A Lifetime Under the Hood

Our ancestor Larry Pipes was a professional drag racer, holding two world records in the early 1970s. But his love affair with cars started much earlier. Larry was born in 1941 on a small dairy farm near Butler, Missouri, just a few miles from his grandfather James Richard Pipes’s farm in Altona, Missouri. But from the time he was a teenager (driving himself into town at age 14), he began tinkering with every internal combustion engine he could get his hands on — teaching himself how they work, but also how to make them more powerful and efficient. In the fall of 1958, an uncle loaned him some money so he could leave the farm and attend the University of Missouri, majoring in Agricultural Economics. However, this path was not meant to be.

Two years later, Larry dropped out of college and moved to St. Louis. A job at the Post Office paid the bills while he moonlighted at various machine shops around town, plying his trade, while at the same time learning all he could. By the early 1960s, an unfinished stretch of Interstate 70 was serving as a makeshift dragstrip, and Larry had begun modifying his 1955 Chevy (pictured at right) and racing against his friends and other challengers. He also begun hanging out at the “Circle Steak n’ Shake” in north St. Louis, which is where he met Elaine Burmeister, who would eventually become his wife in 1966.

His first bona fide drag racer was a combination of a 1951 Ford Anglia (pictured at bottom) and a 305 cubic inch Chevy engine, running B/Gas. This car would prove to be a gateway drug in his addiction to speed, and in Sep 1968, he set a national record of 10.38 seconds through the quarter-mile. He would continue racing this car for another two years until a near-fatal accident at Mid-America Raceway in May 1970. Larry spent almost a week in a coma after that wreck, but his need for speed would not be deterred.

It was clear that if he wanted to go faster, he would need a different car. In 1971, he moved up to C/Gas in a new car that he built from scratch using a fiberglass Opel GT body (pictured below) on a frame that he welded himself. In Jun 1972, he would set an American Hot Rod Association world record of 10.2 seconds with this car, and in Aug 1973 he would further reduce his quarter-mile time to 9.98 seconds with his second world record.

Not long after breaking the 10-second barrier, Larry’s wife Elaine convinced him to give up the danger of leaving their young son fatherless. Larry would eventually pivot and go to work for the American Automobile Association (AAA), managing their diagnostic center on Lindell Boulevard in downtown St. Louis, leveraging his almost twenty years of automotive expertise. In 1981, he would leave AAA and start his own company as an automotive consultant, investigating car accidents for insurance companies, and testifying as an expert witness in a myriad of different court cases. In 1983, the St. Louis Weekly newspaper did a story on his career up to that point, entitled “A lifetime spent under the hood,” but that was hardly the end. Larry never got tired of looking at old, beat up, burned out, and demolished cars, and would continue working as a consultant until his retirement almost 30 years later.

Larry Pipes passed away in 2024 but he would have been 84 years old today.