Life at full throttle

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/09/2015 (3393 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I’ve known Wally for 25 years but only learned last month his family name is Dyck.

I suspect the oversight is fairly common, that the hundreds of people who deal with him today and the thousands who have dealt with him over the past 50 years, know him only as Wally, too.

His last name never seemed to matter. Everyone knows Wally. They ask for Wally on the phone. Call “Hi, Wally” when they greet him. Like Prince or Madonna or Drake, he doesn’t seem to need a last name.

Wally is that nice old guy who has been behind the counter at the Sturgeon Creek Garage on Portage Avenue forever.

The garage is a St. James institution. It is both an old garage — built as a stable in 1930 — and an old-school garage with a lot of grey-haired mechanics and a professional machine shop that actually turns cranks.

Wally always wears a white smock, his long grey hair spilling out from under a worn Castrol Oil cap, his features dominated by a prominent nose and bushy, mad-scientist eyebrows over hazel eyes that seem at once intense but kindly.

He is courteous, but never unctuous. He takes customers seriously, and unfailingly shows a genuine interest in whatever ails their autos (and, often, their families).

He is modest and self-effacing. In fact, he would only agree to let me into his world on condition the resulting story was not “boastful.”

He is the calm at the centre of the storm that a seven-bay shop employing 14 often can be. (A man who worked with him for 24 years recalled Wally famously lost his temper — once.)

He is trim and fit, no doubt because he works out four times a week — two hours of weights, elliptical and stationary bike… maybe a bit of rowing.

At the end of each day, Wally hangs up his smock, but not his cap, and drives home in a nondescript, pale green 1998 Camry sedan.

“I bought an Impala new in 1966 and then I came to my senses,” he explained. “On a daily basis cars are just functional.”

Well, yes. On a “daily basis” his cars are “just functional.” But Wally’s world is not all that it seems on a daily basis.

Come the weekend, he abandons the Camry to fire up screaming, fire-breathing demons that are only “functional” for a quarter of a mile and have earned him three world speed records and a truckload of trophies. He was inducted into the Manitoba Motor Sports Hall of Fame in 2013.

There was, admittedly, always evidence of an alter ego — hot cars parked at the garage and the occasional dragster in a service bay. Then, too, half the building houses Competition Engine Machine Ltd., operated by his son Kevin, who doubles as the driver of Wally’s cars. For a time there were photographs of a dragster on a wall.

But none of it made much of an impression until a couple of years ago when a tractor-trailer became a garage-lot fixture. You can’t miss the rig — it’s about 80 feet long — a gleaming white Renegade motorhome built on the back of a Freightliner tractor pulling a tall Renegade trailer.

The motorhome is fitted out much like a hotel suite, with a bedroom, kitchen, full bathroom and living room. The trailer has two tiers; a Toyota Tercel and a Corvette super-gas racer parked up top, with a 20-foot super-comp dragster on the bottom. The Tercel, a motor-scooter and bicycle are there for getting around at sprawling racetracks. The dragsters are there to win.

Wally refuses to say what the rig is worth. (Recall the prohibition on “boastful.”) He allows only that he bought the rig used and the cars are products of his and Kevin’s efforts.

An Internet search, however, finds similar rigs are worth about $600,000 new, and maybe $200,000 used. The website racingjunk.com pegs the dragsters as being worth between $15,000 and $50,000 each.

I asked Wally if ever in his wildest dreams he had imagined one day owning a drag-racing shop on wheels. He laughed, as he does easily.

“Let me tell you a story,” he said.

Valentin (Wally) Dyck was born on Dec. 18, 1940, at Adelsheim, Ukraine, which was then part of Russia. It was a German-Mennonite community established under Catherine the Great to improve agricultural practices. After the Russian Revolution, however, the Mennonites were increasingly persecuted as anti-Communists. During the 1930s, when Stalin was purging millions, their success as farmers and devout lifestyle made them especially vulnerable.

Wally’s father, Heinrich, was one of a number of Mennonites jailed and exiled for resisting collectivization and defending Mennonite beliefs. Heinrich, who had been a colony “manager,” was eventually released when it was found production had fallen in his absence.

However, he had become sickly in jail and died, likely of tuberculosis, a few months before Wally’s birth.

Soviet persecution ended with the German invasion in 1941. Two years later, however, the German army was in retreat, and the entire colony was evacuated to Lodz before the arrival of the Red Army.

Wally remembers little of that time, other than the terror of exploding bombs. As a boy growing up in Germany, he recalls the news was delivered by a town crier.

