Yesterday we told you about a neat old front engine dragster that is for sale. The car has some cool history and was built by the west coast shop of Roy Fjastad called Speed Products Engineering. We mentioned that Roy built a lot of dragsters, we weren’t kidding. Shortly after the item hit the blog we were contacted by our friend and BangShift.com forum member Don Roberts (TopFuel169 on the forums). Don had a great career driving dragsters and funny cars, one of which happened to be an SPE piece.
The SPE digger than Don drove was a Top Gas machine called “The Slider.” The car was owned by then New England Dragway track manager Jack Doyle. According to Don the car was a real strong runner and the chassis from SPE was awesome.
“The Slider top gas car I drove for Jack Doyle was a SPE car that weighed 1,150 pounds with a 392 hemi in it. We couldn’t so anything wrong with this car in 1968. It flat hauled ass.”
Don was gracious enough to send along a few photos of the car in action.
Yes, the guardrail at New England Dragway in 1968 was made of plumbers pipe!
Jack Doyle, the car owner, is the guy standing behind the dragster looking over his glasses. He can still be found in this very pose a few times a year at New England Dragway, some 40 years later.
