History Classic Indy roadsters: Most beautiful oval racers ever?

What a car. Check out the tailfin. I drew hundreds of these as a tot.

 

When I was younger(50 years ago) I remember listening to the Indy 500 on a pocket transistor radio, Other boys made fun of me. They were into ball sports. Ha Ha. If I don't get dirt under my fingernails now I get bored. I never watch ball sports.



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Hi everyone,

I have subscribed to this as well as cageless midgets. As an old Aussie, I guess that I will never get to see one of these cars "in the flesh" in what is left of my lifetime. I thank each and everyone of you for bringing them back to life as custodians of history. I respect and admire all your knowledge and skills in both the car and constructor's detail, driver history and willingness to photograph and explain all of the intricacies of thes beautiful metal sculptures. I have always loved cageless open wheel dirt track cars, but the Indy Offies have always been the one pavement car that is pure beauty. Sprints and midgets are brutishly designed, but the roadsters are just class. Thank you each and every one of you for allowing me the privilege of viewing your skills and learning from you. may God bless you all

 

Ha! Yea me too! If you were a kid in the sixties, there was just something about an indy roadster with a tailfin!! Just something about that that really punched a kids buttons back then.

 

Yea, I was one of those kids too. Betcha Wild Willy could beat up Bobby Hull...

 

After reading Smokey's book, I thought he was the one that came up with the inverted air foil above his 1962 Black and Gold roadster?

I also appreciate all of the pics and knowledge on here! Thanks for your contributions and willingness to share and educate.

 

I think Bruce Crower may have built the one on one of Garlits' Swamp Rats. 1963?

 

Maybe the Bruce Crower/Garlits story got erroneously tangled up with the Smokey Yunick story. Maybe I tangled them up somehow.

 

The Kurtis KK500B pictured (Bardahl Special) is owned by my good friend Bill Akin of Hermitage (Nashville), TN. Built by Frank Kurtis in 1953 and powered by a 270 Offy..Raced at Indy in '53, '55 and '56. Owned by Pat Clancy of Memphis when raced...best finish was 3rd in 1955 with Jimmy Davies driving...This car has placed first TWICE at Pebble Beach and is driven every year at Indy and in 2012 at Milwaukee..Bill does all the restoration at home and is a well known Offy guru. For pics of his other 2 cars look at my pictures by clicking on my avatar...We will have this car, the Bowes #33 (placed 6th in '59 with Johnny Boyd driving), and recently restored Mid Continent Securities #14 (formerly the Autolite #5 in its '61 livery) at Indy this year...The Bowes and Mid Continent cars are both Epperly laydowns.....Bill has another Epperly laydown that is awaiting a total restoration..it is the Bryant Heating and Cooling #54 that finished 5th in '62 with Bobby Marshman driving......Joe

 

Very cool. Enjoy seeing the Bardahl car at Millwaukee each year. Can't wait to see the Epperly!

 

Now that it's May, it's time for more roadster material and Indy lore in general. This is a little piece about NASCAR drivers who were able to moonlight at Indy: Yarborough, Yarbrough, the Allison brothers, that bunch. A golden age we won't see again.



Stock Car Drivers in the Indy 500 | Mac's Motor City Garage.com

 

WOW! you forgot our own HAMBER Denny Zimmerman!!! 1971 Indy ROY and former member of the legendary Eastern Bandits.

 

One Grand National start vs. 15 USAC starts, so not really a fit for this story. You have to keep a tight focus in these stories or they quickly run away on you and turn into War and Peace.

I had one guy complain because I didn't include Tim Richmond -- but Richmond didn't go from NASCAR to Indy. He went from Indy to NASCAR. Perfectly good story, but it's not this story.

 

Hope you like this one. It seems that the 1965 Indy 500 is one of the most popular ever so I found a very nice, short (20-odd min) film-to-video of the race. Among everything else going on, 1965 could be called the last real year for the roadster.

The film was commissioned by the Novi people back in 1965 but since their cars fell out early (as usual) the film then went straight to the action. And actually, the Novi stuff is pretty good...and there is a segment on Novi driver Jim Hurtubise, at that moment recovering from life-threatening burns, that is moving and maybe disturbing.


Video: The 1965 Indianapolis 500 | Mac's Motor City Garage.com

 

My father met Enzo Ferrari in the early sixties. He told him that Ferrari should have made a deal to put his engine in a roadster with a crew who knew how things were done at Indy. Ferrari was polite but not too happy to be told this. Dad had a few Ferraris in the 70s when the old ones still were not terrifically expensive, a couple of 330s, a two cam 275 and a 375 America whose Lampredi engine took a big shit and had been replaced by a single cam Columbo engine, not sure which one. That car would be worth several million today. Dad strongly felt that the Ferrari engine at any displacement could have stomped hell out of the Offy if they had had a two speed transmission and had been in a chassis set up for oval track.

