[Wayne Totaro]

I believe this says it all!

There are no absolutes in life, but the claim that Ronnie Sox was the greatest four-speed driver that ever lived comes pretty close. The longtime racing partner of Buddy Martin was the winningest Pro Stock driver (with nine victories in 23 events) during the short-lived four-speed era (1970-72), and he also claimed six additional Super Stock victories from 1967 to 1969. His skills as a four-speed driver in match races, ranging from his lumbering full-sized Chevys in the early 1960s to his injected, nitro-burning Barracuda Funny Car in 1966, are also part of drag racing lore.

But perhaps the best measuring stick for Sox's shifting talents came in 1973, the year that everybody switched to the clutchless Lenco transmissions. Many teams cited the reduced breakage as the primary reason for the move, but just about every driver went quicker with a Lenco, some picking up as much as a tenth of a second. Sox, by contrast, was the only driver whose car slowed down with a Lenco, losing a very measurable .04-second.

The science of power shifting, which is the act of changing gears with a manual transmission with the engine at wide-open throttle, is a lost art in today's world of air-shifted two-speed Powerglides. Power shifting requires the hand-foot coordination of a tap-dancing juggler because the timing of the hard yank of the shift lever must be carefully synchronized with the minimal application of the clutch pedal to prevent the over-revving of the engine. During the 1960s and early 1970s, there were a number of excellent four-speed drivers on the scene, including Don Nicholson, Butch Leal, Herb McClandless, Arlen Vanke, Bill Jenkins, and many others, but none could boast that they were better than Sox