At least in rural western Pennsylvania, demolition derby is held on mud, in a rectangular space about the size of a football field marked off with giant earth mover tires. As the grandstands fill up and the spectators dig into their burgers and sausage sandwiches, a big front-end loader does its best to level the mud and push the tires into place. And then after an enthusiastic attempt at The Star Spangled Banner, the first heat of cars, many looking like escapees from a Mad Max movie, make their way into the arena, parking nose first against the tire barrier. A flagman perched atop one of those tires waves a green flag, and all hell breaks loose - as the cars go backing furiously trying to smash into one another.
And oh, the cars... In the late 1970s when I took took my shot at the Derby, well worn full size V8 family cars - Ford Galaxies, Chevy Impalas, Plymouth Furys - where the standard fodder. For some reason - maybe their unibody construction - the Chrysler products were tougher than the others, giving the midsize Dodge Coronets a fighting chance. You could find these cars sitting in front yards with "For Sale" signs and expired inspection stickers going for $50 - most were really rusty with big holes in their heavy steel frames. Engines were mostly work-a-day V8s: 350 Chevys, 390 Fords, 383 Chrysler motors - although you could find just about anything Detroit had ever produced.
The derby drivers - mostly kids just out of high school (you had to be 18 to enter) - would buy one of these in the spring, park it in some remote corner of their yard to avoid annoying mom and dad, and then spend all summer preparing it. The rules required the side and rear windows and the stock gas tank to be removed and the doors chained shut. A five-gallon gas can was bungied to the floor where the rear seat had been and a rubber fuel line plumbed through the firewall direct to the fuel pump. The battery was likewise relocated to the floor of the passenger compartment, and if you were smart the key-switch was replaced with big toggle switches hard-wired directly to the ignition coil and battery. The heater core was bypassed with a piece of pipe to keep scalding hot water away from the driver. The exhaust pipes were cut off just below the exhaust manifold and removed to avoid falling off and getting caught in the wheels. The most heavily treaded tires you could find for $20 - often recap snow tires on their last legs - were mounted on the rear wheels. The engine was "tuned" - which meant cleaning and gapping the plugs, setting the points and changing the fuel filter. And then of course we had to paint on "competition markings" - our favorite number on the doors and snarky sayings everywhere else.
Of course these cars were totally illegal to drive on the road, but 19 year old kids didn't have the money to have a truck haul them to the fair grounds. If you were lucky enough to know someone with a pickup and a tow bar you might get your car there semi-legally. The rest of us would fire up our open-piped monsters in the middle of the night and take as many back roads as possible to the fair grounds, with a friend tailing along closely behind to hide the lack of a license plate, and then take us home. I'm sure a few state policemen must have looked the other way that one night of the summer.
My first attempt at "demo" was in a '68 Galaxie, with a 2-barrel 390 - that had been our family car for most of the 1970s. I had gotten into a fender bender in this car shortly after getting my drivers license, and my dad had declared it too worn out to fix, so I got to stare at that hammered out front fender for the next 3 years as a reminder to be more careful behind the wheel (which may have helped me survive my teenage years). When the frame finally went too swiss cheese to patch, I was happy to pay dad $50 to get rid of it.
When I fired up that big 390 and spun into the arena on my nearly smooth tires, I had no idea what to expect. In demo derby, the main strategy is to avoid taking hits to the front of your car, which will push the radiator into the fan: if that doesn't immediately lock up the engine, the resulting water leak will quickly overheat the engine to destruction. So you start with back-to-back hits, and if you're lucky the back of your car will fold up into a battering ram that you can bash away at the other cars with, and if you're not lucky the back of your car will bend down and start dragging on the mud, which will quickly end your race. I knew what the frame of the Galaxie looked like, and I wasn't hopeful it would last very long.
When the green flag fell and two dozen unmuffled V8s went full throttle, I hesitated until the car next to me backed up and launched the Galaxie sideways into the his front fender, hoping to break something in the front suspension and spare the Ford's rear end as much as possible. Nipping away at the surrounding cars worked for a while, until someone with better traction managed to push me sideways into a pack of dead cars, where my tires did nothing but spin - which is another way to lose. I ran two heats that night with similar results, and at the end of the night I sold what was left of the car to a junk dealer for $20, so I didn't have to worry about getting it back home.
The king of demolition derby was the 1966 Chrysler Imperial, a heavy and incredibly solid luxo-barge with the "big" big-block 413 V8. You didn't find these going for $50 - more like $500 - so the only people that ran them in the demos were people with big flatbed trucks who could haul them home to fight another day. At the time there was a towing service with a fleet of about 5 Chrysler Imperials, and they generally won.
The year after my adventure with the family Galaxie, a friend offered to sell me the one car that had a fighting chance against an Imperial - a Dodge Polara station wagon. Fold the wagon's 3rd row jump seat down and there was a solid steel deck creating a cargo area about the size of a pickup truck bed, forming an incredibly solid structure. Under the hood was a 383 that someone had grafted a 4-barrel carb to by way of a steel plate and plenty of silicone sealer. The car had already been "demo prepared" and had run in one demo with only minor damage. Most importantly, my friend was willing to let it sit in his backyard for the summer, so I didn't have to talk my parents into parking another junkyard escapee behind their garage.
In my first heat I was pecking away at the cars next to me, doing a fair amount of damage and getting the hang of backing the big Dodge when something hit me hard enough to get my attention. One of the big Imperials had been chewing through the cars on the other side of the arena, and had worked his way to me. The Imperial pulled away to take another backwards run at me, and I got on the gas quickly to try to win the momentum war. We hit back-to-back hard enough to rattle my fillings, but the wagon - and of course the Imperial - took the hit in stride.
I pulled forward to take another backwards run, but the Imperial - with a driver who had been in a lot more demos than me - took off somewhere among the clumps of already dead cars. I went chasing after him - in reverse of course - backing the Dodge as fast as I could - but I lost site of him in the steaming wreckage. And then I heard the bellow of that big Chrysler motor - in front of me - and I turned my head just in time to see that big chrome bumper coming at me. I hit the gas to try back away but the Imperial had the edge in power and tire-traction and it had a head start, and Detroit had yet to discover the idea of crumple zones - the Imperial hit hard. As the seat belts dug into my body I had a flashback to my dad swatting a bee with a badminton racket - and I wondered how many pieces they would find me in.
As my brain started working again I noticed I had my foot planted on the brake pedal but my car was still going backwards - sliding all 4 wheels in the mud. Eventually the wagon stopped - it probably slid 30 feet into another car - and the motor was dead. I wasn't processing things all too clearly then, and when I hit the big toggle switch for the starter I heard the shriek of fan against radiator, turning too slowly for the big V8 to fire. There was nothing left to do but wait for the heat to be over and to try to steer the wagon as a big tow truck drug it out off the way for the next heat. It would be an inglorious end to my short-lived demolition derby career.
While the basics of demolition derby haven't changed much over the years, the details certainly have. Most of the cars now are mid-size front-wheel drive sedans with 4 or 6 cylinder engines, and while their open exhausts are loud, its not the bellowing all capitols LOUD of a pack of big-block V8s. There is a separate category for rear wheel drive V8 cars, but there aren't very many of them and they are mostly small block V8s. Back in 1980 we would have 5 heats of 20 or more cars, followed by a championship match going until midnight; today there are 2 or 3 heats and its all over by 9:30. And not all, but a lot of the guys driving the cars are well past middle aged and probably started demo driving about the same time as me!
I wonder if the Missus would notice an old Crown Victoria parked behind the garden shed???
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