He was an underdog in a tough, competitive business from the earliest days of the racing industry. And he always had the courage to buck conventional wisdom to follow what he believed in, even to the point of buying out business partners when they were satisfied with their initial success and he saw broader horizons. He proved to the industry that six cylinders could be better than eight and that Chevy could overcome Chrysler’s dominance on the drag strip.

Arias was not an engineer, and there were no textbooks to teach what he had to learn. A Korean War veteran, he began working on cars, as he says, before his military haircut grew out. Self taught about engines, pistons, cylinder heads and combustion chamber design, Arias has carved a legacy out of his ability to make superior performance parts. He is especially well known for his pistons and cylinder heads -- the heart and lungs of any engine. His products have influenced almost every aspect of racing, from Bonneville and drag strips to offshore power boats and airplanes.

Arias recently was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award in Manufacturing by the California Hot Rod Reunion and has been inducted into the Don Garlits Drag Racing Hall of Fame and Museum. Recently, the American Hot Rod Foundation sat down with Arias to discuss the pioneering days of the sport and his career of craftsmanship in speed and performance.

American Hot Rod Foundation:
Can you remember the first car you ever got?

Nick Arias:
It was a 1932 three-window coupe. A World War II veteran had just come home and he had this coupe. I had worked from 11 or 12 years old, saving for a first car. I had saved $350 and spent $250 of it on this thing. It was kind of a compliment because we worked at gas stations and back then it was 50 cents an hour, if you were lucky. So, it took a lot of savings to get $350. 


AHRF: 
What did you do to that car?

Arias: 
Just basically drove it and raced it a little bit on the street. The airport didn’t go all the way to the ocean then and there was a big long stretch there, but they raced out of Inglewood. And then the (San Fernando) valley. Most of them went up to the big LA reservoir. There was a long stretch about two miles long. But it was dangerous up there because the police would block each end and you could get caught real easy. I remember one night we got raided up there and all my friends left and I got stuck up there. I had to walk home from San Fernando and I got home at five in the morning, walking and hitchhiking.


AHRF:
So, you were fixing up cars in school?  What did you learn in shop class that you could apply to your engine?

Arias: 
I went to Polytechnic High School (in Los Angeles) and everything I did in high school, I practice as an adult and it carried into racing. In auto shop, we worked on stock cars. But the teacher would let us bring our cars in and worked on them, too, so that helped. That was a Godsend.


AHRF: 
What did your parents think of hot-rodding?

Arias: 
The areas we grew up in weren’t the best. You know, central LA had its ups and downs back then. And it was real easy to get into trouble. So, I have to say that being pushed into racing or automotive mostly kept us out of trouble.


AHRF: 
Could you describe the clubs back then?

Arias: 
The clubs were formed either out of the drive-in or in school. And then, after I graduated from high school, you know, it was a car club. Not gangs, but clubs. Everybody had to have or race a car, a hot rod we called them back then, and then you joined SCTA or Rusetta.


AHRF: 
What was the first club you joined and how did you get into it?

Arias: 
It was the 100 Mile-an-Hour Club in South LA. We were real young at that time and didn’t really have as nice of cars as we had later. Our high school club that we formed was the Photons and Kenny Bigelow and Joe Pisano and a lot of other people were from that era. And we raced Rusetta because they had a mixture of roadsters and body cars.

AHRF: 
How were hot rodders viewed by other kids?

Arias: 
Well, not outlaws totally, but we weren’t considered the “in” crowd. The out-crowd, I guess. But out of that element came our industry. Most everybody that went into that business was from a middle class family. They weren’t rich to start with when they started out. Basically, we had to make our own parts and other people wanted the parts. That’s how we really got into this business.


AHRF: 
What did you do after high school?

Arias:  I worked as a mechanic for a while and then the Korean War started in1950. I got out of high school in ’48. So, in that two years we worked and ran the dry lakes and street raced.


AHRF: 
What was the first real hot rod that you ran up at the lakes?

Arias: 
In our club, there was a guy named Kenny Bigelow and he was a good friend of Bud Iskendarian. He had a Chevy six cylinder and it was dynamite. Bob Pearson had the Rusetta record for a coupe. Kenny got married and had quit racing for a year. Walt Mahoney talked Kenny into going up to get Pearson’s record and in the process, he got killed. Bob Toros and I sent the money home (from Korea) and bought the remnants of Kenney’s car from his mom and when we got home we built a new car.  We had a quick change, roll bars and it was made to race. We put Kenney’s engine in it and went up and broke records. So, in 1953 and ‘54, we were Rusetta Timing, number one.

