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18th
Annual Vintage Celebration
"Vic Yerardi Memorial"
by
Al Novotnik
May
13-16 at the New Hampshire Motor Speedway located in Loudon, New
Hampshire, was the site of the 18th Annual Vintage Celebration.
This year's guest and grand Marshall was Mr. Arlen Kurtis, son
of Frank Kurtis, the founder of the Kurtis Kraft Race Car Business.
Frank would have been 100 years old this past January. To the
racing fraternity, Frank Kurtis is the king of American car makers.
From the Pacific to the Polo Grounds, this car builder holds nearly
every important track record in the books. Kurtis-Kraft race cars
have been showing the boys the way home for more years than their
competitors care to remember.
Frank Kurtis' life story is a unique success tale of an ambitious
youth who forsook book learning for a monkey-wrench at the age
of 14. That was the year he lied about his age to get a car servicing
job with Don Lee, a California race car owner and Cadillac dealer.
In his spare time at home he put together a hot rod with a Model
T Ford motor and scrap parts from twenty-seven other heaps. The
home-made contraption cleaned up at local tracks. The spindly-legged,
tousle-haired kid with the knack for "souping up" engines
to pin-point efficiency, ate, slept, and dreamed of speed buggies,
and used to play hooky from school to sneak the 15 miles to the
old Culver City track to watch the greats of that era blazing
to glory around the oil-slick boards - men like Milton, Murphy,
Meyer, whose deeds are written into immortality.
That first Kurtis-built car was the forerunner of a whole string
of illustrious cars to come from the master mind of one of the
world's truly great automotive geniuses.
Ninety percent of the cars that face that starting flag at Indianapolis
each year are usually chassis built by Frank Kurtis of Los Angeles.
The phenomenal success of the Kurtis cars - stroked with the powerful
Lou Meyer Offenhauser engine - is like money in the bank to the
lucky owners.
Kurtis has not used any magic to lap the field.
"He has just engineered and built his product better than
his competitors," sums up Johnnie Parsons, who swears by
Kurtis' mounts. "The speed records have fallen where they
may."
But the man who has built over 600 midget racing cars, an assortment
of deluxe custom-built jobs, competition cars, and over 100 Championship
Indianapolis cars since the war, has not developed a complacency
as a result of his fabulous success. He likes being on top of
the pile.
"There are too many others," he confesses modestly,
"who will pass you on the straightaway if you let up."
He means men like Lou Moore who builds the Blue Crown racers;
Bud Winfield and his famous Novis; Emil Diedt, Lujie Lesovsky,
and Johnny Pawl.
Kurtis' zest for the sport is undiminished through the years.
Now he wants to field an American team on the European racing
circuits.
"My first project," he explains, "if I have my
way about it, would be Le Mans. I would not expect to win my first
time out - but a gradual building up, seeing where I could improve
performance both with engine and chassis, until I had the perfect
combination."
His pattern of victories through the years bears him out in this
statement. When flying Johnnie Parsons rocketed a Kurtis-Kraft
car to first place in the Indianapolis race in 1950, the chassis
had received the benefit of 11 years of mechanical experimentation.
Work on hot rods, roadsters, hopped up jalopies and custom cars
had given Frank Kurtis an invaluable storehouse of knowledge for
racing perfection.
In 1938, when Kurtis achieved his first major success in the midget
field, he had been building racing cars for six years. That was
the year Kurtis turned to designing and building the doodlebugs
as a hobby and wound up with a shop of his own. He became the
king of the midget builders with his vast "know-how"
and held this distinction until he voluntarily stepped aside by
selling his entire midget business - good will, jigs, fixtures,
and parts supplies - to Johnny Pawl of Indiana in 1953.
Easygoing Frank Kurtis makes his headquarters in a 14,000 square
foot, two-building plant in Los Angeles, where approximately 32
employees turn out Indianapolis race cars; competition cars, and
micro-midgets for the small fry in a steady line.
Around Christmas time each year, construction on the Indianapolis
race cars gets under way, with work gradually increasing in tempo
until the final month when the plant is akin to sheer madness
trying to get the cars finished in time for the qualifying trials.
But during the rest of the year work proceeds at Kurtis' natural,
deliberate pace. When the pressure is on, however, no one works
harder than Kurtis himself. The Indianapolis crowd found that
out in '39.
That was the year Kurtis decided to take in the 500-mile classic
for the first time - as a vacation jaunt. No sooner had he checked
in at the Brickyard than he found himself being dragged towards
the pits. Leon Duray's car was washed out. "Can you get it
back in shape for the trials?" he asked Kurtis. "One
week to rebuild it in time for another run." Kurtis shook
his head sadly. "I'll do my best."
