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15 | The Duntov Cam I n the morning, the IMCA inspectors called the Chevrolet factory in Michigan. They were told that the strange cam in Swanson’s car had the part number 3736097 and that it was indeed valid.1 Dale Swanson’s car was within the rules of IMCA. The inspectors were not aware of the part’s origin and that it had the name “Duntov Cam” after its creator, Zora Arkus-­ Duntov. He had come to the United States after an adventurous life in Europe, with stops in Belgium and Leningrad and an escape from fascist Germany with his wife, a Follies Bergère dancer. Thanks to his engineering background and understanding of European-­ designed sports cars, Chevrolet hired him as director of high-­performance vehicle design and development. His mission was to improve the performance of the Corvette, first produced in 1953, so that it could outperform the Ford Thunderbird. The cam advanced this goal by adding power to the Corvette engine. A cam regulates the opening and closing of air and fuel in the cylinder chamber. The shape of the cam lobs attached on the turning shaft determines how long the valves remain open, and thus the amount of air and gasoline entering the cylinder—the more combustible material entering the cylinder, the larger the explosion that drives the pistons and powers the car. The Duntov cam by its shape added power. In 1955, when Swanson searched for the half-­ ton pickup axle/rear end, he had talked to mechanics at Doane Chevrolet located in Dundee, Illinois .2 This garage was a center of Corvette activity. Dick Doane’s interest in racing engineering attracted him to the Official Corvette Racing Team,3 and while most Chevrolet dealers received only a restricted allotment of Corvettes, Doane Motors had as many as it could sell. It claimed in a Road and Track ad to be the biggest Corvette dealer in the nation. Significantly, the Corvette was manufactured by Chevrolet, making its parts legal for a Chevrolet race car. One of the 1955 shipments of Chevrolet parts delivered to Swanson included an experimental Duntov cam.4 The cam, at this point, may not have 82 | Chapter 15 been an authorized Chevrolet part, and Swanson did not install it.5 He had little time to experiment because of his breakup with Short. But when Short left with the race car, Swanson kept the experimental cam. It is not clear whether he ever tested this version of the top-­secret Duntov cam, but it was tested at Pike’s Peak in September 1955 with a 1956 Chevrolet that sported dummy headlights and taillights and had its other new features covered, one month before the 1956 Chevrolet arrived in showrooms. The cam Swanson installed in 1956 was actually a new and improved version of the 1955 test part. This cam came standard in the new model Corvette engines, but it was also available in a power pack that could be installed in a Chevrolet; it added a sensational thirty horsepower. Why did the Owatonna inspectors not recognize the cam as a legal part? The most plausible explanation is that the inspectors lacked up-­ to-­ date information. Learning the cam was available required investigation—the same type of checking that Swanson had done to locate his parts. Years later, several competitors believed that the Duntov cam had been available for anyone to purchase.6 Nevertheless, the exact date of availability of the cam at every Chevrolet dealer in the nation might not have been the same, and the speed with which the news spread about its availability could have varied. The variability in the spread of knowledge about the part was compounded by the way racing worked in the mid-­1950s. While in theory perhaps the inspectors could have known about the cam, this was an era when drivers entered rental cars in races, and other drivers were known to buy a new family car and take it straight to the track. The inspectors faced a wide array of cars, and they weren’t necessarily well-­ equipped to do their job. Mechanic Robert McKee recalled one inspector using a yardstick to check micro features of the engine.7 IMCA officials did not always reflect the highest standard of mechanical sophistication. In short, it’s possible that IMCA mechanics did not have an opportunity to learn of the cam. Duntov not only believed “to establish the sports car, you have to race it”; he...

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