By
Andrew Wolf May 17, 2018They say you never truly forget your first love, and for veteran racer and renowned chassis builder Rick Jones, that classic line rings no more true.In October of 1978, a young and bright-eyed Jones — a mere senior in high school at the time — purchased an all-original 1969 Chevrolet Camaro, complete with a 375-horse 396 with a four-speed “because I wanted to race,” he shares.
“It was a pretty nice car,” he continues. “I got my lessons on how to drive a four-speed and how to power-shift on a Muncie. That winter I took it apart and put a 9-inch Ford rearend in it, ladders bars and 12-inch tire and started racing at my local track in Cordova [Illinois] the next year. I enjoyed tearing it apart and making the next revision as much as I did racing … sometimes more.”I’m the kind of person that always feels it’s time to move forward, to go forward all the time. So I said I’d just build something else.The Camaro went through a number of transformations under Jones with the help of his friends, progressing from leaf springs and slapper bars with an 8-point roll bar, to a narrowed 9-inch rearend with a two-by-three square tube backhalf to fit wider rear slicks — “we put some Cragar Super Tricks on it back in the day,” he adds with a laugh, in reference to the desirability of the wheels in days-gone-by. “I had a Muncie in there and then progressed to a Ford top-loader, and I’d break that thing all the time, and eventually went to a Doug Nash five-speed. I just kept working on it every year. We later took the front stub off and put a two-by-three all the way to the front, with a Corvair front suspension, because it had the same spindle as the first-generation Camaro, so the brakes and all would work.
“It still had the steel front fenders on it — I didn’t have the money to buy a fiberglass front end at the time,” he continues. Interestingly, it was this Camaro — the one he spent his wilder days tinkering on and took his now-wife, Bonnie Jones, on dates in — that precipitated the founding of the
Rick Jones Race Cars and Quarter-Max empire we know today.
“My first customer at the time was a local bracket racer from Iowa, Greg Couch — he was a really good racer and saw the work I did on my car and would ask if I wanted to work on his … I put a 9-inch Ford and four-link in it and some struts on it. That was the first car besides my own I was able to do work on, and I was doing all of this at home in my garage at the time.”