The man behind the original Lakewood Industries has a new Top Fuel Trick up his sleeve

Words: Cam Benty

From the man who invented the Lakewood Hydro Formed Scatter Shields and Traction Bars back in the 1960’s comes a new system for vintage Top Fuel Cackle Fest dragsters. While it won’t have the mass appeal of Joe Schubeck’s hugely successful Lakewood products, this new system demonstrates that innovative products can spring from anywhere – at any time.

The latest Schubeck High Performance Solutions products were developed for Joe’s personal dragster, the classic 1965 dragster that often traveled most of the way down drag strips across the country posing on just the rear slicks. Restored to perfection, the digger is back and sports the original, style 392-Hemi engine complete with supercharger burning nitromethane and same cool paint scheme.

Running only at Cacklefest events around the country today required a stationary or static start, rather than the push start used to light the engines back in the day. The normal process for starting one of these classics involves a massive external starter that cranks the engine in coordination with priming the engine with a squirt bottle full of alcohol sprayed into the intake to fire it up. For Schubeck, this became just another challenge to overcome. The possibility of remotely starting with push buttons installed in the driver’s compartment to activate an onboard fuel primer as well as engine mounted starters became obvious.

Clutch side of Alum. Flywheel has steel facing for 11 in. Long Presure plate.

Starting the engine is simply a work of art. Using his highly skilled bellhousing knowledge, Schubeck built a firewall that allows mounting of the two high torque capacity starters. Key to the system is a flywheel smaller than the standard ring gear, which locates the starters in a new position closer to the block. This new location and the smaller ring gear does two things; it prevents modifying the bellhousing, which is necessary when a larger ring gear is used, and creates a new ratio for higher cranking rpm. This is very beneficial for starting the big cubic inch engine. A series of solenoids, switched and cables makes the system complete.

First, know that these engines are notorious for having fuel leaks that puddle into the cylinder when you are running nitro in these dense quantities. Excessive liquid nitro accumulating in the cylinder can be very destructive and even dangerous during start up.

Part One of this three-part system is a counter clockwise starter that is activated by a push button that reverses the rotation of the engine safely clearing the cylinders of any unwanted nitro. Simultaneously, the magneto is grounded to avoid any errant firing.

The priming of the engine, Part Two, is fairly simple. Through the process of fabricating a new fuel tank with a small secondary two-gallon storage area inside the tank and separating it from the nitro fuel with partitions, he had his priming source installed. Having installed a pair of motorcycle batteries for power, the alcohol is sprayed into the injector hat with a self-contained electric pump that effectively primes the engine. A “console” mounted button in the cockpit activates the priming process.

Which leads us to Part Three. To fire up the engine, another cockpit-mounted button is depressed to activate the clockwise starter. The engine, already primed, is rotated with the magneto activated. The result is a backfire-free start up all controlled from the driver’s compartment.

When the warm up of the engine with alcohol is sufficient, introducing the nitro fuel from the larger section of the tank is obtained by pushing forward on the fuel shut-off lever. This allows the race ready system to fuel the engine with the nitro fuel while at the same time shutting off the flow of alcohol. The resulting change over to nitro fuel is an earful of loud exhaust – maybe 10 times louder than the alcohol fuel. The same “thrill” goes for the eye-watering smell of nitro exhaust. But then that’s why they all come out for a cackle fest in the first place. It’s sensory overload.

Clearly Joe Schubeck’s inventive ways are still going strong – regardless of the decade – with a system that rewrites Vintage Top Fuel history.

For full details of the system or to ask questions contact Joe at lifters@aol.com or call (702) 810-4429.