Let’s face it, loading and unloading your racecar isn’t a fun task. You have to make sure the car is straight, then deal with it trying to move toward the walls of the trailer as you pull it in with a winch — it can be an infuriating process. But Ray Stroope borrowed upon a dirt-track racing trick and found a way to make loading and unloading his car easier by creating a way to steer his car from the outside as it goes up or down the trailer ramp.

Stroope races his gorgeous 1969 Camaro in outlaw big tire classes all over the southern United States. Recently, Scott Taylor from Discovery Channel’s hit show Street Outlaws posted pictures of Stroope’s Camaro on Facebook with a steering wheel sticking out of the back window. At first glance, one might think Ray was trying to drive the car while sitting on the decklid.

At first, the steering wheel looks very strange, but when Stroope explains the reason he did this it totally makes sense.

“One evening I was sitting and looking at the car and realized it was a straight shot from the steering shaft out the back window. I drilled a hole in the seat, drilled a hole in the back window, and ran a column out the back. My steering wheel has a Strange Engineering quick connect, so I bought another for the shaft extension, made an adapter with a Borgeson joint, and ran the shaft out the back window. Now, I can steer the car into the trailer without taking the doors off,” Stroope says.

Stroope told us he came up with the idea to do this out of necessity more than anything. The first car he made this modification to had steel doors and they were very heavy, so hanging them up in the trailer so he could load the car was problematic. The extended steering system eliminates the need to remove the driver’s side door off the car to load and unload it.

“I may not be the original person to come up with this, but I’m the first person to do it with a drag car. I don’t go to dirt track races, so I’d never seen it done before, but apparently the dirt track guys have been doing this. When people see the wheel back there they look at it funny and don’t know what to think. I get more attention with the steering wheel sticking out the back than anything else,” Stroope explains.

You can love this modification or hate this modification, but you have to give Stroope credit for thinking outside the box (or is it outside the window?) to solve a problem. The question is, will we see this as an option from racecar builders in the future?