![]() ![]() "We used to burn cars Tuesday to Saturday from 6 o'clock in morning to night. It was because of his father, however, LaJoie had to put his racing career on hold when he joined the family business, LaJoie's Auto Wrecking, on Meadow Street in South Norwalk. "My father used to say where can you go see a show where a guy flips over in a car and walks away for five bucks." "I flipped the car end over end five times and destroyed the car," he explained. It was at the Waterford Speedbowl and LaJoie has never forgotten his first race. It was in 1959 when LaJoie sat behind the wheel of a stock car for the first time, a 1937 Dodge owned by another Norwalker, Larry Hamilton. When my daughter got married he drove her to the wedding in it." "It's been rebuilt and my son Randy has it in his shop in North Carolina," the elder LaJoie noted. More than a half-century later, the 1932 Ford Roadster is still around. We once finished runner-up at a dragway in West Hempstead, Long Island, with it." "We worked nights and every chance we had to get it built. "We called it the 'Seven Day Wonder' because we built it in seven days," LaJoie said. Not long after, they took the engine out and put it in a dragster they built and LaJoie drove at dragstrips across the Northeast. "We did a lot of different things like that." "We would go on I-95 and test run the car," LaJoie said with a laugh. It was not even three feet high."Īnd with that, a promising racing career was born We put four two-barrel carburetors in it. "We put a Chrysler Hemi in it that was a 331 cubic inch engine we bought at the junkyard and built the motor up to 392. "We bought a '32 Ford Roadster convertible and went racing with it," LaJoie recalled. LaJoie was only 15 when he and his brother Roger built their first car in 1953. "Chick Stockwell (who won a record nine point titles and whose record of 51 feature wins LaJoie broke) also had a lot of fans and they booed me."īut those memorable days in Danbury were only part of a remarkable career that spanned four decades. "I was the guy they loved and I was the guy they hated because I kicked their butt. "I was gone two years and the people that ran Danbury told me the crowd went down between 2,000 and 2,500 on Saturday nights," the Hat City fan favorite said. Of course, as many longtime local racing fans remember, the track LaJoie ruled over was the Danbury Racearena, where he won five point championships and a record 58 feature races before the famed oval closed in 1981.Įven more amazing, LaJoie set the all-time record for victories despite missing two years when he left to compete on the NASCAR circuit in the Modified Series, mostly at upstate Stafford Motor Speedway. We were running fifth when the engine let go." "It had to be the late '70s and we built a Firebird that averaged 180 miles per hour. Our race was on Friday and the 500 was on Sunday. ![]() "Not in the 500, but in the smaller modified series," he pointed out. ![]()
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