OK. I visited Jack and Sammi Dolan in San Diego with Simon Davidson in 2011. I have more of this, it was recorded , however although it is word for word I will at my discretion, leave some out, being an outsider I don't want anyone's nose to be put too far out of joint and as we know Jack was capable of being controversial. As it is this is about ten per cent of it.
It was a very emotional time for me as apart from everything else Jack was on oxygen by then, my father had died from a lung disease and went onto oxygen but died soon after , it was difficult meeting Jack for the first time and him being so ill. Despite that, he was still funny, he was also determined to get some story out.
I will get around to transcribing more in time ...for now it's the story of the LN7,So, JS is me, SD is Simon and JD is Jack.
Jack Dolan in his own words as told to James Stewart.
"So, the two little Fords that I ran, one originated from Ford, that was a Lincoln, no, not a Lincoln ,a, um Mercury! A Mercury LN7. And that’s the one that they produced in 1982 the Mercury version was a 2 seater, had a hatchback, and had a different type of front end on it to make it distinct from the Ford, but the rest of it was the same as the Ford EXP that was a four seater so I could use the same car in GT which is two seater cars like Corvettes when I put the Mercury parts , the Mercury was the grill and the hatchback then it became the Mercury 2 seater to run GT in modified sports classes. Then in half an hour I could put the Ford front end back on and change it to a notch-back then it was a Ford EXP four seater legal for all the gas-coupe, fuel coupe that everybody else contests with the same car and they hated that. They hated it because I could switch classes instantly and I never took full advantage of the class for example competition coupe , competition coupe allows you to stretch the front and streamline and lower the top so it looks nothing like what it started out to be. But I never did that. Competition coupe the ah, highest level of….
Is competition coupe what Tom Burkland’s Datsun was?
Yes, well actually that car was a sort of a cheater, it started out as a two seater Datsun and then Datsun produced a four seater version but it had a different roofline. So they made it into a competition coupe as there’s four classes available, it started out as a GT, with just two classes GT and modified sports , so there’s not many people who know that that car started out as something else. The EXP and LN7 was legal to do that that’s exactly the way it came from the factory. One of the things you do in the United States is the DOT takes a vehicle that’s to be licensed in the United States and tests every system related to that car all the smog and emissions stuff ,evaporation stuff aaand the seat belt and seating configuration. So they sent the Mercury LN7 forward as a two seater, it had the brackets and everything for the rear seat but the hatchback cut your, ahh, headspace and instead of having the rear seat they just put a shelf in there as a Mercury. But, as a Ford they put a rear seat and a different back and they had a Ford emblem front end , and a Mercury emblem front end, the Mercury front end was slightly better streamlined with different louvers and things like that.
They hated that car so bad, we set so many records with it, we had the records painted on the hood, and all the classes we could run painted on the hood and we just filled in the records as we went. They hated that, they just hated that, we thought, this is great just great.
With one of the cars we set 21 records. That was our primary car, then we had a secondary car that, um, set a few more. At one point in the late eighties early nineties we had forty one records with five different cars, they hated that. Because I would come up to Bonneville with three cars , we were the only group, that, one of my cars set a class record every day of Speedweek in a different class two years in a row. (Dog itches itself, JS laughs, JD says ”that’s what I said, exactly what I said”) They weren’t so happy about it, I had two different motors and the motor that um was designed for the United States that Ford ran or the Mercury Division was what they called the CVCC or “constant velocity combustion chamber” and that was a cross flow head, two valve, but it was primarily a head to increase the efficiency for emissions for smog stuff and consequently wasn’t as maximum performance as it might be. In Europe they had a , I forget what version Ford called it, but they had a rally sports motor that came with the cars in Europe ( Sierra?) and the rally sports motor was a 2300 Pinto block in terms of all the accessories that you could bolt onto it. It was made out of aluminium by Cosworth and it had the four valve Cosworth head on it just like an Indianapolis car ( yeah, the Ford Sierra…Jack: OK, that’s the Ford Sierra? Right. Simon: They were big in NZ as well. Jack : right, but they’re not legal in the states because of the emissions. JS “They slaughtered everything in Australasia. SD: when they ran in Touring Cars they just, that was it they nailed EVERYTHING. JD: “ah-hahaha , good, I’m glad to hear it) well, I got three of those motors from Ford and two of them were 1997cc motor and the other one was their turbo-charged version they used in their GTP cars, same block but smaller bores 1497cc and it was designed to be turbocharged so instead of having liners , steel liners in the bored aluminium block it had chrome plating in an otherwise aluminium block and the compression was different and the pistons fit different. It had four bolt main caps instead of the two bolt that the others had two came in from the bottom and two came in from the side and it had side oilers that came in and squirt oil from underneath the piston instead of depending on splash off the crank these were designed to put oil under the piston to cool the piston because the heat from the turbo-charging was so high. They made in the 1500, 1497cc version they made right near 750hp, they were the GTP cars so ahh, I got one of those in boxes I mean everything was there brand new in boxes , it was a set of spares for the GTP cars when they quit running them and went onto something else I just got this whole thing of spares that I could put together a motor. I never ran it turbo-charged, I could have but I just didn’t have the time. I did run in the fuel class I ran nitrous oxide with it, because with nitrous oxide you can elevate the horsepower substantially, with a motor that was designed for turbo-charging it will take it instead of taking a normally aspired motor and put a bunch of nitrous oxide horsepower in it and blow it up or break or take out the bearings or whatever this was designed for turbo-charging, designed for very elevated horsepower, and smaller and the way the pistons fit in the chrome bore instead of the sleeves they could be made tighter so that the rings worked better, in a normally aspired motor they had more clearance, and in a race version you had to have so much clearance that the pistons rocked and it took the rings out, they didn’t last as long…they are designed to work straight up and down with a straight edge and when you rocked the piston when it’s cold or you need a lot of clearance or whatever you take the rings out. They’re not as effective. Well the turbo-charged version with the chrome bore everything expands together, you don’t have an aluminium piston expanding inside of a steel sleeve so you don’t have to have as much clearance with the chrome bore you can make it real tight, it stays straight, expands together and stays tight as a package.
One of the guys I raced against in class and kicked his butt every time was Scott Harvey, do you remember the Chrysler project ahh, the Shelby version of the front wheel drive Dodge, the Shelby Charger? You know Carrol Shelby of course, I don’t know how much he had to do with the whole deal , they might have just bought his name to put on it but it was a Dodge Shelby charger with a distinctive paint job on it , a high performance engine and all that kind of stuff and then later on they evolved into turbo-charging. Scott had all the G and F records for a sedan at Bonneville and El Mirage until I came along and I just kicked his butt. Scott Harvey was the chief engineer for Chrysler for the high performance Dodge Charger so they would dyno that thing they would have their best engineers working on it getting all the horsepower they could then I would go kick his butt. I not only took away the records he had but if he switched classes to try and get away from me I would go get and the thing is they knew I was sandbagging about twenty per cent and I wouldn’t go any faster than I had to beat him and I would just kick him every time and he just quit."