First photo of the "Beezymobile" above has a "pink" car in the back ground, one of the Cannon Specials. I think this is Mark 1, Ardun powered. The very tall guy is Rick Cannon, nephew of the builder, Ted Cannon.
Curtis LeMay was an active promoter of road racing and the USAF made available Air Force Bases' runways and taxiways. When he retired the practice stopped. it had an immense influence on how road racing in the US developed.
I saw a guy with a Bugattie Racer with a model B engine somewhere this year. Can't remember where just yet.
It must be the one owned and raced by Sandy Leith. Probably somewhere on the East Coast; though he's run it at Monterey a few years back, when Bugatti was the featured marque.
XKTbird, send me a PM with your mailing address and I will send you a copy of Brock Yates book. I have two of them(don't ask)and need to de-clutter. Would be happy to see it go someone that would actually read it.
There was no maybe about it. The circle trackers, the drag racers and hot rod builders and the circle trackers were like contiguous Balkan nations in those days. They all hated the others. The circle trackers were in it for the money (so they liked to claim) and were proud of the DOHC engines that cost as much as a house. They thought the road racers were spoiled rich kids and/or light in the loafers. They thought the hot rodders were just misguided poor kids or hoodlums. The road racers felt the hot rodders were beneath their station and rough trade, and the circle track boys were all balls no brains and also beneath their station. Und so weiter. Not everyone in either camp was like this but a lot were. The Ferrari and Porsche race car people usually had big family money and liked being around others of their ilk, and the smallbore road race guys were usually college professor tweedy types with calabash pipes and such. You also had a lot of women in smallbore road racing. In drag racing they were a novelty because the drivers wrenched too in those days (Shirley Muldowney had a son who was her mechanic as I recall) and they were BANNED FROM THE PITS in Indy racing for a while! There was one year when any female seeking to get in had to bring a note from a doctor saying she was not pregnant. The NASCAR people were on a whole different planet: circle track meant open wheel circle track with methanol burning Offys. Most of this rivalry diesd out in the 1970s when all forms of auto racing became big money and all the drivers crossed over and so did the technology. Stock cars sported Porsche 917 brakes, road racers were all full caged fuel celled things you could not drive on the street. Drag racers started making money and you had truck pulls, tractor pulls, sand drags, it just exploded. But when I was a little kid I saw the various camps meet and even I could tell those guys didn't particularly like each other. But I never saw any fights either: those were reserved for transgressors inside your own sport, and they took it off the track usually. Just my recollections from someone who was very young at the tail end of all that. Maybe in other areas of the country it was somewhat different.
I'm not so sure things have changed all that much, no matter what you race, it's the cubic dollars guys (old money or sponsors, or both) versus the rest of the paddock. But what I wish for the most would be a return to the unspoken "no bump" rule seen in early road racing. Even if you were slow, at least you could bring / drive your racer back home in one piece (self-inflicted damage being all on the driver's ego and wallet). I suppose that's where the oval guys really po'd the gold chainers. Crashing about, bumping and shoving their way to the front. I really enjoyed the recent V8 supercars race in Austin. Imagine, getting a "red card" from the umpires for avoidable contact! Those guys were fast, clean and the racing was really close. Try that in USAC. Or NASCAR. Gary
What years was this car in your shop? Wondering if we met? Possibly at the "Doughnut"? At Busby's shop?
Strange I missed this thread before. Hot rod road racing was one of my top priorities back in the late 50's. I only ran 2 tracks in the NW so I never got to try it against any of the big names that made the media. And yes, you talk about discrimination and hate. The SCCA guys for the most part would not even talk to me. The exception was Pete Lovely who I knew from roadster circle track racing. He was a neat guy. In those days after they had run all the class races, they would run a "formula libre" race where all cars could run at once. Besides the class race, I usually won these also. It got so I won so many races they told me no more trophys because you have a hot rod. So I ran for fun after that. As far as the shop that was building hot rods to road race, that could have been us although we never advertised. We built 3 cars and 2 of them were very successful. There wasn't much call for that so we went back to circle track racing. The attached pic is of the car as it was in 1955. 315 ci flathead Ford, 25T zephyr gears, Halibrand rear end, wheels, knock off hubs and quick fill gas cap. Home made drum brakes with metalic lining. I won the NW hot rod road racing championship in 1954 with this car.