They formed the Bigelow Trophy and we won it two years in a row and we set two records in A-class and B-class coupe. It ran so good that, in fact, it’s still a good time today, 50 years later, for that class of car. We ran 148, almost 149, at El Mirage. Pearson’s record was 136 on nitro and we were running alcohol, so it was really outstanding.


AHRF: 
What was your first job?

Arias: 
When Bob Toros and I came home from Korea, we had Bigelow’s engine, but we need some parts for it. I went to Wayne Manufacturing, which Harry Warner owned, and bought push rods and parts. I had to go back to pick up the parts and Harry needed somebody to work (and) I ended up running the business. About three months later, I mentioned that Toros wasn’t working, so he came to work there, too. We both basically ran Wayne and built all the engines through 1953. We bought out (Wayne’s next-door-neighbor) Frank Venolia in 1954 or ‘55 and started Venolia Pistons.     


AHRF: 
Was it mainly racing?

Arias: 
Just racing. We manufactured the cylinder head because a stock Chevy had a three-port inlet cylinder head and the Wayne head was a single port in and exhaust out. It really hopped up the engine and made it run a lot better. In fact, we were building engines back then for Juan Fangio before he became world champion, driving the Ferrari. In fact, when he came to LA, he used to come to see Iskendarian and Bob and I and that was kind of a personal compliment.


AHRF: 
Talk about the Chevy GMC and how you became an expert on it.

Arias: 
I went to work for Bob Yakel and raced his roadster with a Cadillac engine in it and also my GMC. We ran Bonneville in 1958 or ‘59. Back then, it was a competition between overhead valves and flatheads. We knew the overhead valve was a better engine, but you had to prove it to the flathead guys because they had all the mature race engines. The whole sport was based around the Ford V-8.

We were really in the minority then. But being that we raced the six cylinder and built the engines, we got to be more specialized in overhead valves. In fact, I had the first Cadillac in circle track, a 330 inch engine with overhead valves versus a 298 flathead. I already had the cubic inches, so I bought one at the junkyard and ran it basically stock, just turning the clearance on the pistons.


AHRF: 
Right from the beginning, you were doing different things with pistons?

Arias: 
Well, Ford’s piston was the dominant one and you had to design the dies to make the forgings, and then the applications and dome configurations, all the technologies that we came up with first. I had a thermo head piston for a 392 Chrysler that ran during the fuel era, the 1950s in drag racing. It was real thick in the center and had a trough in the head that made the heat go into the second ring groove to get out. It worked real well.


AHRF: 
Is this trial and error?

Arias: 
No. We got the concept, produced it and tried it on the dyno and then out in the field. We worked real close with Don Madden at Howard Cams. All his cars were kind of our R&D cars. And once we got something that was good and sellable, we turned it into a product.

We came out with the first pin buttons. The snap rings would pop out if the engine detonated at all. It would push the retainer ring out of the pin, rub on the cylinder wall and ruin the engine. I saw that on aircraft. The World War II engines had pin buttons pressed in the wrist pin. This expanded the steel and created a big production expense, more than the racer would pay. So, we made ours where they were free in the wrist pin and kind of revolutionized that whole era.


AHRF: 
What would you attribute to your ability to make these pistons that no one else is doing?

Arias: 
The requirements of racing. Failures first, then trying to design something better to get rid of the failure. Most of the time, it was the tune up of the engine that tore up the pistons and the rods and blew them up. So you had to design a safety factor there. You couldn’t rely on luck and if we made a mistake, it couldn’t be lethal. We came out with a one-sixteenth ring, stainless steel. To make it work better, we put little holes above the ring groove to let pressure behind the ring blow it out against the cylinder wall. Stainless wasn’t compatible against the iron, but chroming the face on it was the trick. It made the two compatible and revolutionized drag racing a lot, because it let them run more nitro and more heat and more horsepower.


AHRF: 
And you bought Lou Senter’s business?

Arias: 
I wanted to expand because we had already been in the business 10 years or so with the Ford piston. All the customers that I talked to ran Chevrolets in drag racing, but they weren’t competitive to the Chrysler with the Hemi heads. I had the idea to make Hemi heads for Chevys to try to beat the Chryslers. But my partners at the time weren’t up for it. And I knew Lou Senter real well -- he had started a piston business two years before and he’d wanted me to work for him, but I didn’t want to get tied down as an employee.

