As I have Barry's, Jay's, Smokey's, and the R-M book, and also the Sunnen machining guide stuff, I can say I've learned a little or a lot from each. I even have the old Chevrolet Power book, because as the wise man said, they all have pistons that go up and down. Smokey was an innovator by nature and a shit-disturber at heart, similar to another push the envelope guy, Junior Johnson. Having grown up around the road racing stuff in the Sixties at the Glen, I would add a few others, Jim Hall, Roger Penske and Bruce McLaren- all of whom I had the pleasure of watching drive and also engineer some pretty wild stuff. Hall even had his own road race course, Rattlesnake raceway, with photo sensors mounted in holes in the track, in the mid-sixties- and worked up through the wings to the 2J or "sucker" Chaparral, with a 440 JLO snowmobile engine under a box with ground following skirts, driving a pair of suction fans to hold the car to the ground. Penske was a master of the parts book in Trans-Am, using stuff like four lug wheels off six-cylinder cars for faster pits tops. Smokey was of course a little bit of a nutbag, but the biggest genius while being a pretty twisted individual was Henry Ford- find a copy of the book "The Fords"
