Dan, I was happy to have assisted you with the purchase of the Road Runner. You have been a worthy owner.
I was wanting to buy it at the time, but the timing was bad for me personally.
The only time I saw the car race was at Muncie (Indiana) Dragway sometime in the late 80's or early 90's. It was in gray primer and from what I remember, it already had the Centerline wheels. It made a pass and as it crossed the finish line, something broke in the front suspension (tie rod) causing it to go off the side of the track into the corn field.
When it arrived back in the pits being towed by a wrecker, I struck up a conversation with Darrell (didn't know him at the time) and that's when I found out it was a real A12 car.
It wasn't until 10 years ago that I found out the car was still in the area, then went to look at it for documentation purposes.
After talking with Darrell, I listed the car for him and worked with Dan to assure him it was the real deal, early build A12 Road Runner.
I remember hearing about the wreck. Luckily it didn't hurt the car much. The story I was told was that nearly all of the replaceable hardware on the car was replaced to lighten the car. Even the fender bolts were center drilled and reinstalled. Apparently they had used thin aluminum washers on the strut bars where they go through and are secured to the K member. Under hard braking after making that pass the aluminum washers (one side or both, not sure) completely failed and the strut bar (or bars) punched through the washers and went where they wanted causing a loss of control. That's what I remember hearing, I'd have to go back to my notes for more details.
And speaking of making the car lighter. You might remember the special door hinges I showed you when we met up at Tom's place in 2018. Carl's brother Dan (who passed) had a lot of connections. He had both the steel bumper brackets and the two door hinges recast using a mixture of aluminum and magnesium that they called "Alumi-Mag" using factory tooling! I was told about these parts after I bought the car. Darrel said he already had removed the special bumper brackets, but that the door hinges were still on the car. Upon tearing down the car, sure enough, I found the extremely light-weight door hinges. They were definitely not stock steel pieces. I was not able to reuse them as they were wearing extremely thin in the pin-bore in certain areas and eventually would have failed. I replaced them will stock units.
Here's a photo of the "Alumi-Mag" door hinges:![[Linked Image]](https://i.ibb.co/S5GBgKK/bty.jpg)
