Jerry Blais can’t wait for the traffic light up ahead to turn red. 

“I like red lights,” Blais said as he rolled down Sabattus Street in his gasser street rod. “I get to bring it up through the gears again.”

Four of them.

First gear, second and so on. 

“It’s really fun to feel the pull of the car,” he said. “It’s like shooting a .44 magnum instead of a .22,” Blais said, describing the experience of driving a four-speed.

Blais gets a lot of attention while waiting at a red light. Drivers rubberneck to get a glance of Blais’ car, a 1935 Ford with a Anglia nose and a 350 Chevy under the hood. 

“I get thumbs up, all the time,” he said. 

“If I go to a gas station, it’s one question after another,” Blais said. “I don’t recall a time this year that I have been to a gas station and have not been stopped to talk.” 

But Blais does not mind. “If they ask a question, I want to give them an intelligent answer.”

Blais said it’s his car’s “nosebleed-high front end” that gets the most attention. 

Blais’ car is called a “gasser,” a name that grew from the drag strips in the 1960s. Drivers started experimenting with exotic fuels, such as methanol and nitromethane. The cars that stuck with plain old gasoline raced in the “gasser” class.

“Drag racers always want to go a little faster, so they experimented a lot,” Blais said. 

Raised front ends are common amongst gassers. The feature helps the weight transfer from the front to the rear tires during rapid acceleration.

“It’s old-school technology,” Blais said. 

Born and raised in Lewiston, Blais grew up craving horsepower.

“My brother was more refined,” he said. “He played the saxophone; I just wanted to play with cars.”

The retired Bath Iron Works worker built his first street rod 30 years ago. “When you build your own car, you’re the purchaser, the planner, the painter, the welder and the fabricator.” If you had to pay someone else to do each of those, it would cost too much to build, Blais said. 

Blais said he will take apart an unfinished street rod and put it back together probably 10 times before the rubber hits the pavement. 

He shortened his gasser by 16 inches and narrowed the car by another six to make everything fit just right. 

Among the common questions Blais gets from people filling their gas tank is, “Is it street legal?” The answer is yes. The vehicle has Maine Department of Transportation-approved slicks on the back, and the open headers are capped to reduce noise when driving on the street.

The rest of the conversation might go something like this:

“How come you don’t have fenders?” asks the bystander.

“We don’t run them in the wintertime, so we are not chucking rocks at anybody.” 

“No air conditioning, don’t you get hot?”

“AC and power steering are horsepower-robbing entities,” Blais explains. “The more stuff you have to turn with that motor, the more you rob your horsepower.”

“Speaking of horsepower, how much does it have?”

“290.”

“That’s it?”

“You don’t want weak links,” Blais says. If you have 500 horsepower, the rest of the car has to be built to withstand that. “If I blow up a 500 horsepower motor, it’s very expensive to rebuild a 500 horsepower motor. At just over 2000 pounds, my horsepower-to-weight ratio is really good. I don’t need 500 horsepower. I can have a good time with 290.” 

“How fast is it?”

“Eighty mph in one-eighth mile,” he answers. That’s about 8.6 seconds from start to finish. 

“Can I touch it?”

“Yes,” Blais says. “I like to build a car that’s approachable. Anyone can build a car if you are not afraid to make a mistake.” 

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