^Pete1, love your roadster! Do you have any more pix? BTW, I've got a 29 Ford coupe I plan to build up as a "sports rod" - but it will be a faux 50's GT / coupe. I'd welcome your comments. The thread is here. Gary http://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/showthread.php?p=8933019#post8933019
I like your build ideas. Should work good. You may have problems hitting 2000 lb but you should be close enough. You could lose quite a bit of weight by using an open axle sprint car rear end if you could put up with the tire wear. (which isn't really too bad) I don't have any other pics of the old roadster except some in the pits at Bonneville. Here is a pic of it as it looks today. In this pic it had a 324 ci flathead but that was replaced with a SBC crate engine. (more economical) I'm thinking about either converting it to a street roadster or selling it. I have too many hot rods....lol
Thanx for taking a look at my notes. The new version of your car sure looks like bad news. I'd keep it! Gary
Hey Pete... I think you'd really miss that car if you sold it! Nice challenge would be to convert it for the street.
That is the New car that busby did with Rick Knoop (former IMSA road racer) I have seen that car run and it is totally bad ass, with a 750HP (at the rear wheels) Roush small block Ford. But Alas, not the car that was asked about here. here it is in raw form And after it was painted
I recall that Busby originally intended some sort of pseudo hot rod road race class, with that car as the prototype, but the number of guys who would (a) be interested and (b) be able to afford it could be counted on your fingers. Has the car ever been run in anger on a road course? I'd love to see it in action.
Yeah that was the idea. He ran it at Willow Springs. There is a little bit of You Tube footage when they were running the jaguar GTP car there. it's in here; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7RuLXEOnYU
A similar Hot Rod circuit racing class was tried here in the UK about 10 or so years ago as well. Fiberglass '32/'34 coupes, stock style frames, live rear ends and a basic ifs front end. Really low-buck cars compared to the Busby coupe. That also never got past the prototype stage. The problem seems to be circuit racers aren't interested in Hot Rods and Hot Rodders aren't interested in circuit racing.
From Max Balchowsky to Duffy Livingston, there were always guys who liked tweaking the road racers with their hot rods, but part of the fun was that they were done on the cheap. Busby's program, however neat it would have been, would have been open to Don Orosco and Bruce Meyer and how many more? Anyway, Busby's car sounds bitchin' and looks like huge fun. I wonder if he'll consider renting it out?
I don't know about you guys; but I "shipped over" from hot rods to sports cars, when I saw in the pits, at the Santa Barbara road Races, Porfirio Rubirossa arm-in-arm with, the then starlet, Za-Za Gabor. I said to myself: "That do it! I'm go'n to where the women are"! Though years later, I ran my 5-window coupe, with a supercharged (V6-71) "Jimmie" truck motor, at a Vintage Auto Racing Association event at Buttonwillow Raceway. We "smoked" all the Shelby clones and Cobra replicas. The only car I couldn't catch was a well driven Formula Ford.
Porfy's tool was so famous even Smokey Yunick had to comment on on it (albeit with "no,I didn't see IT!" ) in his biography if memory serves. He was a professional playboy and a very good race driver as well. He also had a B-17 one of his wives bought him he used to fly all over Europe with. His flying skills were not as good as his road racing skills and on the road he was a terror from all accounts, like Fon Portago and Mike Hawthorn and some of those other kind of gentleman racers. He was killed in a Ferrari crash on the road in Europe somewhere. I am reliably told that in Paris to this day, the large pepper grinders in the best restaurants are referred to as Rubirosas. If I go to the Chick-Fil-A they always have one on the back condiment table and I refer to it as a Rubirosa. It gets an interesting conversation sometimes.
The Old Yellers were some of the most famous and successful Specials in old time road racing and the snobs were incensed over it. Balchowsky played it up to the max, including the fact the paint was John Deere tractor paint (but it does look paler than any JD yellow I ever saw on a tractor). From the car's web site; [FONT=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular] [/FONT] http://oldyeller2.com/history2.html
Thanks for posting the Nagamatsu's website. A couple of years ago, my wife and I had the pleasure of sitting at a table with Ernie and Elaine at a Christmas dinner, put on at the Peterson Museum by an organization of racing folks of which, both of us belong. They are some of the most affable and engaging people you'd ever want to meet. They keep an illustrated log of all the events, in which they participate.
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