Hi, my name is Spencer Churchill. I would like to introduce myself. My grandfather was John Edwards. Of the gasser team Pittman and Edwards. My friend and I were cruising the web and stumbled upon a couple of H.A.M.B. videos of my grandfather at Lyons Raceway. I think jnaki posted the video. It is my grandfather in fact in the video next to the race car.
Hello Spencer, Please allow me to be the one to tell you that any miss identification is purely based on 58 years of old memories. At the time I recorded that film and continued to film up until 1960, the Pittman/Edwards red Willys coupe was one of our inspirations. It made us want to build something that looked good and go fast. We began our own 40 Willys build that we completed in the first 3 months of 1960. One thing we did not want to do, because we were just a couple of teenagers, was to go against that red Willys in the B/Gas class. So, after our initial outing, we dropped down to C/Gas to pursue the national record until our accident. Jnaki PM me for more information for your files. in the pits total films
Pittman/Edwards "blur" plus the blue push truck Hello Spencer, I found these in my Impala files and then going through a film clip of our 58 Impala racing at Lions Dragstrip. It is only a blur, but that red Willys Coupe stands out anywhere. It seemed like when we were racing our A/Stock 58 Impala, that red Willys was either ahead of us in the staging area or behind us. So, it was a commonplace to see that Willys race first hand. We were Lions drag racing fanatics, so we spent quite a few weekends at that dragstrip. It helped that we lived about 1.5 miles away. Jnaki I am sure my brother and I had envy for that red Willys and how neat it was sitting still and racing. it inspired us to build our Willys...(Secretly, we actually wanted to race against the Pittman/Edwards Willys later when we had more experience.) Thank your grandfather for me.
Hey Spencer, Sorry, I took so long to change the name over to John Edwards of the Pittman/Edwards red Willys team. Now, a search for this video can be "1959 Lions John Edwards" and it will pop up in the Google or You Tube search engine. Any luck finding some of your grandfather's racing days stuff? We grandfathers are/were people that threw stuff in drawers and boxes for later use, sometimes losing a bunch of stuff when the box got thrown out. Jnaki Your grandfather and KS Pittman were inspirations to all of us teenagers that built our backyard Willys coupes. We knew that we would be competing against them one day soon... But for us, that day never came.
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