A great thing about this thing of ours, and Hemmings, is that you get connected with some really good people. One that I’ve gotten acquainted with over the past year is Vance Ferry, whose name people from the Midwest who are into hot rods or drag racing ought to recognize at once. Vance, who lives in Gurnee, Illinois, is the hardest of the hardcore. He’s been racing from the Fifties on, mostly in a series of cars named “Compulsion.” It fits, believe me. As the first photo shows, Vance has been really at it for a while. His road-legal hot rod/tow rig and drag-spec Street Roadster are posed here in front of an Illinois dealership during the 1970s.
Vance has a particular fancy for small-displacement engines with extremely light internals and impossibly steep output. In this version of his Compulsion roadster, Vince had a 301 Chevy that he routinely banged into the next gear at close to 9,000 rpm.
This is my fave, though. Recognize the car? It’s the former Malco Gasser, the 1933 Willys previously campaigned by “Ohio George” Montgomery. Vance bought the car, yanked out its blown  Oldsmobile, and dropped in a radically built inline-four sourced from a 1960s Chevy II. I don’t recall the exact performance numbers for the car, but Vance told me that with driver, it weighed barely 1,500 pounds. The screaming four-cylinder Chevrolet explains the single exhaust header and the J/Gas classification. The coolest thing of all is that it’s a Midwest drag photo of the past, something that we don’t see often enough.
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