In 1948, Wally, his two brothers, their mother, two aunts and a grandmother were sponsored by extended family members in Canada and immigrated to Grunthal in southeastern Manitoba.

Desperately poor, the Dyck clan relied on handouts that first winter. The only clothes that fit Wally were made for girls. His mother tried to make them more boyish, with some success.

But walking home from school one cold winter day, he was overtaken by a team of horses driven by a man who called out, “Are you a boy or a girl?” Wally was so upset he refused to respond, and the man drove on. Once the team passed, Wally saw it was pulling a sled with a heated cabin on its deck.

“I saw that sled and heated shed and said to myself: ‘Boy, one day I will have one of those, too.’ ”

* * *

While oddly prophetic, owning a mobile home wasn’t an idle fantasy for eight-year-old Wally. Back then, he said, when immigrants arrived in Canada they were warned that if they failed to succeed, they would be “sent back.” Wally’s desire to stay in “the land of milk and honey” helped fuel an innate need for constant improvement — and it made him a goal-setter.

He worked hard at school and after school, but by age 14 he determined there was no future for him in farming and left home to live with his older brothers in Winnipeg. There he enrolled in automotive mechanics at Tec-Voc Collegiate.

It was then he got his first taste of racing, working as a student on stock cars competing at the old Brooklands Speedway. However, it was his wife, Erica (née Klassen), who fuelled his need for speed.

It was 1964. Wally was enjoying some success and had built, at age 23, his first service station in East Kildonan. In August that year, Keystone Dragways opened east of Winnipeg. Erica wanted to see the races, but Wally was busy. So she and her brother went without him.

At the track, Erica decided she wanted to try racing, signed up and became the track’s first female drag racer, finishing the day as runner-up driving a V-8-powered 1963 Chevy.

“My wife is a very different girl,” Wally said. “She comes from a very competitive family. Cindy Klassen (Olympic speedskating medallist) is our niece.

“Erica came home so excited. She said the other guy had beaten her by only three feet. Was there some way to make the car go faster?”

Wally replaced the ignition system and tuned up the manifold. She won every race she entered that season, and he found his true passion — to build faster cars, first a ’55 Chevy and then increasingly more powerful rail dragsters.

He set his first speed record in 1979 — 186.19 m.p.h. in 7.49 seconds — and then did it again in 1982 and 1985.

Wally was also succeeding off the track. He built a second service station and started Astro Industrial Machine Ltd., a 32,000-square-foot welding and machine shop complex in St. Boniface that fabricates heavy equipment such as railway motor cars (jiggers).

After he bought the Sturgeon Creek Garage in 1978, he found his time was stretched too thinly and decided to convert his other service stations into convenience stores, which he leases to operators. In all, he owns six commercial properties in Winnipeg. His large home in North Kildonan, built by his brother, sits on a property so manicured and landscaped it has been used for wedding photos.

* * *

It’s a six-hour drive from Winnipeg to Brainerd, a resort town in Minnesota lake country and home of the Brainerd International Raceway, where top drag racers from across the U.S. and Canada gather in late August for the next-to-last “national” races before the season finale in Indianapolis. While the town’s permanent population is about 13,000, about 110,000 race fans go through the turnstiles at the 500-acre raceway.

Wally and his son Kevin have been making the trip for more than 30 years, although, for most of that time, not in the comfort or convenience of Wally’s Renegade.

For much of the drive, Wally sat at the table in the motorhome patiently explaining the bewildering array of cars and categories of races that would take place over the next four days at the National Hot Rod Association event. It was all too confusing for this novice, so Wally focused his tutorial on the races he and Kevin would compete in.

My simple understanding of drag racing starts and ends with the idea they are straight-line races from a standstill to see which of two cars can travel a quarter of a mile (1,320 feet) and cross the finish line first.

And to a large extent that remains true for such racing classes as funny car, top fuel and stock.

But Wally is not much interested in contests of brute power and terrifying speed. He prefers the “chess match” afforded by the sportsman class, “super” division,” in which drivers attempt to cover the quarter mile, not at the fastest speed, but in exactly 8.9 seconds.

It sounds simple enough but quickly gets diabolically complicated, and don’t forget it all takes place in about the time it took to read this sentence.

For example, a driver could decide a steady pace would guarantee a time of 8.9 seconds. But that would give another driver a clear advantage because the second driver could start slow, and then crank it to cross the line in exactly the same 8.9 seconds but at a considerably faster speed and win.

So turtles and hares notwithstanding, slow and steady will not win a “super” race.

But what will? There’s the rub. Every drag racer is trying to answer that question.

A further complication is there is no limit to how much power a super dragster can have. But clearly, too much power creates the risk of running too fast, not in speed so much as in time.

