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(ARA) – For most people, do-it-yourself means painting the living room or maybe changing the oil in their car. For Tim Gangle, it meant building a car from scratch to race on the new television series PINKS.
The show, which will begin airing on SPEED Channel in July, features old school drag racing. The catch? The loser must turn over the title (or pink slip) to the winner.
Although he owns Minnesota Hot Rod Hardware in Manorville, Minn., building and racing a car was not something Gangle ever thought about until he got a call out of the blue from PINKS producer and host, Rich Christensen. In fact, the day of the filming was not only the first time Gangle had ever drag raced, it was the first time he had driven the car he built.
“Rich found our shop and called to see if we’d be interested in being part of the show,” explains Gangle. At first, he thought it was a prank; then he decided he was too busy to take on such a big project. But his friends convinced him otherwise. “All my buddies were telling me I had to do it,” says Gangle.
He and a group of friends worked evenings and weekends to get the car ready in time for the show – six weeks from start to finish. “We all worked our jobs during the day, and then worked until midnight every night on the car,” says Gangle. They started with a rusted out 1929 Ford Model A that Gangle found “sitting in the woods in Northern Minnesota.” He bought the car for $200 and went to work. With help from his friends and some donations of parts from his vendors, Gangle built a lean, mean racing machine.
He and his crew finished the car just in time to load it up and head to Cedar Falls, Iowa, where the show was filmed. Gangle took the car out for a short test drive the night before he left, “but the car doesn’t have any headlights, and it was too dark to see much, so I just drove it down the road a bit,” he says.
Nevertheless, on race day, Gangle and his car beat the competition hands down – and he walked away with the other team’s 1966 Pontiac GTO. He says that the race was the highlight of his life, and that even if it hadn’t been for television, it still would have been exciting.
“The response to the show has been overwhelming,” said Rich Christensen, host and creator of PINKS. “We have three guys building cars from the ground up, the town of New Hampton, Iowa is sponsoring and racing a car, one of the hottest bands in the Mid-West bought a car just so they could compete on PINKS and three Shifter Kart racers are putting their $10,000 karts on the line in a winner take all competition in San Francisco. And NOTHING about this show is fake. If you lose the race, you lose your vehicle ... period.”
And, yes, Gangle was very glad he got to keep the car he and his friends worked so hard on.
“More than winning the other car, you really want to keep your own car,” he says.
SPEED Channel is the nation's first and foremost cable network dedicated to motor sports and the passion for everything automotive. From racing to restoration, motorcycles to movies, SPEED Channel delivers quality programming from the track to the garage. Now available in more than 68 million homes in North America, SPEED Channel is among the fastest growing sports cable networks in the country.
Courtesy of ARA Content