Clayton Racing Engines

Well I guess that without going way back to how I drove a team of mules on the farm , I will just say that my Dad was a mechanic at the Ford garage during WW2 and when that was over we moved to the farm in central Illinois. I learned to work on farm tractors from him and of course drag raced during high school and worked for an Allis Chalmers dealer after high school where I was known for not only putting big bore pistons and sleeves in tractor engines but also bigger valves and longer stroke crankshafts.

In 1961, I went to Chicago and worked for Capital Airlines which then merged with United Airlines. Wow, three dragstrips , Skip’s Drive In street racing and I became buddies with John Keeling who had an supercharged Crosley altered. We were about to become partners on a dragster when I got drafted and sent off to the Army for 2 years. When I returned , John had built a top fueler with Dale Lepke and I just helped out.

I started taking flying lessons and applied for transfer to flight operations which is a long story, however after finally getting into flight, I had to go to Washington DC. John and Dale split up about this time and he transferred to Los Angeles, working for TWA. After a short time in DC , I changed aircraft and transferred to LAX, where as before, John had built another dragster with someone else. So I built an engine and hung out with them, using my engine a couple times. His new partner wanted to get married and wanted to sell out his part of the car so of course I jumped on it!

During this time in California, we built a group of cars, top fuelers and funny cars, called the California Charger and they have been described as the most beautiful cars ever built ( at that time ) and they also ran fast---we generally had Low ET, and set many track records , including the NHRA National ET record and the unofficial worlds record. ( Official World record is a 2 way average)

As the world turns, things change in the airline world, they parked the plane I was flying and I had to return to Chicago on a different fleet. As it was difficult to get time off to go back and forth to west coast races, I started doing UDRA Pro Stock in the Midwest. My pro stock Monza was one of the first to run in the 7seconds . We were also involved with some late model dirt stock car racing and did some of the work on a stock block Indy car.

In 1992 we started karting with my boys Corey and Frank. We ended up building our own kart chassis for WKA Road Racing and raced on tracks like Daytona, Road America, Indianapolis Raceway Park, Mid Ohio, Putman Park, etc. During this time we usually had fast lap time for the week end in our class and once we started running the shifter class we often had quicker laps than the unlimited class.

Over the years I have procured a full shop of KwikWay, Sunnen, Lincoln, Stewart Warner,eguipment and use it to get the exacting tolerances we desire. We do everything in house except for hot tanking blocks as we take them to another shop for baking and bead blasting. We bore and hone with torque plates with a Sunnen CK10, aline hone main bores , square deck blocks , balance crankshafts, everything that needs to be done to your race or classic car engine.

Even with most of my famous period being decades ago, we still get publicity---recently The Rodders Journal had a center color spread featuring our top fueler, we were in a hard cover book titled Fuel and Guts, NHRA National Dragster, the cover of Slingshot Dragsters of the 60s,along with several pictures inside and also several pictures in Top Fuel Dragsters of the 1970s.

Also Revell make several model kits of our dragsters, 1320inc did a diecast model and Johnny Lightning did a 1/64 type car. These have been some of the most popular kits these companies ever made and some have been reissued years later.

We continue to make high end race engines for rare and classic cars, Cobras, street rods, local racers, turbo and supercharged Mustangs and Corvettes and also perform on call dyno tune services for four different area dyno shops where Corey does the EFI stuff and I do the Carb/dist stuff.

Corey has experience with FAST, Big Stuff, Accel, Holley, Edelbrock, AEM, Hptuners, Diablosport CMR, and tuner catz. We build and machine all makes and models of engines, the crankshaft doesn’t know what the valve cover says. We do ALL Fords, Chevys, Chryslers, and foreign engines too. Call us to discuss your project and see if we can help you out.

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