His best was good enough. He peeled off his jacket and went to
work. For the rest of the week he might as well have saved the
price of lodging. But the man whose very life is wrapped up in
racing creations saw a challenge - and a conquest. As the hours
ticked off, visitors crowded around, all of them intensely interested
in the race against the clock. Would the West Coast engineer with
the skilled hands make it in time? Car owners, mechanics, drivers,
and AAA officials milled around the car so that, at times, Frank
Kurtis had to plead for more elbow room.
On the last day word spread around the track that Kurtis wouldn't
make it. Now he was racing against the minute hands, and his nerves
were beginning to show through. If he had any doubts about finishing
the job on time, he didn't betray it. He worked and sweated in
the May Day sun, giving orders quietly, putting the parts back
together with meticulous skill. Not until the sun had closed on
another day, did Kurtis let up.
"Job's done," he said, finally, forcing a weary smile.
"Come on, Bill," he signaled to Billy DeVore, driver
of the car, "give'er a run." "Right," Billy
DeVore smiled in assurance. He shoehorned himself into the cockpit,
revved the engine while Kurtis lent a critical ear. Kurtis nodded,
satisfied; DeVore pulled the car away from the apron, and the
car roared down the straightaway. Kurtis and the rest of the pit
crew held stop watches on the car. When DeVore pulled into the
pit after his ten-mile run, the official timer announced that
DeVore had won a starting place by .07 of a second, barely nosing
out the last qualifying car on the list. "That," reminisces
Kurtis, "was the toughest stretch of hard labor I've ever
put in."
When a part goes sour, as it sometimes does, Kurtis gets on the
telephone to Los Angeles and has a new part shipped by air. Once
in awhile the chassis troubles indicate that a part needs redesigning
or beefing up. If so, Kurtis works out the necessary change immediately,
and enough parts are turned out to supply all the Kurtis-Krafts
of that particular model at the speedway.
Kurtis' present success is probably due more to his design ability
than to any other single factor. His first experiments along this
line were exclusively with body design. During the years he worked
in auto body shops, he built a series of special speedster bodies
on Model T Ford, Buick, and Model A chassis. He'd drive each one
for awhile, then sell it for a profit and start building the next.
In
1932 he built his first racing car. "It turned out to be
a lemon," he confesses. "Good looking, but not very
speedy. Took many awards for the best looking, but didn't win
me any races." The next year he put together his first experimental
car, using component parts from 27 different wrecks. During the
tail end of the hungry depression - in 1936 - Frank hitched his
custom wagon to the trailer business and came up with the first
all-steel house on wheels, the Hollywood Nomad.
It was a good piece of work," Kurtis comments, "but
the new company couldn't hold out financially long enough for
the Nomad to get rolling."
Kurtis next went to work with the famous designer, Howard Darrin,
fresh from Paris, to build the first Packard Darrin Victoria.
It was two years later, in 1938, that Kurtis built the famous
Rex Mays midget. Mays, already one of the nation's top big-car
drivers, was the owner; Roy Russing was the driver. The car Kurtis
built was basically conservative in design essentials, but there
were important improvements. By substituting 4130 chrome alloy
tubing for the heavier steel ordinarily used in the construction
of frame and running gear, the weight was cut considerably. More
daring was the use of a soft suspension system, featuring a low
spring rate. Traditional practice was just the opposite. Russing
called the Kurtis midget "the best handling car I've ever
driven," and proceeded to prove it by blasting off the nation's
hottest competition.
During the war years, Kurtis shifted to aircraft tooling and during
these years he designed and built a 3-wheel car which later became
famous as the Californian. The Davis Motor Car Company was in
search of an automobile which would combine economical transportation
with ease of maneuverability, so they acquired Kurtis' 3-wheel
automobile. this revolutionary car never went to the highways;
Davis absconded with the financial backing.
It was during these war years that Kurtis, his mind still on racing
cars, had an idea - the Offenhauser 97 had become almost the standard
engine for the midgets. "Why not," Kurtis reasoned,
"standardize and build a complete midget car with easily
replaceable parts, that dealers can handle just like any other
automobile?" From idea to production was a quick step after
the war.
It was Frank Kurtis who took the plans of Bud Winfield and Lou
Welch in 1946 and built the first Novi. The following year he
built a sister car to the Novi along with the big Bowes Seal Fast
Special, the Rose Page special and the Anderson Special. With
that experience under his belt, Kurtis started work on his first
original Indianapolis design. The following year - 1948 - there
were eight cars at the Indianapolis track, known as Kurtis Krafts.
What emerged, finally, was the first of the 3000 series, then,
as now, one of the finest competition cars ever built. In the
first design it had a truss tubular frame of 4130 tubing, torsion
bar independently suspended, and a de Dion rear end. When Johnnie
Parsons took command in the middle of 1948 he hiked it to second
place in the championship circuit standings.
