Speed metal

Alex Coolman

In the alley behind his Costa Mesa house, George Vose is bringing a

demon to life. It’s a 302 cubic inch Chevrolet engine with a GMC

supercharger blower perched on top of it like a yawning chrome mouth. The

engine sprouts out of the front of a canary-yellow 1975 Chevy Monza, a

car that Vose likes to drive very, very fast.

A little squirt of gasoline into the blower, a few more tries at the

ignition, and suddenly the demon is roaring: the engine is rumbling and

popping and trembling, drowning out any possibility of conversation. All

the men standing around the car cover their ears as the engine revs to a

deafening thrum. Except Vose: he’s smilingly broadly, as pleased by his

creation as the father of a newborn.

“Does that snarl, or what?” he chuckles.

Newport-Mesa residents know Vose for one of his more polite

productions. He was the man who created the striking, 12-foot-high

aluminum menorah that Temple Bat Yahm lit this year on the first night of

its Hanukkah celebration.

But the menorah, for 54-year-old Vose, was appealing primarily for one

reason: it was made out of metal.

Vose likes metal. He gets fairly excited about the kind he sells at

his job at Industrial Metal Supply in Irvine. But the best kind of metal

of all, he thinks, the kind that really gets his blood pumping, is the

kind that can be driven around on four wheels with a big engine. Speed

metal.

At the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, where the powdery white salt

surface of a former lake bed spreads out, perfectly flat, for miles in

every direction, Vose and his friends Howard Hoffman and Martin Hansen

have been racing the yellow Monza, and setting records.

Vose recently reached a new top speed for the “blown-fuel altered

class” in the car, tearing across the flats at 233.1 miles per hour.

Hansen also made a number of runs at more than 200 miles an hour. But

his attempt at setting a record was cut short when, in the middle of his

run, the car suddenly lost traction and began to spin like a penny

flicked by a fingernail. Fortunately, the car never flipped, and Hansen

walked away from the mishap.

In 1980, Vose was not so lucky. A dune buggie accident at the El

Mirage lake bed claimed his right arm and the life of a close friend who

was riding with him.

The accident took place during the same year Vose lost his wife,

Susie, to cancer.

In the wake of these twin tragedies, Vose left California. He spent

two years in Nebraska, working and sorting things out. It’s a period of

his life he still finds it difficult to talk about.

“I took time off and worked with my brother,” is the way Vose puts it,

his cheerful, bearded face tightening with the recollection.

“I needed the money, and I needed to get my mind into something

constructive,” he said.

Vose quotes a statistic: 50% of all people who lose upper body

extremities kill themselves.

“That’s a very sad number, in my opinion,” he said. “You’ve got to

deal with yourself. It’s tough.” Tinkering with cars, in the company of

guys who enjoy the same thing, is the way Vose has come to deal with

things today.

In a crowded, flourescent-lit shop that borders his alley, Vose has

accumulated enough equipment and materials for working on metal to do a

lifetime of occupational therapy. There are band saws and drill presses,

a grinder and a lathe. There are stacks of aluminum tubing and racks of

clamps. Snap-on Tool cabinets, standing shoulder to shoulder like an army

in formation, line the walls.

On a recent afternoon, Vose was hanging around with his friends Al

Lombardo, Mike Tuomey and Hoffman, fellow auto enthusiasts. The men all

had their own projects to work on, with Hoffman puttering around the

spare steel frame of what was eventually supposed to be a 1944 sedan and

Lombardo using the heli-arc welder to make adjustments to a modified

bicycle.

Vose showed off his particular pride and joy: a motorized bar stool

that had won awards at a number of auto shows. The creation was

reminiscent of something a senior citizen might use to cruise through the

produce aisle of the grocery store -- the main differences being that the

seat was a round, gold cushiony affair that looked like it belonged at

some dingy watering hole, and that the vehicle only had one handlebar.

Like all Vose’s creations, the bar stool was designed for one-handed

maneuvering.

Inside the Monza, the engineering to fit Vose’s needs is more

elaborate. The button to release the parachute that the car uses to stop

is located on the steering wheel so Vose can hit it with a thumb. The

magneto shut-off and fuel-line shut off are similarly oriented so that

they can be triggered, one-handed, at more than 200 miles per hour.

Though Vose designed the mechanics of the car, it was Hoffman and

Hansen who did much of the fabrication and welding required to translate

the designs into metal.

Vose also pays for most of the race obsession himself -- not a cheap

proposition, when a set of rear tires and wheels for the car comes with a

$1,500 price tag.

What Vose gets, and what Hoffman and Hansen get, out of their

friendship is a complex mixture of companionship and the opportunity to

experiences things that none of the men, alone, would be able to

experience.

“When he bought that car, he said the only reason I’m buying this

thing is so I can get the two of you into the 200-mile-per-hour club,”

recalled Hansen, who is himself a metal fabricator and sculptor. “When

you get somebody who comes along and helps you fulfill dreams, it’s

pretty amazing.”

Asked whether the rush of traveling so fast is the reason he races,

Vose hesitates, and then offers another explanation.

“I’ve been driving for a lot of years,” he says. “It’s the

camaraderie. It’s the only kind of racing like it in the world.”

Unlike stock car racers or drag racers, the people who compete at

Bonneville don’t do it for money, Vose said. There isn’t any money to be

had, or any other physical reward except the occasional trophy.

What the Bonneville racers have, though, is a sense of cooperativeness

and community that Vose and his friends find continually rewarding.

Materials are shared freely between racers, and mechanical ingenuity is

valued over the ability to write a check for the latest gear.

“We build everything,” Vose said. “We don’t buy anything.”

Then too there are the aesthetic delights of racing cars with

enormous, turbocharged engines.

“I enjoy the sound of the motor,” Vose chuckles. “It’s a nasty sound.”