Street Stock racing is a bit polarizing to me. I love short-track racing and I love the balls-out effort that many who get into this sport apply. At any small track across North America you are likely to find a field of cars battling it out in a manner that is more NASCAR than the actual NASCAR race events are. Asphalt or dirt, it’s all the same: local boys who know how to build and wheel a car in just about any condition. My knock against it? It’s where second-gen F-bodies and G-bodies go to die. Which makes looking at Brian Cronk’s machine all that more the strange, because I can’t completely identify it. Parts of it look G-body, parts of it look early W-body Oldsmobile, and the nose cone is a NASCAR Grand Prix style unit that obviously is tacked on there just because. But we aren’t here to dissect the car so much as we are here to watch it in action. I’ll be frank in saying that I don’t know jack squat about setting up a dirt car, but whatever the secret is for Cronk, it involves the driver’s side front tire staying well off of the surface for as long as possible while the rest of the chassis heels over to the right hard under power like an angry sprint car. Hmm…seems like fun. I wonder how well it works in the snow?
I once started to build an asphalt street stocker. The rulebook made it look affordable. Then I got a look at the competition. Apparently they had never heard of the rule book and suddenly I needed a $10,000 engine to even qualify. That was the end of that adventure.