The next year Kurtis eliminated the de Dion rear end. Parsons
came in second at Indianapolis after qualifying at 132.9 miles
per hour, then went on to win the circuit championship. And in
1950, Parsons won the abbreviated Indianapolis race in the same
car with an average of 124.
After Parsons' 1950 win, Kurtis saw his cars roar to smashing
victories in 1951, 1953, 1954 and also in 1955 with Bob Sweikert
pacing the field for the $76,000 gold and glory. In 1943 and 1943,
Kurtis-Kraft cars also won the AAA Championship, generally conceded
to be the toughest competition in American racing.
The average builder might have stopped there, figuring he had
the answer to winning Indianapolis competition. Kurtis can't stand
still. His 3000 series had hardly screamed its way to the top
when he was busy at the drawing board for the current 500 series.
The prototype 500 was the Cummins Diesel machine; in rapid succession
Kurtis developed the 500A, 500B, 500C series.
In its present form, the 500C roadster retains the truss-tubular
frame and torsion-bar suspension of the 3000 series. It has two
exclusive Kurtis features - the offset driveshaft and partly enclosed
cockpit. The cockpit, of course, cuts down wind drag at high speeds.
The driveshaft permits a lower seating position for the driver,
which serves the dual purpose of decreasing the frontal area and
lowering the center of gravity. Brakes on the 500C are the modern
disc-type made by Halibrand.
Kurtis is certain that his winning Indianapolis chassis has all
the essentials necessary to winning the grueling Le Mans race.
"The Indianapolis race is an excellent proving ground for
a car going to Le Mans. Top Indianapolis drivers are at least
the equal of the best European pilots."
Thus far, though, the Kurtis sports cars have been too limited
in scope to either prove or disprove Kurtis' theories. His first
attempt to build a sports car was not too successful. Although
in official two-way runs at famed Bonneville Salt Flats the car
was clocked at 142.68 miles per hour, the car didn't catch on.
Kurtis sold only 19 before Earl (Madman) Muntz bought the project
in 1950. The present competition sports car tells a different
story. The car is patterned after the Indianapolis 500 series
chassis, and powered by the customer's choice of engine. When
the customer orders the engine of Kurtis' choice, he gets a full-race
Cadillac working through a drive train which includes a modified
La Salle transmission and a Halibrand quick-change rear end. The
car rolls out of the factory for $6,500.
Out and out, the Kurtis competition car ranks with the Ferrari,
Mercedes and the Jaguar C in overall performance, with lots of
ginger under the hood, and good cornering.
Kurtis feels he has all the "bugs" ironed out of his
latest speed demon. He says: "I'd like to have a full season
of United States sports car competition to point up any weaknesses.
Then I'll be ready to field a team."
One thing Kurtis forgot to add- It will be a winning team Arlen
Kurtis, son of the legendary Frank, took over the family business
upon his father's retirement in 1968. Arlen had previously worked
alongside his father, at the Frank Kurtis Company since 1956,
when he returned home from the U.S. Navy. Upon Frank Kurtis' retirement.
the company continued work on the SR-71 project doing spares and
repairs for Lockheed. Arlen also developed a line of high performance
speed boats for drag racing and water skiing, which he produced
throughout the 1970's and 80's. During this period of time, Arlen
Kurtis held many speed records. including the world's fastest
propellor driven boat at 229 MPH built for the famous Eddie Hill.
The record still stands in the Guinness Book of Records. Arlen
had started rebuilding a couple of his Dad's old cars that he
had found. He decided to get back into limited production of a
few models of cars and parts his dad had once built.
Arlen
represents the entire Kurtis Kraft Company as the 18th Annual
Vintage Celebration celebrates "Kurtis.... l00 years of Excellence"
Also
attending the event this year from the Kurtis family were Arlen's
wife, Carol, and Arlen's sister, Ellona.
Cars began arriving on Monday afternoon and after a delay because
the track was being used by NASCAR Modified Testing, the cars
were able to get to the garages by Monday evening.
During the winter months, the New England weather took its snow
to Loudon and the roof on one garage complex was destroyed. A
new roof was installed just before the vintage celebration. All
garages were 100% functional when we arrived. Tuesday morning,
for a short time, there was some NASCAR engine testing taking
place. But as that was going on, inspection of the cars took place.
All cars were safety checked and ready for running. Late morning,
a drivers meeting was scheduled and all track rules and safety
were discussed; things such as no passing on inside of cars, only
on the outside, slow cars stay down low and the faster cars up
high. It was explained that this is not a race; there is no winner
and everyone was there for a good time.
Mr. Jerry Gappins, the new CEO for the NHMS, was introduced to
the group. Jerry is taking over the running of NHMS since it was
sold to Mr. Bruton Smith.
