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Last week we featured the Bob Temple photos from Indy, 1950, along with a quiz in regards to a rare DOHC engine in one of Temple’s photos. It didn’t take long for readers to submit their guesses.
The winner of the engine quiz was Dean Butler, the engine was the six cylinder Sparks. Seems that our readers are as well-informed about interesting Indy cars as they are about Etceterinis.
It’s a Sparks. And the rare engine won at Indy in 1946.
At the same time, I was reading the excellent book, Powered by Porsche, the alternative race cars for our review this week, and noticed several cars that had escaped my attention in the past. One worthy of mention was Louis Fageol’s twin Offy racer that made the front row at Indy in 1946, driven by Paul Russo.
Paul Russo with the Fageol twin Offy at Indy in 1946. It was fast and front and center in the front row. Credit IMS photos and use with permission.
The Offy-powered car retired early but inspired Fageol to build two twin Porsche-engined sports cars, and one was built to qualify at Indy (though it never did.) There were no photos of this car, but Smith found a photo of the first Fageol twin-Porsche being sorted out at Everett Washington in 1953 (photo from REVS). In a further note of coincidence, that same year George Robson won driving a Sparks-engined car, the first six cylinder win since 1911.
But rare to see a photo of the prototype, here at Everett Washington. REVS photo
But wait, there’s more
About 400 pages later in Powered by Porsche in a chapter on Porsche-powered single seaters is a photo of another twin-engined Porsche, the Stein-Porsche Brickyard Special. In 1963 Albert Stein came upon two new 901 Porsche engines and decided to have Joe Huffaker create a chassis, placing one engine forward of the front wheels with a Lancia gearbox, and at the rear another Porsche engine powered the rear wheels in a more conventional manner. The linkage was, like all earlier twin-engined cars from the Citroen to the Alfa Bimotore, was very complex but the car was ready for the 1966 Indy time trials. However, it proved to be just too slow; Andretti set the pace with a record 165.889 mph and the twin-engined Porsche could only muster about 149 mph.
The early sixties, as the Kurtis Offys were getting long in the tooth, heralded another interesting era at Indy. The Stein-Porsche Brickyard Special made an attempt to qualify in 1966.
Smith goes on to tell us much more about later Porsche-backed Indy attempts, with exclusive interviews with Hans Mezger about the Indy March Porsches. But Porsche never did have much luck at the Brickyard.
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I remember the sight and …the Sound of the twin engined
Porsche of Lou Fageol at the 1954 running of Pebble Beach
Road Races.
Made hell of a racket and think it might have been supercharged as well.!
Mr Fageol from Ohio must have liked California since he settled down
in San Diego 5 years later with Crosley 750 special to compete with
Jim Sitz
look what fun indy was before the racing bureaucrats took over. f1 too, by the way.
As an engineering student in college I spent my free time as a crew member for Lou Fageol on his H-Mod special. He built this car from a successful special originally built by Harry Jones. Lou bought the car and improved it with a Porsche transaxle converted to 5-speed, one of his Fageol 750cc engines hopped up to about 50 hp, and a very light Devin body. This car was a screamer, turning 9000 rpm. It had all independent suspension, Crosley disk brakes, and wildly different tire sizes front and rear. Lou’s driver was his nephew George Peterson who ran the La Mesa Pit Stop exotic car sales and repair business.
I got to drive the car during testing at Hourglass Field and was totally hooked on small race cars. After the car was wrecked I bought the remains from Lou Fageol but could never find the spare time to get it back on the track.
Lou Fageol was a very inventive car guy. He drove around in a Fiat 8V Ghia coupe with a Chevy V8 in it. His son Ray drove a VW Ghia with a Porsche engine in it taken from one of their supercharged twin-Porsche racers.