Joe Martincic

The Martincic Brothers, Tough Competitors

I guess the best thing you can say about Joe and Frank Martincic is that they were true competitiors and winners. Joe began winning when he won the Ohio State Model Airplane Aerobatic title when he was sixteen. No matter what those two did, they were good at it and they were good at it because they did not take defeat well!

I met them both about 1952 when drag racing first got started in the Northeastern Ohio area. A HotRod Club in Akron was putting on some drag races every other Sunday on a two lane service road that ran between the Akron Airport and Derby Downs (the site of the Soap Box Derby) The same strip where the Arfon brothers started with their Allison powered cars.

We ran a channeled 34 Ford coupe that had a 49 Caddie in it and they ran a stock bodied 39 Chevy that had a six cylinder 270 GMC for power. While we didn't run in the same class, we did strike up a long lasting friendship and as the years went by we exchanged ideas and competed against each other in both dragsters and in supers ..and they were tough guys to beat no matter what they ran. You never knew what they were going to show up with. Sometimes Joe would show with a control line model airplane to give worth while entertaining demonstrations.

When they grew tired of beating everybody in their class with that '39 coupe, they showed up with a 32 Ford four door sedan. The engine was a set-back GMC and the driver, always Joe, was sitting in the back seat with his elbow out the quarterwindow. It was so evil handling that at the next event they came with a roadster body on it. It wasn't much better so over the winter months, they went all out and built a drag car from the frame up.

Those guys really wanted to race as despite their mothers protest they built the car in their residential basement. I will never know how she put up with all that welding smoke!

As I said you never knew what they were going to run as at first with the GMC and later with a Ford. and finally with the Chevy V8.

Somehow, Frank got hold of an early set of Hilborn injectors for a flat head Ford V8. He stopped by our place and borrowed the instructions for our Chrysler Hilborn unit and with that and their experience, in no time he had his set-up running like gangbusters. In fact that engine sounded just like an air drill. It was usually they who won when we raced our rear-engined Chrysler dragster against them.

We couldn't keep axles in the dragster, so after my brother flipped my dragster on that 22 foot wide road that was our drag strip, we abandoned drag racing went oval track racing stock cars.

Although a couple years later we did get to run against each other at the Mount Vernon drag strip. By then they were running a glass bodied slingshot dragster with a four carburetor Chevy V8. I had put my wreck-salvaged injected Chrysler V8 into JoeSchubecks slingshot chassis. Between the both of us we broke the track ET record nine times that day and raised the speed record by over 20 miles an hour.. First they did it and then we would come back with a bit better time.Then they would go out and do it again. While we were running straight alky, to make up for cubic inches, they were tipping the nitro bottle. Finally when we had done our best and couldn't top them, I conceded. Joe said "Good thing as we were ready to go to 100 per cent Nitro"..that's the kind of guys they were and I loved competing against them.

They went on winning in drags, still building their own fiberglas bodies (again in the basement). They built them in a female plaster mold and that can really cause a mess. They ended up going to the HotRod Drag Nationals in Kansas City. Unfortunately they blew the engine while setting an exceptionaly good time. A lot of those California guys were happy over that!

While they were doing the straight line stuff, I had turned my attention to circle track supers. Back then they were both in their early twenties and ran a Sure-Weld Garage on Clevelands East Side doing specialized auto repair. Frank was a true cylinder head specialist. He earlier had converted my 51 Chrysler heads over to big valves using screw-in seats.. He always said his secret with the GMC was the head work and the port shaping.

They would occasionally come to the circle track races and even stopped by our backyard garage from time to time. When they heard that we were running for MONEY instead of trophies, they jumped into the game by building the first of many supermodifieds.

The first track car they built was the Chevy powered 707 super that had a complete tube frame, cage and all. For nostalgia, they purposely made it resemble a 27 T roadster. Other than once or twice of Joe driivng an Olds 98 stock car at the old dirt Sportsman Park track, they had no real circle track experience.

