1961 Corvette Roadster - Long Hauler

Block Partying

"I got to know the management at the Morristown Airport, and they let me pull up to the pump there to fill up with 110- or 140-octane airplane fuel," he says. "Little did I know, but there are different additives in car fuels than there are in airplane fuels. It didn't take long to put a hole in the number one cylinder while running at Island Dragway."

But before he busted up that cylinder, White regularly took his 4-year-old son, Dan, out in the Corvette for shakedown runs. "He loved to ride in it and go fast. One time I brought it out of the hole and powershifted Second, then Third, and heard a loud bang. I thought I blew Third gear. When I got home, I looked and realized that the harmonic balancer had come apart at about 7,500 rpm. Luckily, it had blown down, and not up, when it came apart."

When White went back to the spot where the balancer had exploded, he found a large hole in the macadam. "It could have taken the nose off of the car if it had gone upward," he says. Another crisis averted by luck.

Eight years later, White had Dan back in the car, this time in the driver seat. "I taught him to drive a stick in the Vette when he was about 12, at an industrial park in Livingston. It had the mild 350 in it and 4.56 gears, so it was almost impossible to stall. He did very well."

But that wasn't the end of the young man's very special driver's education.

"I taught him how to powershift the car in an industrial park in Florham Park, about a mile from where we lived," says White. "Next, I put a new pair of slicks on the car and taught him how to bring it out of the hole. I had him stop the car, bring it to 4,500 rpm, and dump the clutch as fast as he could. I told him to drive it like he was trying to break it." It must have worked, as his son is now one of the few people who can actually get a nose up on him at the local drags.

Motors for the '61 came and went frequently. After the high-compression 350 blew, a homemade Sprint Car motor wearing the heads off his old 302 and a 327/360 hydraulic cam made a brief appearance in the car. That motor died after a year, and those parts found their way into another 350 White had in storage. It lasted perhaps five years before finally coming apart at the dragstrip.

"It finally blew up at Island while I was racing my son, who was driving my '69 Camaro. I was just trying to squeeze a little too much out of it in Third gear, and it threw a rod. That one got tangled up with another one, the crank broke, the cam broke into three pieces, and it puked every fluid out of it that it could, all over the track. While towing it back to my barn, I realized that it was time to build a real good motor."

Running on Full

In 2011 White set about freshening up the unbreakable motor. While it was on the stand, he decided to go completely "old school" and change out some of the modern components. A roller cam was added, along with some Crane Gold roller rockers. Up top, he installed a vintage tunnel ram and crowned it with two big four-barrel carbs. The imposing engine is all but guaranteed to strike fear in the hearts of White's drag-racing competition, even if all of that racing is now done on sanctioned tracks.

After 44 years, more than 16 motors, 6 transmissions, 8 Chevy rears (the current Oldsmobile rear has thus far proved indestructible), and countless other parts, Butch White says the car still serves as the mechanical embodiment of its driver: a little beat, a little battered, but still running…and running hard.

Having survived a medical scare a few years ago, when doctors found and removed a brain tumor, White is back to tearing it up on the racetrack, though he sometimes passes the keys off to his son. With its powertrain finally sorted out, this once and future dream car looks poised to provide the pair with many more years of driving excitement out on the road we all ply everyday--the road of life.