COTTON PERRY TALKS ABOUT THE POCKET ROCKET

by Bobby Bennett    Mon, 2020-12-07 11:01

By the time Cotton Perry learned what the term Pocket Rocket meant, it was already incorporated into a stunning paint scheme applied by Terry Russell, an extremely talented painter known for his air-brushing ability

Three dozens of contingency decals, multiple national event titles, and world records later, those who worshipped the Modified Eliminator platform knew all too well what the Pocket Rocket meant. It might have been slang for amphetamines back then, but its definition was a potent H/Modified Production 1967 Chevy II with an oddball engine combination.

Perry and his uncle and “best friend” Jim Headrick raced in the high-winding, gear-jamming division with a 301-cubic-inch, inline six-cylinder that was equally tough on parts as it was on the competition.

Just like Bob Glidden, whose successful NHRA career was launched on the strength of a runner-up finish at the 1972 NHRA SuperNationals. Perry’s NHRA legend began with a win at the 1975 NHRA Division 2 event, when his competition bypassed the scales. After a lengthy teardown, at 2:30 in the morning, Perry was handed his check and trophy.

“Buster Couch came over and said, ‘Perry, the Gatornationals is in two weeks, if I get you in it, will you race it?”

“I said, ‘I don’t have points.”

Couch responded, “Don’t worry about it; I will get you in.”

 

 

 

Indeed, Perry made a statement in the first round as he jumped on an icon of the sport.

Perry won H/MP class honors at the 1975 Gatornationals, and in the first round of final eliminations, squared off with the "California Flash" Plymouth Duster of Butch Leal.

“I’m just telling you how God works, how things work,” Perry explained. “I don’t remember who I outrun in class. But I remember the first round.

“I do my chirp, ‘chirp-chirp’ the line, and I’m sitting there in pre-stage against Butch Leal, in a B/Modified Production Duster, and you can’t even see his car for the big tire smoke. And I’m sitting there, he’s a legend to me.”

In beating Pete Smith in the final round, Perry won his career’s first two events.

Perry, who came from humble beginnings, proudly acknowledges the hand of God on his life and career.

“I’m going to tell you how I acknowledge every day how much God has blessed me,” Perry said. “You know I’m going to go back and say that, I’m second-oldest of eight. My daddy was an alcoholic. He wasn’t mean, but just an alcoholic. If he had a dollar in his pocket, he was drunk. Fortunately, I had a godly, Christian mother.

“I never drank. Never done drugs. Nothing. But in our hometown, I went to work at an early age and bought me a ’55 Chevrolet with 327 in it.”

Fortunately, he grew up in a town with a Sheriff who loved hot rods.

“Our sheriff was kind of like the Buford Pusser,” Perry said. “He liked fast cars. He had a 421 four-speed, three twos. So he was good to us boys. He knew that we’d hang around in town. We didn’t drink. We didn’t smoke.”

What they did do, was race through town. If not for the Sheriff’s intervention with the state authorities, Perry could have gotten in some serious trouble. He learned his lesson and never street-raced again.

Now that you know about the man behind the wheel, here’s the story about the wheel which ran over the competition right and left. As Perry told Fred Noer in an article for CompetitionPlus.com years ago, the high-ten-second car was engineered well ahead of its time and could run ten years under the index.”

 

 

 

St. Louis-based machinist Pat Curran built the car with the intent of being a thorn in the side of Wayne County Speed Shop, a front-running team of the era. He knew the Wayne County team personally and made the “Pocket Rocket” his personal mission.

“He wanted us to be fast and outrun them,” Perry admitted. “He spent a lot of time on detailing and building it to be a legal Modified car.”

Headrick was skilled when it came to the cylinder head, camshaft, and suspension technology, so he sewed the whole oddball combination together.

However, Headrick’s ability to negotiate, a trait which made him a steward with the Teamsters in his day job, may have very well been his greatest attribute. He knew how to work his way around the protests, which came early and often throughout their five years of racing Modified. He even got protested for transmission in the middle of the 1981 NHRA U.S. Nationals, his final national event victory. He was declared legal in what would turn out to be the final NHRA Modified event ever.

The fact his Chevy II was nothing more than a Pro Stock car underneath a Chevy II body didn’t make life easier for them. Essentially, the frame was inside of a subframe.

 

 

 

The first real argument came over the suspension, where the rulebook stated the car had to retain its stock suspension.

“It didn’t say you couldn’t have two,” Perry said. “We still had the leaf springs on the car, but that was dummied up. Instead of arguing and cussing and fussing with these people, he just got them to listen to me. We got the thing retained. Did it say that it had to be one of them functional? And so, he finally talked them into it, and they said, ‘Okay, take the four-link bars off, tie them up, or put them on whatever, if you can drive it through the pits, we’re going to let you run it under protest, but were going to have a meeting on it.”

Perry paused and, with a chuckle, added, “But if they told me to burn out on it, I’d been screwed.”

Perry knew his role was to be the jockey of this wild ride and deferred the talking and negotiating to Headrick.

“It was easier to play the dumb role than it was the smart role,” Perry explained. “Headrick was the smart one; I wasn’t, just the good Lord gave me a little bit of common sense. At the time, I didn’t realize this so much, but I was better under pressure. I don’t know why. It wasn’t me; God gave me that talent. I had guys that I know were good drivers, but whenever the pressure was on, they’d fold.

Perry knew how to manhandle the Chevy II with a penchant for being unfriendly.

“The Pocket Rocket was so brutal, if you didn’t leave between 10,800 and 11,200, it would bend over the wheelie bars, bend them right up over,” Perry said. “I’ll tell you right now; a 292 had nothing but torque. You had all this torque, and because there’s no clutch slippage, it ought to go boop. And you had to have it all built up really, really high to make it launch forward. If you didn’t, it’d just stand straight up, and bend the wheelie bars and all that. So learning to drive it was different; you had to just act like you was mad at it.”

Perry admits some four decades later, he never got the opportunity to showcase the full potential of the Chevy II.

“We had to fight,” Perry recalled. “I never got to run the car wide open. I had to kill the tree and go down and ease off the throttle. And then they sure didn’t like that. But if I went three-tenths under, the guy that run the V-8 car went four-tenths under, odds are, I’m going to get hit .05 [on the index].”

Perry admits the car paid for itself with winnings in the $300,000 range. But, in 1982, after Modified was disbanded and his combination relocated to dial-in racing within Super Stock, the thrill definitely left, and he and Headrick sold the car to Danny Davis, who turned it into a Super Modified car.

Reportedly, the Pocket Rocket is under different ownership and runs as a Super Stock/K entry. When Perry began his bid to return to NHRA competition, he tried to repurchase his old car but was met with a polite, “It’s not for sale.”

“I’m just an old has-been that just got into something, that I was blessed with some talent,” Perry explained. “I’m very humbled and grateful for that, that we left a decent name, that we raced hard. We got to do the American dream, no money, it paid for itself. The years this car paid all of its way, other than the first year we raced, it paid the crew, motors, motels. We raced somewhere every weekend.”

 

 

 

 
Categories: 
Side Bars