Outlawed by NASCAR: - 1957 Oldsmobile J-2

Like an awakening dinosaur, the American auto industry was coming to the realization, in 1956, that horsepower, and not just acres of chrome, helped to sell cars. It was a dizzying time, with Chevrolet's small-block V-8 and Chrysler's first-generation Hemi replacing the flathead Ford as the performance engine of choice. People were now buying, rather than building, their drag cars. In the South, the nearly stock NASCAR Grand National circuit was a regional phenomenon.

At Oldsmobile, it was crunch time. Company CEO J.F. Wolfram knew his brand-which had made some inroads into the nascent performance market-was in the hole when it came to making serious speed. For example, the 1956 Olds had 38 more horsepower than its 1955 counterpart, but was actually slower to 60 mph due to its ballooning girth. Oldsmobile's best for 1956 was a 324-cu.in. OHV V-8 with 230hp, but that was woefully short of Chrysler's 354-cu.in. Hemi, with 10.1:1 compression and 355hp, that was laying waste to the Grand National fields that year in Carl Kiekhafer's team of 300Bs. In the meantime, Chevrolet had developed its landmark small-block V-8, and Ford, in arrears since the flathead's supplanting, was actively exploring supercharging.

Action was clearly needed, and in a hurry. Brand prestige was going to be bludgeoned otherwise. An image-rescue team of engine designers was thrown together, and it included Bill Holt, now the last surviving member of the group that developed Oldsmobile's J-2 Rocket triple-carburetion package for 1957, a little-known story of achievement overcoming the double demons of cost and time.

"It was right in the middle of that era where everybody was horsepower crazy," said Holt, 91, who still has solid recollection of the events that led up to the J-2's creation. He started his Oldsmobile engineering career in 1941, in the engine department, and stayed at it for 30 years except for designing automatic cannons during World War II. When civilian production resumed, he was part of the engineering group that built Oldsmobile's first high-compression V-8, which bowed in 1949.

"Right after the war, we decided to go to a V-8 with overhead valves, and that was called the Rocket. It was quite a departure from anything Oldsmobile had ever done before. That was the start of the golden days of the horsepower race during the Fifties," he said.

It's altogether fitting that we interviewed Holt on this particular car. You see, this 1957 Golden Rocket 88 Holiday two-door hardtop, with the J-2 setup and only a few more than 30,000 actual miles, is owned by his daughter and son-in-law, Jan and Tom Hummer. When it comes to Oldsmobiles from 1957, the hardtop was the second-most-popular body style, with 49,187 units produced. The best estimates for cars fitted with the J-2 option vary, however, between 2,000 and 2,500 during 1957 and 1958, the only two years the tri-power setup was offered.

Enough paper has been expended on writings denigrating the melodramatic excesses of late-Fifties cars and their extravagant styling. Regardless of your opinion on the 1957 Golden Rocket's (thusly dubbed in honor of General Motors' forthcoming 50th anniversary) appearance, rest assured this is a muscle car in every sense of the word, built expressly to race under the era's NASCAR regulations that mandated largely stock cars. The Hummers, die-hard Olds fanatics, are fully aware of their hardtop's place in American performance history.

"Other than the original high-compression V-8 (of 1949), this was actually the first real muscle or performance car that Oldsmobile built," Tom said. "The whole selling point of this car, with the J-2 package, was power and racing."

Produced first with 303 and later 324 cubic inches, the Rocket V-8 became a prolific winner in NASCAR during the early and mid-Fifties in the hands of Buck Baker, Red Byron and Curtis Turner, taking two straight Southern 500s before the competition caught up. It quickly became obvious that single carburetion wasn't going to cut it in the evolving Grand National division for very long. The solution, coupled with a displacement advance to 371 cubic inches, was the adoption of triple carburetion atop the Oldsmobile intake manifold, along with a slight compression bump to 10.0. The inline arrangement placed a choke-equipped Rochester 2GC two-barrel in the center, with a nominal flow of about 280 cfm, assisted at the front and rear by Rochester 2G two-barrels capable of flowing 290 cfm. In normal driving, the engine was fed by the center carburetor, but once enough poundage was planted on the pedal, the vacuum-operated secondary carburetors snapped open, allowing the big-inch Olds to swill a hearty 860 cfm, or thereabouts, of the oxygen-hydrocarbon cocktail. The consequence: The 371's normal output of 277hp got kicked to 300, with a corresponding torque increase from 400 to 415 foot-pounds.

This meaty powertrain is clothed in one of the most memorable body styles in Oldsmobile's history, a one-year-only fling with a wraparound three-piece rear-window treatment that harked back, in a somewhat detached or perhaps Fifties-exaggerated manner, to the Forties styling cue of separating the rear window with plated straps. A "ridge" on either side of the main rear window ran upward into the roof. Oldsmobile also adopted unusual barrel-shaped fins tipped with ovoid taillamps, and reverted to its 1954 practice of applying a downward-and-back angled spear to the quarter panel. Up front, chrome-hooded headlamps were set into fenders topped with-surprise!-tiny rockets above a downturned, sour-puss grille that is curiously reminiscent of the indifferent smiley face on the old "Have a Nice Day" buttons.

