Like Father, Like Son

A while back it was brought to my attention that Karl's son Kyle(who is now 17) has taken a liking to hot rod cars. In particular his fathers racecar. Karl's 66 Plymouth Sport Fury was put into storage right after his passing in 1999. It was started and fluids changed every so often so the car wouldn't detoriate to a point of no return. A few weeks ago Kyle with a lot of help from Tom Syron rolled the car out of the garage and gave it a once over,Filled up the fuel cell and put air in the tires and checked the brakes. Kyle learned the hard way how to detail a car. For the first time in many years they had the car running and headed to the local cruise night over at the Brauerhouse. It was really cool to see this car back out again. Kyle has many of the same qualities that his old man had. It's awsome to see that he has retained the gearhead gene of the Mortensen family. I hope with some practice Kyle will keep the legacy alive. I dug out some Pictures of the car when it was in Alaska. Karl dragged this car out of a junk yard in Alaska and put his drive line out of his 73 New Yorker he had. The same engine is in the car now. What was really cool was once a month the Fairbanks Lions Club set up a temporary dragstrip and held a race. Karl participated in many of these during his stay in Alaska. Check out the hand written time slip. That is something that you just don't see anymore. It seems Alaska is behind the curve in racing technology by about 50 years! The pictures are from a race that he won his class called super street. Best e.t 13.28 at 106 MPH. not bad for a car put togther with junk parts and a little bit of hard work. Seeing the car a few weeks ago brought back some good memories of getting the car from the military down in St Louis after it was shipped home. Then doing a frame off restoration on the car while adding some serious race hardware at the same time. Kyle seems to be enjoying himself and I hope that someday he understands who his Father was and how involved his family was in the racing industry.