The Dick Flint Pictorial

I gotta wild hair up my ass this morning and decided to collect every known historical photograph of the Dick Flint roadster. Give or take a photo or two, I just might have found ’em all. And in doing so, I was actually sort of amazed at how seldom this legendary car was photographed. In my opinion, the Flint car is one of the top five hot rods ever built and you’d think there would be hundreds of old photographs out in the world to discover. I only found about twenty-five.

Maybe you know of more? If you do, feel free to post them… Historical shots only please.

For the “amateurs” out there, here’s a CliffsNotes version of the car’s history:

Dick Flint was a member of the Glendale Sidewinders and an employee of So-Cal Speedshop. In 1949 or so, he got the idea to build the ultimate street/lakes roadster. After designing the chassis, he had a local welder crudely and quickly glue her up. He then took the roller and three rough ’29 Ford roadster bodies to Valley Custom where Neil Emory and Dean Batchelor picked the best from each body and worked their magic by forming the now famous track nose and the slippery belly pan.

Before the car was polished and painted, Dick took the flathead powered beast to El Mirage and went just north of 143 mph. Afterwards, he completely disassembled the car and dressed it to the nines – good enough for a number of awards at national shows as well as four magazine covers – Hot Rod Magazine, Hop Up (twice), and Popular mechanics. On top of that, some folks argue that is was not the Niekamp roadster that was featured in the original NHRA logo, but Dick’s car instead. There is some collaborating evidence of this, in fact, as Dick was a strong supporter of the NHRA from the very beginning.

In the early 1960’s, Duane Kofoed bought the car from Dick and quickly began a full rebuild. However, he was horrified by the engineering of the chassis and eventually threw in the towel on the project. In the 1990’s, Don Orosco finally talked Duane out of the car and performed a massive and deserving over restoration of the famous roadster.

And well, that’s that…