Gettin' Back To Basics

A Proud Son Keeps his Father’s Gasser Legacy Alive

- Rod Short

There’s a point in everyone’s life where reconnecting with the past kind of helps you with the present. It could be just a beer with some old friends, a trip to a favorite destination, or maybe even playing some loud rock ’n’ roll from a metal band. For 47-year-old Rob Walden, it’s racing a wide-open, 409-powered, ’33 Willys Gasser just like his dad, Lamar Walden, used to run.

“He raced that car before my time, but I remember him talking about it. I even have some old photos of him running against Ohio George Montgomery,” Rob said one evening with a faraway look in his eyes. “He originally had an Anglia but wrecked it. So then he bought his Willys in 1965 out of California. When he got back from driving to pick it up, he started off with a blown 409 in it but then later changed it over to Hilborn fuel injection. He match-raced it for a while all over the Southeast, but never really got to travel the way he wanted because of business. He later sold it at the end of 1970 and built an A/Gas flip-top Vega in 1971, but Gassers started dying off about that time when everyone started switching over to Pro Stock. He’d always say he wished he knew what happened to that car because he always liked it, but he lost track of it over the years and didn’t know what happened to it. That’s part of the reason I decided to build it as a tribute to him.”

As the son of a man whose name is almost synonymous with Chevrolet 409s, few people know that Rob’s grandfather and nearly all of his siblings were Ford people. Lamar graduated from high school in 1959 and got a used ’57 Chevy as his first car, only to hear his father say the 283 V-8 was too small and would never last. He eventually opened a shop, sold it, and moved to Doraville, Georgia, to open Lamar Walden Automotive (LWA) where he began to play with 409s as a hobby. His legend only grew from there.