ZEKE GOODRICH- SON BRINGS DAD, UNCLES AND FRIENDS TOGETHER TO BUILD AN SEGA GASSER
Quain Stott | Published on 5/21/2020
SON BRINGS DAD, UNCLES AND FRIENDS TOGETHER TO BUILD A SEGA GASSER
29 year old Zeke Goodrich from Huntington WV worked over 3,000 hours the last several years at his job as an Industrial Insulator to save the money to build his gasser. Zeke's love for racing came from his dad Jon Goodrich telling him stories about his Uncle Joe Goodrich racing in the 70's.
As Zeke got older he wanted some cool stories of his own, so the search was on for a foundation to build an old school gasser. Zeke's hot rod passion has been show cars but this time it had to be a solid built race car that could be abused on the drag strip. His search lead him to a rusty 63 ford Falcon body shell.
Zeke started doing research looking for a set of rules to build to and found over 30 different nostalgic racing groups in the country. After digging into the rules from each group he said he liked the strict rules and real racing format the Southeast Gassers Association had in place. So with the SEGA rules in hand Zeke took the Falcon body to Joez Rodz a hot rod business uncle Joe owns. Once there Zeke and uncle Joe went to work building the chassis, roll bar, suspension and sheet metal. With Joe's old school racing experience together the two enjoyed building the car like Joe built his own drag cars so many years ago.
Once all the chassis work was done Zeke took the car back to his grandfathers old shop where many old family hot rods had been built in the past. Even tho Zeke had never painted a car he wanted to do all the paint work himself so he draped plastic around in the shop to make a poor man's paint booth. One of the old school techniques Zeke used in painting the lace was to have soot from a torch in the paint. The only torch Zeke had was an old camping tiki torch so as hot rodders do he made do with what he had. Problem was a rag got to close to the torch and caught fire with paint fumes in the shop, it was almost a bad day but luckily he got it put out before any damage was done. During all of this famous ford guy Jimmy Huff was building a 320 inch small block Ford engine to fit the SEGA C/Gas class. When it came time to put it all together Uncle Charles Browning was a really big help with the technical stuff like setting up the clutch and such. Zeke's dad Jon helped in the shop and helped Zeke when he got stumped during the build.
It's been a 3 year project at night and weekends with a lot of friends and family involvement but it's now finished and ready for it's debut at the SEGA season opener June 6th at London Dragway in London Kentucky.