Opening day in 1959, after some practice on the 1/2 mile Sandusky asphalt, Joe had done well. So well that after qualifying, the old fox MacClingan comes over and says "OK Joe you showed off, now you got to prove it. You're on the pole of the fast heat!" And that was against guys like Rollie Beale, Dick Good and Joy Fair.

Neither of us remember how he finished but Joe said he learned a lot that day. But they were always learning and experimenting. Like when they built their own fiberglas molds and body.. They had to take the basement windows out so they could get it out.

Joe had taught himself how to weld aluminum and built all the bodies for the track cars while Frank did the engine work. The total number of cars built has been lost over the years, but there were many that included upright sprinters and offset roadsters. And they were all winners too as eventually the cars were sold to experienced race people like Gary Myles and Dick Way, who continued to win with them. There were also many feature wins and season championships for the Martincic Brothers at Lorain County and Sandusky. Of note is their winning the 100 Lap Midvale Invitational four times in four different cars. This was no mean feat as that race always attracted the best in supermodifieds that included Wayne McGuire, Gordon Dukes,Norm Sawl and a host of others who were standouts.

Back then we were running a Chrysler powered super against them with Eddie Weisman driving. One night at Midvale, Joe and Ed broke away from the pack and were putting on a duel. I had just said to Frank "I don't care who wins this as long as they finish one two." When Ed bumped Joe and got him out of shape and passed him for the win, needless to say Joe had his hot Bohemian temper up and almost floated the valves trying to catch up and get into the pits.

When Ed came in he tells me "Jeez Joe must have hit some water, I better go apologise." Well he didn't have to go far as they met in the middle of the pits and here I am in between both of them and they were both over six feet and 190 pounds. There was a lot of yelling at each other until Ed says "OK if that's the way you feel about it, you can have my share of the purse." Joe comes back with "Aw hell Ed, I know you didn't mean it."

We always referred to Joe as Tinker. But never to his face. Even if he had fast time he was never satisfied with the car and he would always, tinker with it after qualifying and between heats. Sometimes it hurt him, but he was always willing to try a new set-up.

Unfortunately, during his career, Frank contracted Muscular Scleriosis and was soon confined to a wheelchair. However it never deterred him from the competition. It was inspiring to see them coming to the track with the wheelchair stacked on the tire pole and then to see Frank wheeling up to the fence with his stopwatch in hand.

One time in the garage, Frank pulled himself out of the wheelchair to check the timing on a car and promptly fell over. A couple guys ran to help him and he fought them off with "Can't a guy fall on his ass once in awhile?" He was tough!

One Saturday night at Lorain County they blew an engine, packed up and left for their gas stations garage. They pulled the engine, bored it, sleeved it, put it back together and were qualifiying it the next afternoon at Sandusky and that included 130 miles of towing.

The last track car they built was a rear engined machine that Joe considered a failure. That is it was only a failure when he had to run it without a wing. With a wing Joe says "It was the fastest car I ever drove, but totally uncontollable without a wing". They sold it to Jim Shirey, who did use a wing and won the Lorain County Championship in his rookie year.

Frank, who was probably the one of the best engine men around for his time was doing things to engines that were innovative and were usually twenty years ahead of the times.He specialized in port shaping and valve pockets. He ended up in a VA hospitalwith a ruptured appendix. After spending several years there he passed away while in a nursing home in 1978 at the age of 49.

Joe with his fiberglas experience became a dealer for FiberFab Kit Kars and he built numerous complete cars as well as helping in the design of the kits.

The press of the FiberFab Kit Car business and Franks failing health caused them to drop out of the race business and Joe moved toFlorida in 1975.

Joe, at 72, is retired now and lives in Ormond Beach, Florida and recently crashed riding his bike and added a broken pelvis to his numerous race injuries of a broken neck(1960), broken ribs and punctured lung(1966) and a broken wrist in 1974.

Those two free spirits helped make supermodifieds what they were back in those days, exciting, innovative, interesting and competitive for they, like most of us at that time, engineered and built almost everything that went on the cars from exhaust headers to suspension springs to bodies and even the wide based wheels. And we are the richer for for having had them as competitors!

from Super Dave's Reader Stories. written by Duane Depuy