He worked on a couple of Indy efforts, the most interesting one was a twin engine 4WD car with two stock 911 Porsche engines.

He always said the reason the Offy was unbeatable was simply that if you had enough money to buy an Offy engine, which cost more than a whole Ferrari or Maserati race car, you had the money to run a team that could maintain everything. The stock blockers failed because of not enough money usually.

He was offered a spot with Granatelli on the turbine car deal but because he knew the engineer who told them it would fail and why and whose advice was ignored and quit, he stayed far away. One tidbit most people don't know was that all those PT6 engines were junk unairworthy training engines P&W gave Granatelli to shut him up. Nonetheless they had the power to put the Offy "in the damn museum where they belonged!", he said. The banned the turbines after that. 4WD as well.

 

Plane tickets aren't THAT expensive, come on out sometime.

I plan on visiting Oz, NZ and Japan in the next couple of years. Just don't ask me to go back to FRANCE any time soon. If you don't parlez vous francais they are total dicks.

 

Cummins later dismantled that engine at the factory and found out the crank had a bad crack. Had he not DNFed the engine would have grenaded.

The claim was that the DNF was due to turbo fouling from rubber off the track but apparently Agabashian claimed later he had been told to pull it for political reasons.

 

For 1956 they tried a Ferrari in a Kurtis chassis and it was still a DNQ.

 

That was still a non Indy driver and crew and an engine that never really did what it was Ferraris did, which is why they never put it in a road car.

Ferrari built fours, sixes, and a V-6 or more accurately a few of them but none of them ever were all that well developed. He even built a two cylinder engine that looked just like a four, it had twin plugs and four ports a side.

They needed an Indy crew and a driver that had a good deal of circle track experience. They would not sell a competitive engine to a team that knew what they were doing out of pride and a lack of appreciation of the problem.

Road racing and open wheel circle track were very different worlds indeed back then. You had two groups that did not like or understand each other and each looked at the other sport as something of a goof. Chapman was the first outsider to really look at the problems and do what it took to solve them.

As it stood, Il Commendatore never did get an Indy win and it rankled him, but not all that much. He'd done what he really wanted to do.

 

I saw a post somewhere on someone machining new Offy blocks on a big lathe. I can't seem to find it now. Any Ideas?



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Miilers and Offys post by Silent Rick 3/11

 

Hi Hefty,..lol, loved your answer and thanks.. I agree with your comments re France; Like thailasnd even if they can speak English, they will not. I think the loss to Brittain in all their attempts to conquer them several hundred years ago, has had a flow on effect! But you can't take their cooking and pastries away.

God willing we will get "over there" one day; I would love to see the midgets, sprints and mini sprints run, as well as see Indy in the flesh.

My good friend Dean McAllan here in Perth runs a home built midget, using a Geddys (geddes/) engine out of the States and though he missed getting Aistralia 1 on the tail, he has the honour of being the first ever car owner, to have won every State Title (5) in one season in Australia. Driver is Clarke out of Sydney and boy can that man put it alltogether.

Take care and again, thanks

 

Ooops Adam Clarke

 

Hey Afroddizzyak47 !!
Hitch a ride with some of your midget racers to the Chili Bowl in Tulsa Oklahoma next January. It's a party where a midget race occurs!

 

Before the flood I had Mark Dees' Miller book. I think it was in there that he talks about how Meyer-Drake used only standard machine tools and did not own any dedicated automotive tooling like Sunnen or Van Norman. This was a poor choice and made it unnecessarily expensive and difficult to do many operations. I think someone else told me they did have a Gardner crank lathe, made by Gardner diesel engine company in Manchester, England. These are beautiful steampunk looking engines built much like an Offy in that they have an aluminum crankcase and cylinder block on top and those lathes were much in demand even in the US by aircraft and artillery makers.

I have a friend in Kansas City who has a Gardner crank lathe AND a Maserati horizontal mill along with a few other goodies like a Monarch 10EE with original thyratron controller. Doesn't do a damn thing with them

More modern tooling and strategic outsourcing would have made making Offys far cheaper and better. Despite the enormous prices they were not a cash cow.

 

I think Offenhauser, and later Meyer-Drake did have a Van Norman mill. I'll have to find my copy of Gordon White's "Offenhauser" to check, but yes, Fred Offenhauser, at least, was pretty frugal in his ways.

 

Great points, great post, thanks!

 

I just finished re-reading both Yunick's and Garlits' books and it turns out Bruce Crower was involved in building the wings on both cars. How about that.

 

I have a question for the experts: what was the direction of engine rotation in the Novi V8? Conventional or reverse rotation? And by extension, what about the 1935 Miller-Fords?



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