Jerry told everyone he has an open wheel background and raced
sprint cars in the Midwest. He also explained to everyone that
the Vintage Celebration will continue the same time next year,
and he wants to make it an even bigger event in the future. If
you have any suggestions, drop him a note at the speedway, his
email is: nhmspr@nhms.com.
When
the meeting was over, it was track time. For the newcomers, and
people that had not been on a mile track before, a 10 lap orientations
session was held. This was done in two groups; one stock car,
one open wheel. Both were on the track behind the pace car.
With the orientation out of the way, Roland Champagne monitored
the cars entering the track and kept stock cars moving. The time
was now for the first group to get track time. Approximately 15
minutes is allocated for each group. The first ones out were the
6 cylinder and flat head cars.
When they headed back to the garage area, the next group was ready.
This group was the small block group and they were followed by
the big block modified cars.
With
the last modifieds heading for the garage area, the open wheel
cars, under direction of Brian Watson, kept open wheel activity
moving. First out were the midgets with plenty of push trucks,
and ATV's pushing the cars off was no problem.
Tuesday
evening, Ray Boissoneu who has a garage and museum in nearby Concord,
NH, opened his doors for a get together to see his collection,
have a hot dog, hamburger, etc. and a great time looking at the
collection. In his stable are the San Traylor Sprint Car, Ray
Brady Indy Roadster, Wheeler offy midget and many more. Every
one had a fun time bench racing and admiring the collection. Arlen
Kurtis mentioned to Ray, that the Ray Brady Car, a 1956 Kurtis
Roadster, was one of the first cars that Arlen worked on when
he got out of the Navy.
Arlen said he wished his dad could have seen all the Kurtis cars
and how well they were restored.
Because of the way the cycle goes, the session ended on Tuesday
with the Stock Cars. That meant the Midgets were first to take
to the track on Wednesday morning. The cycles moved right along
till Lunch break. At that time everyone was asked to assemble
at the garage area where the drivers meeting took place. A few
awards were given out.
The Grand Marshall award given to Arlen; A large silver bowl was
presented by Carl Fredrickson from "Speedway Illustrated
Magazine."
Arlen also received a replica of the Scooters that his dad made
during the World War ll years. This was a small scooter made entirely
of wood. The scooter was built and presented by Rich Poisson and
a framed original drawing from Rich as well.
In
past years there has been two trophies given for the Best appearing
Stock Car and the Best appearing Open Wheel Car.
The
Stock car trophy this year was given to Darrell Dutch from Rhode
Island for his fine looking Stock Car.
The
open Wheel Trophy went to Fred Johns from Indiana for his Kurtis
Midget Roadster.
During
the entire three days, raffle tickets were drawn during the day
for over 60 awards contributed by Advertisers. They included auto
accessories, books, sportswear, and the major prize of a driving
course at the Bonderant Driving School.
Jerry
Gappins of the Speedway presented a Plaque for all the outstanding
work in the preparation of the Vintage Celebration event to John
McCarthy. For years John was a Midget Car owner in the Northeast
and won the Northeast Midget Racing Championship.
Larry
Pfitzenmaier, all the way from Arizona, and the originator of
the Roadster Rooster Publication, presented Doug Post with a framed
original drawing done by Rich Poisson.
Bondurant Driving
School Winner
Robert Caramella |
50/50 Winner
Tom
Tierney
|
As
soon as the awards were given out, the women took to the track
for 10 laps. This was open to the women whose husbands, fathers,
boyfriends, whoever, had a car for the ladies to drive. There
were a couple of first time drivers on the track; ones that had
never been in a car or on the track. Dave Schleppi's daughter
in law, Lorilee, took the Chevy powered Indy for a ride and Connie
Taylor, another first timer, took Bud's Roadster for a trip around
the speedway.
Back to the track for all the groups again and everyone enjoyed
track time till four o'clock. Then back to the garages till Thursday....
During the evening after dinner, at the RED Roof Inn just a few
miles from the track, you could find the lobby full of stock car
people and open wheelers; all bench Racing. In the middle of the
bunch, was Arlen, who after three days, about lost his voice from
talking and answering questions, and he always had the answer...
Nine o'clock, Thursday, cars took to the track again for the final
day of track time. With some of the people making long trips,
some left a little early to get back home. Everyone commented
that they had plenty of track time.
All in all, it was a great event again. Car count was 156; a little
down from last year; probably due to the increase in the price
of gas and diesel fuel. Sure there probably was a glitch here
and there, but everyone that I talked to said they will be back
next year.
If you have never been to Loudon, New Hampshire and the New Hampshire
Motor Speedway, mark your calendar for the Vintage Celebration.
You won't be sorry.
Please
keep an eye on this web site for updates concerning the 2009 event.
See
you there!
