[FWDLK] Dodge History pass it on.

[DupontTim@xxxxxxx]

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