"I had to talk to my mother really nice, because I didn't even have a driver's license," Jim Glass says. "So she gave me a permission slip, and I went racing." He was 14. He grew up in a race car family in dirt modified country, his father and both uncles on the local tracks. "On the weekend, it was what we did," he says. "You went racing, and I guess I didn't know anything else."
When his father moved up to a faster class, the car he'd been racing sat there, so Glass asked. Construction is a tough living, long days and not much left over, and what was left went into racing and the family came with it. Glass and one of his uncles were the pit crew. He ran well from the start. "It wasn't that I was so talented. It was my father's old car, and it was really dialed in."
He never strayed far from home. Jim Glass Corvette Specialist has been in the same Kingston, New York neighborhood for 40 years, restoring Corvettes and early Camaros. The 1967 Camaro getting loaded into the trailer is his, headed for the historic Trans-Am races at Lime Rock and Watkins Glen the week after. The fall festival this year will mark his 25th entry.
The series this car comes out of started in 1966, the manufacturers going road racing in cars about as close to the showroom as the rulebook allowed. Under 305 cubic inches, over 3,000 pounds, safety equipment, and except for a few secret mods here and there, not much else changed. The parts had to come out of the factory book, not the speed shop. The work in the pits matched the cars. A guy with a floor jack and a toolbox he'd filled at Sears could sit on the wall and still compete. The loopholes lived in the same book. Corvette brakes were far better, and GM sold the brackets to hang them on a Camaro right over the parts counter. Glass's car wears them.
The historic group takes the cars that actually raced. His never got more than 50 miles from Kingston. Jocko Maggiacomo drove it in 1972, before an underdog of a Javelin carried him to the 1976 Trans-Am championship. The Camaro went to a friend of his after that, who tore up a few motors and parked it. Somewhere in the years it sat, somebody rattle-canned the whole car white Rustoleum. "It just looked awful," Glass says. It also preserved what was underneath. A friend steered him to it decades later and he knew what he had. He blasted it and painted it. One of the original DZ302 motors GM built for these cars went in. Maggiacomo, an old friend now, helped with the setup, and since he runs a graphics business these days there was one more thing to ask. "He came over and lettered the car for me, like 40 years after he had done it the first time."
At Lime Rock the Camaro gives him nothing. "You have to drive the car," he says. "It's not power brakes, it's not power steering. You drive it and you feel every bit of it." He credits the dirt tracks for the feel. "The last thing you want to do is get the tires all heated up and they get angry. Then it don't want to steer and they don't want to stop."
He's kept it all these years and has no intention of selling. "I've had it a long time," Glass says. "It's kind of like putting your old slippers on."
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