Gene Winfield

I was contacted by the legendary Gene Winfield himself about working with him on his Salt Flats car to obtain another world record. Seems he decided to convert to fuel injection and his research ended up pointing in my direction. He wanted me to help him with the conversion and then tune it for peak power. Unfortunately I was on my way to Sturgis that day so he convinced me (which didn’t take much considering who it was that was asking 😮 ) to stop by his shop on my way to South Dakota. Gene has been in the industry making the covers of magazines since I was in preschool and I have always said “I would love to be a part of any project Gene Winfield is doing even if it meant just sweeping the floors of the shop and handing him tools!”

His shop is in the Mojave Desert and it was about 11pm at night when I finally arrived. We talked about the conversion to a F.A.S.T. system and what wires that were needed on his setup. He showed us all of the cool projects he had going at his shop and for the Ford Booth at SEMA this year and then it was time to get back on the road. As much as I wanted to stay back and work on this project I had alot invested in getting to Sturgis as well.

When I got back to LA, I got another call from Gene with some bad news about the car… apparently on one of his runs it went into a spin (mind you… Gene is roughly 84yrs old although you would never guess that) and spun 10 times in one direction and 2 in another… Only somebody like Gene Winfield could, with a huge smile, say “it was a hell of a ride!”

He had a few race teams checking out the car because it would crank but not start and after hours of diagnosing their thoughts was the camshaft must have broke. After talking with Gene and telling him I disagreed with the race teams and thought it was a bent valve issue, I took a trip to his shop to run some tests and sure enough it ended up having quite a few bent valves. I am looking forward to working with Gene on beating the record and making history…just as Gene always has!