To my favorite club, I have got a lot of mail some good and some bad. If I might take a moment and pass along a bit of my experience, it may shed some light on things. When I read The WPC article on the D500 by Dennis Kennedy in 1997 on the D500 it was an eye opener. Upon contacting him he seemed skeptical of my car. However as fate or luck would have it he had a daughter in Denver and she was having a baby. He was making a trip from his home in Ohio to Denver and said he would look at my car. The visit was incredible, in no time he was inspecting my car all over, he was very excited, he finally had found a car that had eluded his efforts for over a decade of searching. Parts he wondered might only exist in his imagination were real and present. We had a wonderful conversation and I took him for a test drive, he said he felt like a teen ager again. A few months later he called and said he was returning again and had some stuff for me. I was very excited. The stuff was beyond my wildest dreams not the least of which was a large stack of documents he obtained from THE Danny Eames-the famed Dodge test driver for 56. It was Dennis Kennedy that took the trouble to find Danny and inquire if he had any information on the D500. Did he ever-virtually any question about the D500 and likewise the D500-1 or Special can be addressed by consulting these papers. They range from extensive listings of parts numbers to memo's of the dyno testing of mule engines. I can basically bore you stiff with a dizzying array of engineering correspondence that continued through the year in Danny's relentless pursuit of optimum performance, which was always being prodded by the likes of Carl K and other stock car competitors. I felt a whole different sense of ownership of my car. I have passed on copies of the neatest and most pertinent pages to people who are interested and I am sure they have enjoyed the contents. Some may choose to dismiss my knowledge concerning the D500 as speculative or self serving but I ask that they reconsider. The Eames papers alone would sway most opinion, which was just one part of the very extensive research compiled by Dennis, but my diligence has not stopped there and I have added more and continued to seek information whenever possible. I respectfully submit to the list that I have measured any response about the D500. I am thankful to be entrusted to pass on his efforts and coupled with my own, tempered by the knowledge that such information is still subjective, regard it as ultimately reliable to a defining degree. So if you happen to see the photo of me with a turban on, seated in front of a crystal ball, that someone is circulating over the net I have only one thing to say- I can't quit my day job. Tim |