Racing against Jr Thompson driving C&O’s Chrysler “T” pickup roadster. The olds is getting tired and about ready to get parked until the wallet gets more green stuff in it. But the Olds had enough to win this one. In the same time period it also put Norm Cowdry’s AA/SP blown Chevy Austin Healy away in a match race in two straight. That was fun racing.
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476″ 1960 Oldsmobile engine
This is the basic engine that powered the roadster from late 61 through late 65. It was a 394” bored and stroked 5/8” to 476 cubic inches. Dave Stoll originally built the engine for a boat and he put all the right stuff in it. He owned the engine and the B&M hydro with which we won the 62 Winternationals “Little Eliminator” and A/SR at the 62 Indy Nationals. In the fall of 62 the car was really running poorly and we got beat by a little Chevy powered roadster in Fresno at a “nothing” race. Dave got frustrated with the poor performance and sold his interest to me planning to build another Olds to put in the car. Since I was then the sole owner of the entire project I took a couple of weeks alone and started from scratch with my dial indicators and went back to basic engine building 101 and found an error that once corrected the car gained 10 mph and dropped ½ of a second of elapsed time. It was the first Street Roadster in the 9’s.
Before Dave got a chance to build another engine we won the 63 Winternationals A/SR class and “Middle Eliminator”. Then we had a disagreement over something really petty and it split us up. That was too bad as he was a great guy and fun to go racing with. I’m sure I would have done better if we would have worked it out and remained together. Too soon I get old and too late I get smart. No hard feelings and I have nothing but good to say about Dave Stoll.
In this photo the Olds is sitting on the engine stand in my work shop. Note: my wife’s end table lamps hanging on the wall and my J-head Bridgeport mill right behind the engine. Not long after this photo was taken a guy from L.A. with an altered purchased the engine and got it out of my way. I did keep the Hilborn injector scoop and the Vertex magneto which are both part of the Chrysler in the roadster today. The Olds had about 8 ½ to 1 compression ratio and the guy with the altered put a HUGE load of nitro in the tank (against my advise) and blew the thing into a thousand pieces on the first or second run. She was a sweetie, R.I.P. old trusty Oldsmobile.
Run at Lions, Long Beach
At the 1964 Indy Nationals while I was driving for Mazmanian, I had Dick Gazan in the seat of the roadster and he won AA/SR. After I got bumped out of my Willys ride I got back in the roadster and we changed the roadster configuration which included removing the moon fuel tank which was mounted out in front and put a bigger tank in the rear for better weight distribution.
I also changed to a the full roll bar that is in the car today and had removable headrests that held some lead slugs that weighed about 36 pounds per headrest. The top foot of the roll bar was also filled with lead for a higher center of gravity and is still that way today.
That’s when the severe wheel stand problems started to happen, especially when the starting lines and tires started getting better. The speed fell off for no apparent reason and I tried going back to a front mounted gas tank a couple of times to see if there was a problem associated with fuel line length. That’s the test tank you see in the photo.