I worked out if I had separately operated brakes on either side of the rear end I should be able to steer it, but with the Posi-Traction rear end in the car it wouldn’t work. Yeah, but I couldn’t control it though I could make it go 300-400 feet like that. Having pushed the Hurst Barracuda to carry the front wheels for as long as he could keep it in a straight line, Shrewsberry’s next breakthrough was to devise a steering system, with two brake levers, one for each side of the diffĪnd that was the beginning of the wheelstander? They’d never permit it today, but it brought the house down every time. Dart' ’stander on its rear wheels, and would finish the night coming back up the strip standing out through the windscreen waving to the crowd while on the back wheels, drop the car onto all four wheels, step out onto the bonnet and then off onto the strip, and as the Dart rolled at idle back into the pits and the hands of an assistant he’d turn and bow to the screaming crowd. His first appearances in Australia, in December 1969 and January 1970, stunned the crowds. Shrewsberry virtually invented the wheelstander, and gave up competitive quarter-mile racing in favour of the showman’s stage on the quarter with just two rear wheels in contact with the ground. THESE days he reckons it’s 'Mild Bill', but in his seventies he can still name drop great stories about all the legends of the quarter mile from those halcyon days of racing Factory Experimental muscle cars and a near lifetime career in wheelstanders. This article on Bill Shrewsberry was originally published in issue no.17 of Street Machine's Hot Rod magazine, 2016
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