It's 1941. Buddy Shay and Frank VanDersahl had been campaigning a midget car for a couple of years, but their Chrysler 4-banger just wasn't cutting the mustard anymore. The v8-60 cars at their local track in Denver, CO were blowing them off and the... <BR><BR>To read the rest of this blog entry from The Jalopy Journal, click here.
That has to be the strangest solution to getting competitive that I've ever heard of. I sure hope other HAMBers will come up with more info. The more I think of it, I'll bet a bag of donuts that one or the other of those guys had some aircraft background. Inverted engines were very common in the 20's and 30's.
The innovation of Hot Rodders never ceases to amaze me , that is quite remarkable, what were they drinking to come up with that solution in the 1st place, quite brilliant.
I'm not 100% sure but I think they weren't the only ones to try this... I think there were a couple other upside down flattys as well... I'll go through my books and see if I can find them...
Ryan, where did you find this pic/story?? I read about this car probably about ten years ago. I want to say it was in one of the hot rodding books my uncle had but can't really recall exactly where?
I originally saw it in a Don Montgomery book I think? In any case, I found it this time on autohistory.org.
Huh..wierd.. how do they oil the lower end?..I'd like to know more about the oiling system changes , as to how it ran this way with out some starvation issues. not to mention possibly filling up a piston bore behind the piston with oil before fire up..or if that would even be an issue..wild shit man
i'm sure that's where I saw it. He's got a few don montgomery books. Gotta put them on my christmas list
gotta think of this just like an old radial engine. you would put the car in gear and back it off a couple times to push the oil out before you fired it up. Used to do this with mech. injected VW motors to make sure the cylinders didn't fill up with fuel between runs. on the oiling issues, I bet it really wasn't bad. they probably used a dry sump and the lifter valley was the sump. reverse rotation is an interesting idea on the ovals
"In retrospect, it would have been much easier to just construct a new car"..... Ummm...HELL YEAH it would have! Good thing they didn't. I still can't imagine no oiling problems running a motor this way. Crazy!
Thanks a ton for posting it man... Great to finally see the car. I thought the stance would be way more nose-high. Some days it's real easy. Some days it's real hard. Mostly, I'm just lucky... Or so I'm told. Actually, I get a lot of tips from folks and I think about cars prolly 99% of my day... So, my sickness helps a lot.
Tom Batista (Used to run the track up in Ionia, MI) has some more info on this set up. He was staying in Ionia during the summer, but has moved to Orchard Park, NY if any of the NY guys want to track him down and talk to someone who was there when this was cutting edge stuff.
Thanks for posting .......I love those flatties and found in quite interesting. They never seem to stop amazing me on what their capable of.....
HMMM another publication i could have read that in. In fact, thinking about it I seem to remember reading it at my house so, that would make open wheel a much more likely place that I'd seen it.
Ryan asks if anyone else has seen it and boom, RootieKazootie pulls that out of his hat just like that. Fucking internet. Fucking HAMB. Amazing. You young fellers have no idea how much things have changed. Wow.