Tom Hummer has owned an assortment of Oldsmobiles, but despite his family connection to the J-2 package, hadn't been actively looking for one. But in 1995, while making a stop at the season-opening Kruse spring auction in Auburn, Indiana, he spotted this Golden Rocket 88 Holiday sitting in the queue awaiting a turn in the auction ring.

"I looked at the paperwork and saw that it had been an Oklahoma car, that there was no rust, that it still had its original trim and it had factory air," he remembered. "Then I opened the hood and saw that it had the J-2. I had to have it, but I didn't have any real cash because I went there originally just to go to the swap meet and vendor area. I had my credit card with me, but the car was $10,000. So I went into the auction office, and MBNA was set up there, and within about 20 minutes, I had a $10,000 loan."

Hummer owns and operates an auto body shop, Tom's Auto Body, in Dimondale, Michigan, appropriately close to Oldsmobile's home turf of Lansing. He's long been into 1957 vintages of the historic marque, owns a 1957 Super 88 convertible and even headed the Oldsmobile Club of America's chapter for 1957 owners for nine years. He has executed his share of restorations over the years, but this Golden Rocket, whose 30,000-mile odometer reading was apparently genuine, required unpredictably little effort to get into its current show condition. He guesstimated that the J-2 car was in 3- condition when he bought it at Kruse. One of the most significant areas that needed attention was the right quarter panel, where a bumper crease had been clumsily pulled out and bondoed. After straightening the sheetmetal, he MIG-welded the holes. Speaking of bumpers, one was caved in and had to be replaced with a donor from a parts car. Hummer did the metalwork himself and sent both bumpers out to be triple-plated. Other than that, the car's trim is original.

Given his long career of rejuvenating crash-crippled cars, it should surprise nobody that Hummer undertook the body renovation himself. That, as it happens, was a limited process other than fixing the quarter panel. He didn't even strip the body before refinishing it with three coats of Sherwin-Williams primer and a PPG Deltron basecoat/clearcoat color combination of Rose Mist and Victorian White. The chassis and suspension pieces were repainted in PPG enamel. The entire restoration needed, he estimated, 160 hours. The biggest out-of-pocket expenses were new U.S. Royal bias-ply tires, a replacement J-2 oil-bath air cleaner and a $100 tune-up at a local shop. Since then, it has reeled in a first-place award at the Oldsmobile Nationals.

Although NASCAR racers running J-2 Oldsmobiles made do with the standard column-shifted three-speed manual transmission, in keeping with Grand National rules that mandated largely stock cars, the four-speed Hydra-Matic transmission was the option of choice for many of the road-going cars. As Holt recalled, the progressive carburetor linkages were developed by the Oldsmobile transmission team, since they were directly linked to the Jetaway Hydra-Matic kickdown linkages. Meanwhile, the engine team had its own do-it-yesterday assignment, getting the air cleaner to fit beneath the new 1957 hood line, since the hoods were already being stamped at the body plants and couldn't be modified.

Even though the J-2 option was intended for racing, Oldsmobile intended to offer it as an option throughout its model lineup. You could order a J-2 station wagon just by checking off the option box. But Olds wanted to sell those cars by winning races, and fitted the J-2 for competition with solid lifters and adjustable rocker arms. They started looking for a "marque" driver, and found one in NASCAR pioneer Lee Petty, who had won the 1954 Grand National championship in a Dodge. His son, Maurice Petty, who was chief engine builder at Petty Enterprises in Randleman, North Carolina, for a generation, still remembers the friendly persuasion that preceded the switch to Olds.

"The Olds people came to us with a little deal, a little money," he said. "Hey, we had to live, and Dodge didn't offer us anything."

Petty, who now builds engines for NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series teams and regional short-trackers, emphasized the huge gap between the largely stock Grand Nationals of the Fifties and today's purpose-built Nextel Cup machines.

"Back then, the rules were pretty strict, so you really couldn't do that much to them. We'd do a basic blueprinting to the engine, give it a valve job, but that was about all they would allow you to do. It was a pretty good engine; better than what Plymouth or Dodge had that year, which was nothing," he said.

Oldsmobile's J-2 program came to a premature end when NASCAR, in one of the abrupt rules changes that still occur today, banned multiple carburetion partway through the 1957 season. Lee Petty stuck with a single-carburetor Olds through 1958 before heading back to Plymouth. By then, the street J-2 program was also done, as the industry moved, at least publicly, to endorse the 1957 Automobile Manufacturer's Association recommendation that they back away from supporting racing and high horsepower as a pro-safety gesture, however empty it may have been.

The legacy of those days, regardless, is immediately evident on the rare occasions when Hummer drives the Golden Rocket, which totals only about 100 miles annually. As he puts it, under normal circumstances, the Oldsmobile is docile and compliant, not very different from most American cars built in the second half of the Fifties. That, as you might imagine, changes when he decides to leg it.

