shop – only it is now 5X bigger). The last time I saw the yellow car as such was at Thanksgiving in 1974. I would not be surprised if Donnie and Clyde converted the car back to Hemi power, repainted it, and began to race it. You just don’t throw away a perfectly good race car…
Now to answer your initial question – I have no idea if that was the yellow car. It might have been or it could have been yet another car built by Clyde and Donnie. I know that he switched over to Colts by about 1975 or 1976. When I last saw Donnie at the Winternationals in 1977 he was running a Colt and had been doing so for a very long time by then.
Dick Oldfield may have a better feel for what happened with the yellow car and I will ask him. Right now I think he is back in California with Arnie. I tried to call him at home on Tuesday but there was no one home. I will let you know what I find out.
