How to make your car handle

Fred Puhn and the Santee SS.

By Fred Puhn
All photos courtesy Fred Puhn

From the VeloceToday Archives, August 2020. Fred Puhn passed away on May 13th 2022; we republish the articles he wrote in 2020 for VeloceToday.

I was born in 1939; my childhood was spent in a country environment near Lakeside California. We lived on a dirt road and played outdoors most of the year. A big activity was the design, construction, and driving of “coasters” (gravity powered race cars). Not having much money, we scrounged materials such as old shopping cart or wagon wheels, scrap lumber, and old bolts and nails. Our coasters ranged from very nice to very crude, and we spent many weekends and summers riding down hills, crashing, and rebuilding. I learned how to throw a coaster sideways in the dirt to stop it because they never had any brakes. It was during these early years I learned to control a vehicle and to design and build one.

Fred Puhn and his Maserati V8RI at Laguna Seca, 2014. Photo by Randy Reed.

Story by Fred Puhn

Read Part 1, The Fred Puhn Story

It was 1981 and we were selling old parts at the Big 3 swap meet in San Diego. A nice man came up to our booth and he said he had just moved in from Minnesota. Our chatting turned to stories about “I saw an old car in a barn better than anything you ever saw in a barn.” Naturally such stories are nice to listen to but everyone knows not to take anything too seriously. When my new friend said he found a prewar Maserati race car in a barn in Minnesota for $1000 that story topped anything I could ever bring up. He said the car had raced at Indy according to the owner, but he knew nothing else about it.