So, I bought the business 35 years ago and moved it over here where we’re at now. After two years, I designed the Hemi Chevy head with Rudy Mueller. The streamliner, City of Burbank, that broke the Mercedes record in 1952 had a Mueller-Adams head on it. The first Hemi Chevy was a 500 cubic inch big block with our heads on it. We went on Edelbrock’s dyno and the all-time record at that time was 720 horsepower. Our engine made 890 horsepower. We were in the front office and the staff came back and said it was shaking the building. That was the first taste of a Hemi Chevy.

We put it in a Crucifier boat. A friend of ours named Gary Ewing had a flat bottom. We went up two gears and changed the props and went out and put 15 miles an hour on all the records. That started our boat career going.

We put the engine in the Over The Hill Gang car and debuted it at Bakersfield at the March meet. The second pass down the track, we were top time and low ET of the event. It was just hard to get into drag racing because Chrysler had such a foothold. It took us two years. But you had to get into drag racing to really make a mark. We always ran Chevrolet, but back in those days, our sport didn’t command any sponsorship or R&D programs. When we came out with the Hemi Chevy, we were trying to get Chevrolet into racing. So, we went ahead on our own because, at that time, it was free enterprise, basically.


AHRF: 
You must have been around when drag racing first took off. What was that like?

Arias: 
It was totally out of control at an airfield in Orange County, a landing strip up there. It was kind of an outlaw thing. People just packed in with just a little aisle way for the cars to run. They’re running 100 miles an hour through the crowds, just like road races in Mexico. But they only ran two races there and I think the Marines threw everybody off. And then Pappy Hart started racing at the strip next to the airport and they basically started organized racing. Pretty soon, word got around through the publications. It took off fast. I mean, it was just an exciting era.     


AHRF: 
When did circle track racing start? 

Arias: 
Right after the war, the guys who were running the dry lakes started running again but wanted to go farther than running for nothing. So, the California Racing Association (CRA) was formed and they started at Carroll Speedway in Gardena in 1946. Over the next four years, the CRA became bigger than the Western Racing Association, which was the sprint cars that were Model A conversions with hot rod parts on them. The roadsters put on a better show. All the drivers who came out of the dry lakes were about ten years too soon. If they had started ten years later, they would have climbed to greater glories, (like) Jack McGrath, Manuel Eulo, Dempsey Wilson, Pat Flaherty and Vukovich, who all went to Indy.


AHRF: 
Didn’t you get involved at Indy?

Arias: 
No. I sold the company to Bob Toros in 1956. I was courting my wife at the time and needed a steadier income than we were generating out of the business. I went to work as a tune-up mechanic at Howell Chevrolet in Glendale. Bob started Toros Equipment and also manufactured Venolia Pistons. But he struggled for four or five years and I kept hinting that I wanted to come back into the industry, but I wanted to know it was going to be a guaranteed push because I was married and we had a couple of children. We brought in Joe Pisano and bought out Bill Campbell’s company that was the only one making forged pistons and we got the first dies for Ford’s racing piston. Once people started to race harder with nitromethane, it overrode the strength of the cast piston and you had to go to forged pistons.


AHRF: 
The Bean Bandits were quite a force to be reckoned with, weren’t they?

Arias: 
They were very dominant. Joachim Arnett was one of the first guys to run nitromethane. In World War II, he got burned in the Navy and was recovering in the hospital with an engineer chemist that got hurt. He told him about nitromethane they were using in airplane engines. When he came back, I would say he was the first to introduce nitro in the car, which is why he went so good.


AHRF: 
You were experimenting with different kinds of fuels and additives?

Arias: 
Yes we did.HRFHRF We ran alcohol in Rusetta, but at Bonneville you could run nitro, but at 25, 30 percent. Fifty was too much for the valves. We were taking real truck exhaust valves and running them. They worked pretty good, but not as good as what they have today.


AHRF: 
When you look back, is there a favorite story or part of your life that you like to recall?

Arias: 
Well, one that’s fairly current is the Outlaw racing, you know, the sprint cars with wings on it. They run 410 cubic inch small block Chevrolets. It seems that racing always ends up with one dominant engine. I’ve always been a competitor, like to see different brands and different types of engines out there. My son was an apprentice and his project to be a Class A pattern maker was to make a six cylinder block out of my eight cylinder block. To make a long story short, we built a V-6, 429 inch Hemi and put it in a sprint car. The second night out at Ascot, we were the number one qualifier and the thing was very competitive.

It ran good and sounded good, because it was different. I was going to race full time for the championship, but they closed Ascot. So, my son and I decided to build a Lakester and we ran at Bonneville for 10 years.

I've always been a competitor, and I like to see competition. Out of this, you get information and knowledge that you can apply to your product.