Back in 1966, Wayne Jesel was racing his 1956 Chevy Sedan Delivery. It was the second car Jesel ran and was dubbed Yoo Hoo Too.
Now, Jesel has re-created the classic Stocker.
Back in 1966, Wayne Jesel was racing his 1956 Chevy Sedan Delivery. It was the second car Jesel ran and was dubbed Yoo Hoo Too.
Now, Jesel has re-created the classic Stocker.
“It’s a ’56 Chevy Sedan Delivery with a 265-cubic inch engine in it,” Jesel said. “The original car kind of vaporized, and I found a really nice stock ’56 Sedan Delivery which is what we had to start with back in the day and I just tried to put as many period-correct parts in it as we possibly could. It is about 90 to 95 percent period-correct with the way we ran it back then.”
“We ran several classes in that car,” Jesel said. “We ran G-Stock Automatic, H-Stock Automatic, I-Stock Automatic. What happened was throughout a couple of different years NHRA changed the weight in classes at the top of the chart like AA and A. They used to move those weights around up and down and whenever they made a change up there, it affected us down lower. So one year we ran H-Stock Automatic and the next year it was G simply because of weight changes in other classes. The way we built the car was to run in G-Stock Automatic. That was the primary class we targeted when we built the car.”
Wayne built the Yoo Hoo Too Chevy with his brother Danny and his former partner Tony Massari. The Jesel brothers raced successfully in NHRA Modified and Competition eliminator as well as Stock, and followed up that success by starting a highly successful valve train manufacturing company.
According to Wayne, he was inspired to re-create his Yoo Hoo Too machine after attending several Musclecar Madness York US30 Reunions at the York County Fairgrounds in York, Pa.
“There are a lot of race cars there or a lot of re-creations. Darwin Doll, who used to be (NHRA’s) Division (1) director when we ran that car back then said it was always one of his favorite cars and every time I saw him he would ask when I was going to build the Yoo Hoo Too. I told him I would if the opportunity came about. Throughout the years I’ve seen different cars that were either too far gone or not good enough to make a period-correct car. So, I never really had a full intention of building it. When I saw this car, though, my first thought was that it would be the perfect car to start with for a re-creation.
“I had a ’32 Ford roadster that was just a street hot rod and I wound up trading the guy for the car, and then I sat on it for about a month just trying to come up with a game plan on doing the re-creation,” Jesel said. “Then, I just started taking it a part and stripping it and started searching for all of the parts. That was the fun and challenging part of it, trying to find as many period correct parts as we could. We had all the suspension stuff ready to go when the car got back from the body shop.”
Jesel started working on Yoo Hoo Too’s rebirth in December of 2013 and finished it just before the 13th annual Musclecar Madness event at York the weekend of July 11-12, 2014.
That event featured a salute to General Motors and the inaugural Junior Stock Reunion.
“We got the car done the day before the show, and the car basically really, really looked correct,” Jesel said. “It won the People’s Choice Award and it also won the Bill “Grumpy” Jenkins Award of Excellence.”
Wayne and Danny Jesel were inducted into the East Coast Drag Times Hall of Fame Oct. 17-19 in Henderson, N.C., and they had Yoo Hoo Too on display there as well.
“The only thing we really talked about doing (after displaying it at the East Coast Drag Times Hall of Fame induction) was having NHRA use it in their museum (The Wally Parks NHRA Motorsports Museum is located in Pomona, Calif.) for about six months or so. We’ll see what happens as there are an awful lot of re-creations or restorations there, with Funny Cars and Gassers and dragsters, but there really haven’t been that many Stockers or Super Stockers and they were so popular back in the day that they would really like to have more variety of cars.
“I also got asked to take the car to the big Hot Rod Reunion in Bowling Green, Ky. (13th Annual Holley National Hot Rod Reunion Presented by AAA Insurance June 18-20). They’re having a big show there, and they’re trying to get more Junior Stockers for that show.”
Jesel also hopes to drive Yoo Hoo Too down the dragstrip.
“We have a couple of things to do to the car to where I would feel comfortable making runs down the dragstrip with it,” Jesel said. “I would really be interested in seeing how quick it is today compared to back then. We didn’t have any dynos back then and we didn’t know how much horsepower we made. It would be very interesting to see how quick it would go.”
When Jesel was running Yoo Hoo Too back in the day it was running consistently in the low 14-second range.
“As time went on we eventually got down to 13.50s and 13.60s at around 102 and 103 mph,” Jesel said.
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