I consider myself lucky to have had Dave walk up to me in my 69 Skylark (PennySaver $2k), while in the staging lanes at Irwindale Dragstrip. Dave in his Hawaiian shirt and cigarette in hand.."what the hell ya got in that thing? For Christ sake I hope ya didn't put a dam Chevy in there!" I opened the hood and when he saw it still had the org 350 he lightened up and told me i really needed a bigger motor. (The track had just been opened for a few hours and someone told me there was a really nice Buick on the property that just got rear ended while in the tech line.) Anyway, Dave tells me come on and walks me over to the car that had just been tagged. He introduced me to Bruce, he had a motor he used to race, it was in pieces but he would reluctantly sell it to me. A few weeks later Bruce dropped off the empty block, heads, rods, pistons and the rest of the goodies, still runs good. Ya never know when someone says hi, what will come of it.. Meeting Dave that day and becoming friends with him and a lot of Buick fans...I did't see that coming. Here's an old video i made on a trip to Bowling Green with Dave, Jim, Bruce and friends.
Thanks for sharing !!! We had the opportunity to race Dave, Bruce & Ollie in the finals of GSR in 2011 at BG. I never met Dave before that race, but he came up to us in the staging lanes and was looking over our car and talking to us about it. I still remember that day....the West Coast Guys were truely "Fast With Class" .
I too consider myself fortunate to have known Dave Benisek, Super friendly and one smart dude. I ran across this Cragar beer (or Rootbeer) mug on Ebay awhile back and bought a set of four, Gave one to Dave. He had never seen one before. I thought it was kinda cool that Cragar did this (probably in the mid 70s) and to see a Buick guy on a mug with some pretty famous racers, Dave deserved it. Shoud have been a Buick on the front.
Great video, I must’ve washed it over 25 times over the years anytime I needed motivation to work on my car.
The cup also lists Ronnie Sox for 69 and Bobby Warren for 70. Both raced locally and were from here in N. C. Bobby is still around. I would have loved to have seen Dave B. back then but he was on the west coast.
