REMEMBERING GASSER LEGEND "OHIO GEORGE" MONTGOMERY

George Montgomery, the legendary drag racer who passed away in late August at the age of 90, was one of many successful gasser racers to come out of Ohio.

Yet his "Ohio George" nickname wasn't some fond tribute to his roots. Tim Woods, co-owner of another legendary gasser, the Stone-Woods-Cook Willys, started calling him that at the 1963 NHRA Nationals.

"It pissed me off at the time," Montgomery told Gray Baskerville when he profiled the racer for HOT ROD in the September and October 2000 issues. "But it was good press." And that was important in those days, as the gasser wars were heating to a boil, and there was money to be made at match race appearances.

Montgomery started racing when he was a teenager, but he first caught national attention when he won the A/Gas class and Little Eliminator at the 1959 NHRA Nationals in Detroit driving his blown, Cadillac-powered '33 Willys. He would do the same at the 1960 Nationals, and he took the class win (but not the Eliminator) at the 1961 Nationals. When he won the A/GS class and Middle Eliminator in 1963, he became the first driver to win an Eliminator at the Nationals three times "before anyone had even won it twice," said the NHRA's Phil Burgess.

Montgomery was an imaginative innovator mechanically, honing his skills at the Dayton, Ohio, Delco plant where he worked as a toolmaker from the age of 16. Before he brought the Willys to the Nationals in '59, he adapted a Cragar 4-71 blower manifold to mate a 6-71 to his 390 Caddy mill. He also fabricated the blower's pulley system.