Originally Posted by Neil Davies

I do have one street racing story, not mine, but so good you've got to hear it. It comes from Mike Mahaffey, from the original Der Kleiner Panzers club. Mike had a '51 split with a 2180cc IDA motor, close ratio trans and BRMs. It was awesome, and it's what my '51 split will very closely emulate.

Anyway, here is the story, as posted on cal-look.com:
"That was a fun era, height of the muscle car scene. The cruise scene was on Harbor Blvd. going between Big Carl’s and Taco Villa - straight out of American Graffiti. We were the anti-muscle car crowd that was basically laughed at. Before I built my car a fast street VW ran in the high 15’s or 16’s, hardly a threat to the muscle cars. The really fast VW’s were strip only – the Inch Pincher, Schley Bros, Vittone, etc. But no one that I knew of was using that technology in a daily driver street car. So I decided to go for it. Ron Fleming and I built the motor at Gene Berg’s shop when he first moved to Orange from Washington. I had it dyno’d by Dean Lowry. After a full pulls he just looked at us and said we were crazy, “you can’t drive this on the street. It has more hp than my Inch Pincher did a year ago.” We just smiled, said “we’ll see”. Actually it worked far better than we had even hoped. It was a torque monster that pulled right off of idle. I’m sure the Vertex magneto helped a lot. Ron did a great job on the heads. Suddenly, I had a legitimate low 13-second street car, with fan belt, muffler, and Pirelli’s. American cars needed to have slicks and uncorked headers to run faster than that. Anyway, back to the muscle car street scene. They’d never seen a fast VW on the street before.
I’ll share three of my favorite memories.
I was cruising through the car hop section in the back of Big Carl’s and a guy in a Chevelle stuck his head out and started laughing at my car. I stopped backed up, bounced the front end a little and did a major burn out lifting the front wheels a few inches. I went back around, stopped in front of his car, yelled out “want to race that piece of s#*t.?” The look on his face was priceless as he slumped in his seat and everyone around was laughing.
Another time I was alone driving at night on Harbor Blvd. in La Habra. I pulled up next to a 1968 Mustang fastback. He was obviously very proud of his car as he still had the white shoe polish bracket time of 11.85 on his windshield, presumably from Wed. night bracket racing at OCIR the night before. So I revved him off. He and his buddy just looked at me and started laughing. Obviously he didn’t take me seriously. He just pulled away rather quickly and I stayed a half a car back then punched it and lurched ahead of him. I’ll never forget the looks on their faces as they snapped their heads toward me in disbelief. So we pulled up to the next intersection (fortunately traffic was very light, no one else around). Now he knew I was serious. Watching the side yellow light anticipating the green light, we both took off burning. I shut it down when my speedo said 100-mph and I had him by about 2 open cars. He turned left, I turned right, splitting up in case a cop saw us. I would have liked to have heard their conversation after that.
Shortly thereafter I was without my car at Taco Villa and we approached a crowd engaged in some animated story telling. Standing back and listening I heard them talking about an 11-second street VW. Man, I was wondering where the heck is that car. I didn’t know of any that fast. Then one of the guys from the crowd that knew me and had set up some races for me that he made some good money on whispered to me “they’re talking about your car.” I couldn’t get any more races from that crowd after that."

Cool or what!