PHOTOS: VAN ABERNETHY, BRYAN EPPS
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power potential for the car’s factory 304ci engine,
although the desire to go faster was still very
much irrefutable. By now he had become a fullfledged American Motors enthusiast (a genuine
purist if you will) who didn’t want to dabble in
switching horsepower brands, regardless of the
general consensus.
“I bought a motor from a Stock/Super Stock guy
up in Wisconsin who built me a pretty good 390
AMC engine for the car,” says Kremkau.
Still completely streetable and very much his
daily driver, Kremkau was suddenly clocking
11.20s in the Gremlin. The car was getting fast
to the point that his dad finally asked him to not
drive it on the street anymore.
“I gave my dad a couple rides in the car and it
blew his mind, he really didn’t know how fast
the car had become,” Kremkau admits. “He was
pretty insistent that I keep it on the track, and
only on the track.”
At first, Allan was reluctant to make the conversion from street car to dedicated race car, so
instead he bought a second vehicle and only drove
the Gremlin on weekends.
“Sometime around 1978 I finally did take it off
the street and convert it into a race car,” says Allan.
It was around this same timeframe that Mike
and Paul Therber gave the Gremlin its first racing paint job, back when the brothers owned a
paint shop together in Florida. Then came the
transmission swap, with the factory three-speed
transmission being replaced with a four-speed
manual. In the late 1970s, Allan bracket raced
the car every chance he got, and as one might
guess, it wasn’t particularly consistent for dialin racing, but the allure was fueled by bona fide,
gear-banging excitement.
“I tore up a lot of clutches and transmissions
on a regular basis, and never won a single race
with a four-speed, but I had a ball doing it,” he
smiles. “I finally broke down and put an automatic in the car.”
It wasn’t until 1982 that a buddy built him his
first Powerglide transmission and that’s when
he started winning some races with the car. He
won his very first race at Orlando Speed World
sometime around 1984 and has captured many
more wins since. Eventually he outfitted the car
with a 401 cubic inch American Motors V8, which
produces around 750 horsepower.
“It’s got a Moldex crank, billet rods and aftermarket Indy aluminum heads. If you want a car
to go fast and stay together you’ve simply got
to spend the money on some good parts,” says
Kremkau, who has clocked 9.0s at 147mph in the
car. “They make good power for what they are. A
lot of people have never given AMC a lot of credit,
but I did some research when I was younger and
I believe some of the AMC Pro Stock pioneers
like Wally Booth and Dave Kanners had some
stuff figured out.”
His point has merit when you consider that
at the peak of their careers, Booth and Kanners
(then teammates) met head-to-head in Pro
Stock’s only all-AMC final in 1976 at the NHRA
World Finals. Shortly thereafter, sponsorship
deals fell through and suddenly the most promising AMC Pro Stock team disbanded. Long since
has American Motors cars slipped out of sight at
the drag strip and into obscurity.
“Kids come up to me all the time in the pits and
ask me what kind of car this is,” laughs Allan. “I
tell them it’s an AMC Gremlin and they’re like,
‘What the heck is that?’”
The oddly shaped little car gets multiple double
takes and gawking stares whenever Allan rolls
the car out of the trailer. Most recently, it even
captured the attention of IHRA officials, who
awarded Kremkau’s Gremlin “Best Ap pearing”
at the Nitro Nationals in Orlando this year. The
car is a constant conversation piece, and many
onlookers stop to comment on the ultra-short
wheelbase that the car appears to have.
“A factory Gremlin has a 96-inch wheelbase, but
mine actually measures 97-inches since I moved
the rear end back slightly,” explains Kremkau.
“These cars are deceptively short though. A Chevy
Vega’s wheelbase is only one-inch longer than a
Gremlin, but because the body has no overhang in
the back it makes the Gremlin look much shorter
than it really is.”
Everything about Allan Kremkau’s AMC-powered Gremlin screams nostalgia. Even the most
recent paint job is 26-years-old and is the handiwork of Mike Therber, who painted the car for
the second time in 1990. Therber also plays a key
role in Kremkau’s fondest racing memory when
the two longtime friends traveled from Florida
to Maple Grove Raceway in Pennsylvania for a
Mopar/AMC event a number of years ago. Allan
got the win in the finals when Therber went red.
“It didn’t matter who won or lost, I had the opportunity to race my best friend in the finals. To
this day though I still owe him, ‘cause he’s beaten
me since then,” he laughs.
For Kremkau, the joy of racing means meeting
up with friends at the track, and that’s the element
he still enjoys most of all.
“At the recent IHRA Pro Am race at Bradenton
Motorsports Park, there were probably 20 friends
pitted around me - many of them I’ve known since
the 1970s,” says Kremkau. “That is a big part of
what makes all of this drag racing stuff so much
fun – being around your friends and people that
share your passion.”
His wife, Karen, is always by his side and never
misses the chance to go to the track. Simply stated,
Allan Kremkau is man who’s found the recipe for
success by way of racing relationships, the likes
of which he’s cultivated for decades. As for the
litany of race cars he’s owned over the years, it’s
actually a pretty short list. To this present day,
his 1972 AMC Gremlin is the only race car he’s
ever owned, and that’s something he doesn’t see
changing anytime soon.
“Sometimes I think about getting another car,”
says Kremkau with a laugh, “but then I wonder what on earth I would replace the Gremlin
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May 2016
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DragIllustrated.com
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