Story and color images by Al Axelrod
From the Archives, November 2011
In the early fifties, a hot rodder entrepreneur by the name of Bill Frick established Bill Frick Motors and found a ready market for an estimated 200 Fordillacs. As it sounds, a Fordillac was a 1949 Ford with the newly introduced 331ci Cadillac V8, shoehorned into the Ford. Along with Phil Walters (aka Ted Tappet), a very highly regarded race car driver in midgets and sportscars, they managed a successful engine conversion garage in Rockville Center, New York named, naturally, Bill Frick Motors. Things were looking up for the team when along came Briggs Cunningham, who bought a Fordillac and decided he wanted to go racing. Cunningham opened a car building facility in Florida and took Walters with him.