side effects of kidney failure

In the heady days of post war USA, sports car racing and hot rods rated among the favourite pastimes of the California youth. LA was ablaze with names like Vic Edelbrock, Ed Iskenderian, Frank Kurtis, Briggs Cunningham and A K Miller. These graduates of the motor pool and auto shop had set in place the right and wrong way to get the most out of the V-8 engine on the street, the race track, the drag strip and the salt flats. Lighter, faster, lower and, above all, homebuilt was the order of the day. It wasn’t the same throughout the USA, but the Southern California branch of the SCCA embraced the homebuilt racers.
Dick Jones was 20 years old, and he had a car to build.
The layout was a given. Any V-8 somewhere behind the front axle with the driver and passenger seated low down, close to the rear axle. A choice of modified production chassis or homebuilt frame. And his own, very special, fibreglass body.
He called it a “Meteor”
This is the car, built in 1952, running a De Soto “Firedome” V-8, which was bought by the renowned author Clive Cussler in 1986, and remained in his collection until 2001 when it was offered for sale in Phoenix. The top bid was $USD74,000.00 but whether it was sold is uncertain.

Production gets underway

By the end of 1954, Dick Jones had built six cars. One of the road-going versions was featured in an article in Road & Track in April 1955.

November 1955. The Dick Jones Special

You have to pull the car apart to find them, but stamped onto the homebuilt chassis of the Dick Jones Special are the magic numbers 11/55, suggesting it was November when our car was born. It’s a classic 100 inch wheelbase, race track version. The chassis is 3 x 2 inch box section steel. At the front there’s a homebuilt, double A- arm independent layout, at the rear a Ford Customline live axle, and sitting well back from the front axle sits the faithful Chevy V-8.
The cockpit is aluminium sheet. There was a single roll hoop (now replaced with a homologated double hoop structure and side intrusion bars for safety reasons) and a perspex screen (removed so that the Dick Jones Special could comply with local certification rules for road use). The bodywork was cut away just in front of the rear wheels for twin exhausts.

The Chevrolet racers get to work.

It’s 1956, and Larry Eaves orders a Dick Jones body for his racing special. By November 1957, Sports Car Illustrated had picked up the scent and ran this story.


Trophies on the street

By 1957, Dick Jones had moved to Colorado. Shortly afterwards, he supplied another body to M.A. Adams in Long Beach who spent two years and $1750 completing his street legal sport rod. The trophy came from the 1961 Mickey Thompson Auto show in LA.

Watch this space

Until now, what happened next was still a mystery. E-bay reported that Dick Jones built 25 cars and still placed him in Colorado in 2001. But I can tell you that Dick is still alive and well, and we have made contact with his family. In due course I hope that we will have a whole new section of this site dedicated to the creator of these inspiring cars where he will tell us his story in his own words. Stay tuned!

The Dick Jones Special emigrates.

It was 1988 when Ken White, the President of TACCOC, found the Dick Jones Special in Wisconsin and put it on a plane bound for Auckland, to add to his collection. Two years later he asked me to drive it at Pukekohe.
Wild horses couldn’t have stopped me.

The Dick Jones Special today

The car still has the same engine, gearbox, and running gear, the same chassis and fifty year old fibreglass body. There is a new roll hoop and side impact protection, a new fuel tank, and quite recently some new pistons, conrods, valves, pushrods and camshaft. That old Isky x-85 was just a little too wild anyway.
The cockpit floor and firewalls were replaced to fit around the roll cage, and the car has been re-wired and re-plumbed.
We built a set of home made headers because the old ones used to hit the track, and any day now we’ll be removing the electric tacho and fitting an old cable drive model made by the Jones Instrument Co of Pennsylvania. Any relation I wonder?
In 1956, Zora Arkus-Duntov, the godfather of the Corvette, created a special car with the objective of reaching 150mph at Daytona Beach. His car featured a special 307 cubic inch engine with four barrel carburettor, a special grind cam, and a sump with swinging doors to control oil splash, four speed transmission, a live rear axle, and 15 inch wheels. He succeeded.

You won’t find much that is different in the specs of the Dick Jones Special. The engine is a little smaller, but yes… it is good for 150mph too!