South Mountain Raceway – It’s common to see a lot of vintage muscle cars when you go to the drag strip. What’s not common, and may cause you to do a double-take, is to see a cab pulling up to the line. Well, it’s not yellow, and it doesn’t have the “Taxi” light on top, but it is a Checker Marathon cab nonetheless. And it basically has the original stock interior. Driver Brian Yarrison will be the first to admit his car’s out of the ordinary. When asked about this unique drag car, the first thing out of Yarrison’s mouth was, “While I’d like to take credit for the car, it’s actually my wife’s car. Her family bought this car while she was in high school and she inherited it as her first car. I was drag racing my Dodge Charger, and my wife said to me a couple years ago, ‘I’d like to start going along.’ I said ‘we’re going to need a car’ and she asked ‘what’s wrong with mine?’”

The car originally left Kalamazoo, Michigan in 1966 with a 283 cu.in. Chevy engine, automatic transmission, and a Dana 44 rear. Yarrison took the 283, had it bored it to 4” and made a 327 out of it, using 11:1 pistons and as Yarrison put it, “It’s sort of morphed through the years. The motor that’s in it now is actually the motor it was born with.” The engine is now stroked with a 400 crank with the mains turned down to a small journal size. According to Yarrison, “It’s actually a 377 now. Probably the biggest 283 you’ll ever see.” Residing inside the engine is a solid roller Howard Cam with .570” lift. Last year saw an Offenhauser Cross Ram intake added atop the engine and Steve Baker of Baker Outlaw Carbs built a custom set of 780 cfm carbs to sit on top of the intake. Yarrison is quick to point out the engine only has a cheap set of aluminum heads and doesn’t even have headers (I’m pretty sure small block Chevy headers for a Checker Marathon isn’t something you’ll find stocked on speed shop shelves anywhere). All this has produced an honest 425 horsepower on the dyno. The original trans was a Warner gear three-speed Cruise-O-Matic automatic transmission, but Yarrison said, “that had to go.” The car currently has a turbo 350 trans with a 4200 stall speed Lupo converter. When the original Dana 44 rear went away, it was replaced with a Dana 60 rear featuring a 4:88 gear ratio. This setup has experienced a best time of 12.009 seconds in the quarter mile, which Yarrison is content with although he would like to see it dip into the 11s someday. The best speed the setup has seen is 113 mph. Not too shabby for a cab. Yarrison admits, “It’s a whole lot of fun for a two-ton taxi. I like to tease the guys when we take a win, ‘Don’t feel bad, it’s hard to catch a cab on the weekend!’”