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The SHELBY AMERICAN
Spring 2019 10
PUTTING THE CART BEFORE THE HORSE ?
DON YENKO AFFLICTED BY ACUTE FIBERGLASS INGESTION ?
Normally you see a truck towing a race car. But Gary Go-
eringer spotted this on a Facebook FoMoCo drag racing page, posted by Gilbert Ramsay. Unfortunately that’s all we
know about this Fairlane Ranchero drag racer. Obviously when you need a tow vehicle, you use whatever you can get
your hands on. Can anybody out there in SAACland provide any more information? Where is Randy Gillis when we re-
ally need him?
A large Corvair get-together in
Houston provided Steve Sloan with a
fairly extensive article in the
Houston
Chronicle
about the cars and the
event. One of the Corvairs they high-
lighted in the article was a 1966 Yenko
Stinger. The article touted the car by
saying, “
Race car driver Don Yenko
had switched from racing Corvettes to
using the Corvair in 1966 in an at-
tempt to better compete with the new
Shelby Mustangs
.”
If that was in fact the case, the
only way we can explain it is by noting
that Yenko, one of SCCA’s best known
Corvette drivers, must have inhaled
too much fiberglass dust while he was
successfully racing them between
1957 and 1965, and it somehow had an
affect on his mental equilibrium. It
was probably bad enough for Yenko
when the Cobras began relegating
Corvettes to back-markers in SCCA
production racing in 1963. Yenko im-
mediately set his sights on B/Produc-
tion so he didn’t have to lock horns
with the Cobras in A/Production. He
did fairly well until 1965, when
Shelby’s GT350s began showing up.
Then he was a back-marker again. So
what did he do? He started building a
performance car of his own, based on
the Corvair, out of his Chevy dealer-
ship in Cannonsburg, Pennsylvania,
near Pittsburgh.
Yenko was one of the people who
looked at Carroll Shelby and thought,
“
If he can do it, I can do it
” and found
a niche. Like Ian Garrard’s Tiger, Bill
Thomas’s Cheetah and Jack Griffith’s
Griffith. On paper, the Corvair proba-
bly looked pretty good, weighing 2,100
lbs. and powered by an air-cooled rear
engine that Yenko pumped up to 240
horsepower. Chevrolet wanted to race
them but like the Mustang, the car
was rejected because it had rear seats.
Sports cars had to be two-seaters.
Yenko saw an opening and took a
page out of Shelby’s book. He had
Chevy build 100 white, four-speed, 140
h.p. Corsa models in December, 1965.
By January 1966 his crew was busy
building Yenko Stingers at his Chevy
dealership and he passed the SCCA’s
inspection. Yenko offered several mod-
els including one that was for racing-
only – like Shelby’s R-Model.
The fiberglass dust must have
clouded Yenko’s mind because the
SCCA put the Stinger in its D/Produc-
tion class. They were never competi-
tors to the GT350. A total of about 115
Stingers were built between 1966 and
1969 (100 in 1966). Additionally Yenko
modified another 30 or so customer
cars, giving them Yenko VIN tags
which made them eligible for SCCA
competition.
Yenko died in 1987 while piloting
a small plane.