-----Original Message-----
From: James A. Ruffner <erl@virginia.edu>
To: Triumph_List <triumphs@autox.team.net>; LaJoMor@aol.com
<LaJoMor@aol.com>
Date: Saturday, November 11, 2000 5:10 PM
Subject: Unknown car at the Vintage races
>
>I believe that the red car that you could not identify is a retired Indy
>racer from the late 30's, to the late 40's. I'll bet it is powered by
>an Offenhauser (Offie) flathead four. This was the standard design.
>I'm far to young to know this in person, but I do remember seeing pics
>of these cars in garages and auto shops. The Offie flatheads dominated
>these races for years.
Not a flathead four. A D-O Four. Double overhead cams. Started with
Miller, became Meyer-Drake.
My dad got a chance to drive one of these around the Minnesota State Fair
track before the war. Some of his buddies were involved with the racing
team and were testing. They had two-speed transmissions and the car was set
up for each track with a quick-change rear end.
The Minnesota State Fair was the last stop on the circuit in the very old
days of racing, before even my dad was born. Barney Oldfield raced there.
One of the guys he raced against was Saint Paul's Ralph DePalma. When my
dad left for active duty in the navy, my grandmother made him sell his
Auburn. He sold it to Ralph DePalma for three times as much as he paid:
seventy-five dollars. That would have been in 1941. DePalma ran Indy a
couple of times, I think, and his nephew (Jimmy something?, also an Italian
name) won the Indy 500, I think in a Miller.
Anyway, the Minnesota State Fair track is not up to its former glory. When
I was a kid, there was racing every day of the fair. Now they have only one
race on Labor Day: an ASA stock-car race. Soon they will probably phase
that out too. Sad, even though I am not an oval-race freak.
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