"When you're driving on the center two-barrel, it's really like you're driving any other car," he explained. "Until you really kick it down. You have to get the accelerator down about three-quarters of the way, and because it's a vacuum-operated linkage, it takes a second for the other two carburetors to kick in. From a standing start, you really have to floor it. The whole selling point of the package was, you spent most of your time driving on the center carburetor. But when it does kick in, you can certainly feel the surge. I used to have a Corvette, and it had that same feeling, when you got on it at 60 or 70 mph, it would just press you back in the seat and take off. The J-2 is kind of like that."

"In terms of handling, I guess the best way to put it is, the faster you go, the better it floats. When you get into a corner, it's not as good as my '66 Toronado, in that it leans a lot into the curves," he said. "The brakes aren't good, and that was one of the drawbacks of the '57s. I've never tried it with this car, but I had a friend whose uncle had one, and he was driving it when a dog ran across the road, and he jammed on the brakes, and it wouldn't even slide the tires. The brake surfaces seem large, but the car is heavy."

Weak anchors aside, Hummer said it's indisputable that the J-2 constitutes as much a benchmark in Oldsmobile performance history as its groundbreaking high-compression V-8, and later, the 4-4-2. His father-in-law readily agrees.

"It was just one of those things. It was the Fifties, horsepower was king, and we had to have it," Holt said. "That J-2 was a going machine."

Owner's View

Long before he owned either one of his 1957s, his Toronado or his 1931 Model F-30 rumbleseat coupe, Tom Hummer and his wife Jan had a real jones for Oldsmobiles. It goes all the way, as he puts it, to "back in 1957, when I saw a new 88 in the showroom of Story Oldsmobile, which was then the biggest Olds dealer in Lansing. I still remember it cost $2,477, and I used to just drool over it."

He never specifically set out to own or restore a J-2-powered car, but acknowledges that, "In my case, it's kind of funny. My wife keeps telling me I'm like Tim the Tool Man, in the sense that I always want more power, although in the case of the J-2, maybe Dad had something to do with it, too."

Ask him about the demise of Oldsmobile after more than a century of history, and he quickly turns somber. "I'm not at all happy about it, to say the least. I think GM should have dumped Saturn instead and renovated the Oldsmobile brand. At least at Olds, they were innovators."

PROS AND CONS

Pros

Defines the term "alternative muscle"

Styling is bold, but not excessive

Recent prices don't intimidate

Cons

Prodigious curb weight

Reproduction parts scarce as free Krugerrands

Leave yourself LOTS of stopping distance

CLUB SCENE

Oldsmobile Club of America

517-663-1811

www.oldsclub.org

Dues: $40/year

Membership: 6,400

SPECIFICATIONS

Base price: $2,591

Options on car profiled:

J-2 induction system ($83)

Jetaway Hydra-Matic transmission ($215)

Air conditioning ($430)

Power steering ($100)

ENGINE

Type: OHV V-8, cast-iron block

Displacement: 371 cubic inches

Bore x Stroke: 4.00 inches x 3.69 inches

Compression ratio: 10.0:1

Horsepower @ rpm: 300 @ 4,400

Torque @ rpm: 415-lbs.ft. @ 2,800

Valvetrain: Hydraulic lifters

Main bearings: 5

Fuel system: Dual Rochester 2G two-barrel carburetors, single Rochester 2GC two-barrel carburetor, vacuum linkage

Lubrication system: Full-pressure, mechanical pump

Electrical system: 12-volt

Exhaust system: Dual

TRANSMISSION

Type: Four-speed automatic, dual fluid couplings

Ratios 1st: 3.96:1

2nd: 2.63:1

3rd: 1.55:1

4th: 1.00:1

Reverse: 4.30:1

DIFFERENTIAL

Type: Hypoid, semi-floating axles

Ratio: 3.42:1

STEERING

Type: Recirculating ball, power assist

Ratio: 22.7:1

Turns, lock-to-lock: 3.50

Turning circle: 43 feet

BRAKES

Type: Hydraulic four-wheel expanding drum

Front: 11-inch drums

Rear: 11-inch drums

CHASSIS & BODY

Construction: Welded steel body over I-beam channel frame with center X-member

Body style: Six-passenger hardtop

Layout: Front engine, rear-wheel drive

SUSPENSION

Front: Coil springs, anti-roll bar, tubular shock absorbers

Rear: Live axle, semi-elliptic leaf springs, tubular shock absorbers

WHEELS & TIRES

Wheels: Stamped steel discs

Front: 14 x 6

Rear: 14 x 6

Tires: U.S Royal bias-ply whitewalls

Front: 8.50 x 14 inches

Rear: 8.50 x 14 inches

WEIGHTS & MEASURES

Wheelbase: 126 inches

Overall length: 216.7 inches

Overall height: 58.2 inches

Overall width: 76.38 inches

Front track: 59 inches

Rear track: 58 inches

Curb weight: 4,119 pounds

CAPACITIES

Crankcase: 6 quarts with filter

Cooling system: 21 quarts

Fuel tank: 20 gallons

CALCULATED DATA

Bhp per c.i.d.: 0.80

Weight per bhp: 13.73 pounds

Weight per c.i.d.: 11.10 pounds