“Everyone you talk to is telling you to prepare to torch everything you have; that you better have lots of spares; that you better bring your ‘A-game’ and whatever else,” Camp explains. “Before you’ve even rolled through the gates, you’re thinking this whole deal over in your head a million times.”
For Stanley, as well as his oldest son, John, who took over as the shoe for the family’s forever-supercharged, alcohol-burning doorslammers shortly after the turn of the century, the format of the fast-approaching drag race represented truly uncharted territory. Their construction barrel-orange Camaro, which arrived at their shop second-hand as a bare Tim McAmis-built chassis with a body riveted to it with Cleco fasteners, had never been under power beyond the eighth-mile in the six years they’d raced it. All told, relatively few doorslammers equipped with PSi Superchargers’ notorious screw-type blowers have traversed the quarter-mile, many of them producing world record-setting performances that have largely resulted in the combination being restricted to eighth-mile racing in the name of safety, but in Vegas, it would seem, anything goes.
“I’m not an aggressive tuner,” Camp insists. “Never have been; not when I tune on other people’ stuff, and definitely not when I tune on my own—if I blow that shit up, I’ve got to pay for it.
“So, I didn’t really know what to expect; we figured that we should be able to comfortably run in the 5.80s. If things went really well, we could probably dip into the 5.70s and if everything happened the way we needed it to, we might be able to run over 250 miles per hour. But asking for things to go the way you need them to at a drag race is, well, let’s say, generally unreasonable.”
Rolling down Interstate 70 out of St. Louis, it’s not the next 1,600 miles that’s weighing heavily on Stanley’s mind; ironically, it’s facing the age of 70. “I don’t go on too much about my age situation,” he says, “but I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be able to do this. I feel like I’m well preserved—life’s been good to me—but I am 69 years old. I’m not saying it was our only chance, but it just felt special—it felt like ITALICS> a chance. <ITALICS
“To do what? I can’t say that I knew, but I did know that if we were going to try and get a five-second time slip, I didn’t want to do it at Podunk Dragway where it’d always be questioned. You know, was it a hot dog wrapper? Were the clocks hot? If we were going to go run this ol’ girl out the back door, let’s do it at a first-class facility at what I feel is a ‘holy grail’ of a drag race. It’s the only place you can run one of these cars—an unlimited screw blower car—through the quarter-mile.”
Between Jimmy Dean sausage and egg-and-cheese biscuit breakfasts and Marie Callender’s microwaved TV dinners, Camp did his best not to overthink things like the fuel flow and ignition curve on the Hemi-headed bullet between the frame rails of his race car as he crossed through Kansas, then Colorado and Utah before reaching the Nevada state line. “That time behind the wheel has become pretty treasured for me,” says Stanley, who routinely wheels the team’s toterhome and trailer to and from the races by his lonesome. “I’m an old truck driver; I don’t mind the driving. It gives me time to think; time to dream stuff up. And I’ve dreamt up a lot of stuff—some of it’s worked, a whole bunch of it hasn’t!”
This story was originally published on April 26, 2014. 
