Regal's Parts and Service
1971 - With the Widow Makers
race team taking over more and more of Everet's life, he made a decision
to try to combine making a living, with keeping the race sleds going. Regal's
Parts and Service was born.
Located in downtown Phoenix, New York,
the shop offered snowmobile speedshop supplies, helmets, Arctic Wear, engine
service as well as snowblower and lawnmower sales and service. More importantly
the shop offered a work place other than the home garage and much more space
for the sleds. The building was a very old building in rough shape and like
everything my dad did, he got right in there, tore it apart and rebuilt it
the way he wanted it.
One of the coolest things I remember, was he came up with a bowling alley
and built full length benches along the walls from the old alley! This has
to be in the top 3 of the greatest benchtop surfaces you could ever ask for!
They weighed a ton and were incredibly hard and solid as granite. Very nice!
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Impossible Metamorphosis?
In 1972 something radical evolved
with one of our 292cc Kawasaki air cooled engines. The season was passing
by and Everet just couldn't get the 292 to put out the needed performance
to put our sled on top.
Everet remembers Ken used to say to him, "Ev, I'm driving my ass off with
this 290 and can't pull off over a 3rd place. Can't you do something to
that engine to get some more power out of it?"
So, Everet started doing some "out of the box" thinking and
some calculating. "We had a 250 winning engine and a 340 winning engine.
I thought about combining the two engines to see if they would run."
says Regal. "The factory boys said it wouldn't work, others said
it was impossible, but we weren't winning with the 290 anyway, so I
had nothing to lose."
"Impossible" can be a highly motivating challenge for some people.
Everet is one of those people. He decided to give it a shot and build the
hybrid engine. Kenny Young had his usual grin and commented, "Regal,
what in Sam Hill are you dreaming up this time?"
Everet took a 250cc twin and 340cc twin and put them side by
side on a 60mm crankshaft, creating a 295cc hybrid engine, which was
high limit for the class! With some creative machining and welding they fit
together nicely. "It took me a week to carburate that engine before I
got it to turn on. It didn't respond like any normal engine."
Seat of the pants testing was suggesting the sled was ready for competition.
It was time to put the engine to the test and line it up on the track. "She
was either going to run or she wasn't!"
It never took long for talk to spread through the pits on what setup Regal's
sleds had on any given weekend. Everet recalls, "The first time we raced
this engine was at Marion Lake, Pennsylvania. I remember sitting on the sled
on the ice lake, waiting for Ken to come and get it to go out for the 290
class race. While I was waiting, two guys were standing off at a distance
looking curiously at the strange setup on this engine. One guy said to the
other, "Look at that god damn thing Regal's got there! Don't he know that
won't run?"
"I just chuckled to myself. I knew it would run, but the checkered flag
has to drop before we would know if it had the stuff to be a winner."
Soon Ken came down, got the sled, and went up on the hill to the track. He
raced the 290 class and won hands down! Instead of bringing the sled down
for mandatory tear down, he stayed up on the hill and ran the same sled
in the 340cc and 440cc classes. He won all 3 classes with that 295cc
sled!
Everet recalls the first tear-down "The real fun began when we got to
tear down. Ed Smith was the tech representative that day, as
he often was. I removed the head from the 340 side first, which was on the
PTO side. When "Smitty" saw that his eyes popped open and he
said "Regal, what have we got here? You know this 340 is not legal for the
290 class!"
I replied, "Wait a minute Ed and I'll pull off the other head."
Ed yelled, "What difference will that make?"
"When I got the head off and here was a little 250 bore cylinder, he
almost swallowed his tongue!" Ed spent 2 hours calculating the cc's of
that engine before finally concluding that it equaled 295cc, the maximum allowed,
and was indeed legal for that class.
There was a lot of head scratching and adrenaline flowing in and around the
Widow Makers pits that weekend, as the impossible metamorphosis made
it's debut. The term "Regalized" took on a whole new meaning!
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3rd Annual World Series at Ironwood, MI
NERO had arranged to truck our sleds out to
Ironwood,
so we could all fly out. A little controversy erupted when the NERO truck
arrived to pick up our sleds. We had suspected that Bill Gates had an
aluminum
chassis sled, but had always been told there was no such a sled in existence.
When the truck arrived, his sled was tucked way up in front.
Everet tried to bet Gates $500.00 that it was aluminum, but Gates wouldn't
bite. He climbed up in the front of the truck and put a magnet on the chassis
and sure enough it was aluminum! Ken was pissed that he was never offered
that chassis. Maybe some extra motivation had just been added to Ken's determination
for the final event of the season?
Ken qualified for three(3) separate classes, while Chip had a shot at two(2).
When the checkered flag had waved for the last time, Ken had again been
victorious, capturing the
MOD I title.
Ken Young was the only
non-factory sponsored rider to win a men's modified class. This was
the 2nd time in three(3) years Ken had reached the winners circle in the
World Series Men's Modified racing -
a record unmatched by anyone!
An especially sweet victory for
Regal with his hybrid creation making
a permanent mark in the record books.
"They impounded the sled and engine after winning MOD I and
spent
hours in conference before declaring it legal size for the class."
said Regal.
Other guys attempted to build duplicates of that engine, but never had success
in building a winner. The factory boys said
this is one for the books!
It was about that same time that the Rupp teams, Gene Bloom named Everet
"
Super Wrench."
As Ev remembers the specs on that engine, "All crank shafts on 250,
292, 340, and 440 were 60mm stroke. I believe the 340 had a Walbro butterfly
32mm carburetor and the 250 had 28mm. The exhaust chambers on 340 had 3/4
inch diameter stingers, 7 1/2 inches long. The 250 had 1/2 inch diameter
stingers, 12 inches long. The 340 carburetor sat at a 30 degree angle and
the 250 carb sat parallel to the base.
A very strange looking setup,
that blew most guys minds that saw it."
The engine was on display in Regal's Phoenix, speedshop, showroom window
after the following Spring drags. It was soon to be
stolen and we
were told someone saw it in
Alaska. "That's the last I heard
of it's whereabouts." Regal sadly recalls.
