Since its inception 17 years ago, the Run & Gun event has looked to find replicar and kit owners who will put their vehicle through the wringer and come out on the other end smiling.
Bill Moore, twice the editor of KIT CAR during its nearly 25-year history, had a racing background and, before his gig with KC, was an editor of a motorsports publication on the East Coast. For Bill, it was easy to imagine an event where some real testing of replicars could occur. He rented the Willow Springs Race Track in Southern California and, with help from pro drivers like Tommy Kendall, the first Run & Gun was born.
Over the years the event has changed direction (by including "regular" car owners driving their own vehicles) and venues (Gateway Motor Speedway outside St. Louis has been the home of the Run & Gun for the past few years), but the underlying theme of performance has never left.
The program at Gateway, which is organized by a pair of Cobra owners, Wayne Turpin and Rich Pickles, and run with the help of Gateway track officials and local volunteers, covers three different aspects of driving conditions: road course, autocross, and drag racing. Each Run & Gun entrant has the opportunity to compete in each division against others with similarly prepped cars.
There are basically three classes of events you can run in, the first being Street class, which covers cars with closed exhaust and using passenger car tires. The second class is Prepared, which allows for an open exhaust and DOT-spec tires. One concern that popped up this year were some Hoosier tires on one competitors' car-they read DOT-approved but also had a Not for Highway Use warning, and the controversy was turned over to the judges. The Pro group is typically the fastest, and they cover any car with slicks.
In each of these classes, these were four sub-classes, all relating to the car's engine specs. Class A were big-blocks from 400 cubes and up, Class B covered small-blocks up to 400 inches, Class C oversaw the four- and six-cylinder vehicles, and Class D were the folks who had power-aiders such as nitrous, turbos, or superchargers.
Each class winner is named Top Dog, and they compete against each other via a points system on all three courses (road, autocross, and drags) to determine who is the Overall Top Dog in each of the three categories. By the end of the three-day event, you could have the possibility of racking up a lot of trophies, if you were consistently good in all three mini-events. As it turned out, if you were fast on the road course, you were probably going too fast on the autocross, too. But some folks who had an advantage at the drags couldn't go around a corner smoothly. The combination of three types of driving skills made for an interesting event and a real test of the driver's skills.
The Run & Gun's road course is set up inside Gateway's 1.25-mile banked oval, and it actually uses a portion of one straightaway in the layout of the 1.67-mile road course. In the driver's meeting before any racing occurred, Gateway's Dan Harmon went over the nine flags drivers had to look out for while on the course (in case someone is oiling down the track or spun out in a corner-both of which happened later).
Up in the tower, Don Shank, a volunteer from the St. Louis Kit Car Club, worked the timing equipment that recorded the progress made by the racecars. After the appropriate amount of warm-up and practice laps, you got three laps to record your best time. No one got around the course faster than Patrick Sallaway, an Arizona resident who was driving a red,small-block-equipped Can-Am Exotics racer.