Any car that exceeds the 8.9-second “index” automatically loses to a car that runs slower than the mark. If both cars exceed or fall short of the index, the car closest to the index wins.

Wally is a believer in power, but not for its own sake. His 1,200-horsepower super-comp dragster is so powerful it could run a time of 6.8 seconds — two seconds too fast.

The excess power, however, means Kevin can race the first four seconds more slowly in speed or time than his competitor, who will gain a lead. But in taking the lead, the competitor gives Kevin a chance to see how the race is developing and unleash all his excess horses in the next few seconds to regain the lead and maintain it to the finish line, braking if necessary to stay within the time limit.

The idea is to win the race by as little as possible, which in drag racing is one one-thousandth of a second — one beat of a hummingbird wing.

* * *

It was raining and cold on the drive down to Brainerd, but Thursday morning dawned bright and clear, promising good conditions for time trials prior to the start of elimination races on Friday.

Wally and Kevin were up early — tinkering and making endless adjustments. Professional drag racing, it turns out, is steady, concentrated work from dawn to dusk. Kevin had set up a “weather station” on arrival and was consumed analyzing the impact local weather conditions might have on performance.

Time trials give racers an opportunity to “dial in” their cars.

Roughly, that means adjusting the engine to produce peak performance given the wind, barometric pressure, outside temperature, humidity and other factors, all of which are fed into a computer program.

The best guess is then entered into a system on the engine that controls the throttle for part of the race.

The race goes like this:

The dragster moves to the start line and quickly spins its wheels, burning off rubber and anything that might affect traction while raising the tires’ surface temperature to make them stick better.

The car then pulls into position to start. A “tree” of lights faces the drivers. A blue light signals when they are in position. This is quickly followed by a yellow light then green. The delay between yellow and green is four-tenths of a second. In that time, the driver floors the gas pedal and electronically engages the transmission.

Reacting by as little as 0.01 seconds faster than a competitor gives a significant advantage.

The awesome torque produced by the 1,200-horsepower engine drives the rear suspension down, forcing the bulbous racing slicks to flatten and grip the asphalt with such incredible force the tires barely spin and instead launch the car forward at blinding speed.

The initial explosion of power and torque, however, is short-lived — half a second — after which the 582-cubic-inch Brodix engine automatically throttles back to about 4,400 r.p.m. from 7,800. The idea is to blast off but then control acceleration so as not to threaten the 8.9-second time limit.

This restrained burn lasts about four seconds, after which the throttle opens wide again, causing the dragster to slingshot towards the finish. In these remaining seconds, the driver must sense his speed and slow down, or press on.

Over six trial races, both cars and Kevin performed exceptionally well. Wally was optimistic Kevin might win come Sunday, as he had done most recently in 2013.

* * *

The pit area at the raceway is a hive of activity and thundering engines Friday morning. As impressive as Wally’s Renegade rig is, it is only one of hundreds like it parked in the pit. In fact, it is a modest rig compared to some race teams, which arrive in three- and four-semi-trailer convoys worth many millions of dollars.

Kevin’s first race in the super-comp dragster goes off just after 10 a.m. After a .004-second start — nine times faster than his competitor — he finishes a touch slower than the index and at 175.64 m.p.h. The other car also is slower than the index so Kevin wins because his speed is about 17 m.p.h. faster.

But Kevin is concerned the car isn’t performing as expected at the middle distance.

A second race quickly follows, this time in the super-gas Corvette, which has an engine almost identical to the super-comp dragster. Again, like the dragster, the Corvette fails to perform as expected mid-race.

Kevin senses he doesn’t have the power to overtake his competitor at the finish and decides to slow down, betting the other car will go too fast and be disqualified.

It doesn’t happen. He loses the elimination race by two feet, and the Corvette is knocked out of competition before noon on the first day.

After lunch, Kevin is back at the starting line for his second race in the super-comp dragster. His start is good, but again, midway he senses underperformance and backs off. A computer simulation of race later shows had he not backed off, he would have won by two inches.

But he did back off and lost by two inches. And just like that — in four-one thousandths of a second — it’s over.

* * *

What might have been, three days of racing, ends after three hours. It would be anticlimactic if it weren’t so disappointing. The work of packing up began immediately, silently. Within hours, the Renegade was back on the road home to Winnipeg.

“When you’re done you go home,” Wally said. “I don’t want to watch what other people are doing. Certainly Kevin doesn’t want to.”

It’s a setback, but only temporarily, Wally said.

“When I lose I’m more eager to go out next week than I am when I win.”