The Goodfellow Bantam

Bantams aren’t big cars. Outside the automotive realm, a bantam is actually a type of small chicken. From the factory they were some of the earliest econo-boxes with 46 cubic inch four-bangers capable of humming to the tune of 40mpg. Small? Yes. Affordable? You betchya (in years past, that is). But those stats and attributes aren’t the focus here today. Instead, we’ll be looking at a car that, although diminutive in size, played a large part in the story of longtime hot rodder Lynn Goodfellow.

You see, Lynn’s now 75 years old and he’s been there since the beginning. He grew up just north of Los Angeles in the city of Glendale—a hotbed of hot rodding in its own right. During his formative years, Lynn built friendships with some of the sport’s who’s who, including his neighbor Frank Kurtis and Kong Jackson.

When Lynn was 14, he was able to get a provisional California driver’s license due to his father’s rapidly deteriorating health. That license was his golden ticket; it wasn’t long before he dug into a ’28 Ford roadster that he outfitted with Kurtis torsion bar suspension on all four corners. Unfortunately, Lynn sold the chassis before the project was finished. Next came a ’34 Ford three-window slated for dry lakes competition. “I ran at El Mirage at 14 or 15,” he says. Sometimes you could find him behind the wheel of the coupe, and other times he’d be piloting his cousin’s belly tank.

Once the later part of the ’50s rolled around, Lynn shifted his focus to drag racing. In 1959, he brought the ’34 to the first-ever March Meet in Bakersfield. Although it was now sporting early Hemi power, the heavy Ford was outgunned in the C/Altered ranks. Lynn realized he needed to return to the drawing board if he wanted to be competitive.

“I decided to build something smaller and cut it apart in a big hurry,” Lynn says about the ’34. He removed the roll cage, steering, rearend, and drivetrain to install in his new car—a 1931 American Bantam. “I found it on a farm, cannibalized it and built the car you saw real quick,” he says. Now with a custom fabricated tube-chassis—complete with lightweight tube-axle up front—the car was ready to for the strip. But it wasn’t meant to be; Lynn was starting a family and a new business, so he pushed drag racing—as well as the Bantam—to the back burner. “I quit because I had to feed the kids,” he says.

Fast forward to 1966. His children were growing up and things were going much smoother. Lynn and his friend Paul Law pulled the little Altered out of storage to race at the up-and-coming drag strip in Palmdale (best known as Los Angeles County Raceway). Right off the trailer, the car ripped through the traps at 127mph—a mere two mph under the existing C/Altered record. “With the engine set high off the ground, it had real good traction and went real straight,” Lynn says. On the next run, Paul was driving and scattered the transmission. The Hemi-powered Bantam was put back into storage where it sat for the better part of 40 years.

Lynn took a lengthy hiatus from hot rodding, but he returned in full force as a record setter on the Bonneville salt flats—a story for another time. He’d subsequently moved to Boulder City, Nevada, and, with the help of his children and the local hot rodding community, he brought the faded green Bantam back to Bakersfield for the Hot Rod Reunion about a decade ago. Other than some minor reassembly, all it needed was new pair of slicks.

After unloading the Bantam at the track, Lynn was wondering if anyone would be interested in the car he first assembled as a teenager back in the early-’60s. The staff placed him in a prime position in the fabled Famoso Grove and he couldn’t believe how positive the response was. Friends and neighbors from yesteryear were excited to share their stories, and he was happy to listen. But whenever people ask how he came across such a car, he tells them the same thing: “I didn’t find it, I built it!”

—Joey Ukrop

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