16 replies to this topic

[ovfi]

This unidentified picture was scanned from a 1964 magazine:

I would like to know if someone can identify the body/chassis type (Epperly?) , the year it was originally made, the sponsor, the driver, etc.

[m.tanney]

  It's a dirt car. It carries the number 19. If the photo is from 1964, then it's the Weinberger Homes car. I can't make out the script on the hood but it looks like it could be "Weinberger". The Weinberger car was a Blum chassis with an Offy engine. It looks a lot like a Watson dirt car of that period and may be a copy (A.J. Watson didn't have a problem with people copying his work). Johnny White drove the Weinberger car at Milwaukee on June 7, retiring after 32 laps, placing 17th overall. It doesn't seem to have raced again until August, when Gordon Johncock took over as its driver. He drove it at Springfield (18th), Milwaukee (21st), Indianapolis (14th), and Phoenix (10th). In your photo, the car is wearing pavement tires, so it may have been taken at Milwaukee or Phoenix.

Mike

[Peter Leversedge]

Can't tell you anthing about the car but it is a neat looking car, lookslike it is about to be fired up with the starter in place and the jack under the torsion tubes ?? maybe someone is about to screw some weight into it

[ovfi]

Mike, thanks for your precise answer,I think you have a lot of knowledge about these cars.
As Peter said, it is a neat looking car, and it's the most seen design at the time, perhaps the most copied because of the beautiful front end grille... a true "art déco" item.
Now, as you have informed that this design is owned by A.J.Watson, I suppose that Rodger Ward's 1959 dirty car was a Watson too... but I think Watson made similar cars before 1959. Do you know the year when Watson begin to make dirty cars with this design?

[raceannouncer2003]

A couple on display at Monterey 2007:

On the left, the #17 Bell Lines Trucking Silnes-Offy as raced in 1962 by Roger McCluskey, Bobby Grim, and Johnny Rutherford.

On the right, the #2 Leader Card Watson-Offy, raced in 1959 by Rodger Ward. In 1960, this is the car Jimmy Bryan was killed in:



Vince H.

[Peter Leversedge]

I like the look of the No 2 car, I understand there was a close assocaition between AJ Watson and the Leader Card Team. When I was at his shop in 1981 he was restoring a Leader Card Roadster

[raceannouncer2003]

Originally posted by Peter Leversedge
I understand there was a close assocaition between AJ Watson and the Leader Card Team. When I was at his shop in 1981 he was restoring a Leader Card Roadster

This one?



Vince H.

[ovfi]

Vince
Beautiful pictures you posted, A.J.Watson was a true artist, his cars were "chef d'oeuvres".
I saw in your profile that we share the same sport... I have intention to build some 1/32 scale models of both Watson's cars, the '59 roadster and the dirt car (or champ car, or sprint car...). I don't know the year Watson made his first dirt car using that design, he began to make champ cars in 1950 and until 1953 he used a design similar to the KK2000 and KK4000... for 1954 through 1958 I haven't seen any pictures of his dirt cars, I suppose he created this design (as seen in Ward's dirt car) between 1955 and 1958.

[m.tanney]

Originally posted by ovfi
Mike, thanks for your precise answer,I think you have a lot of knowledge about these cars....
Now, as you have informed that this design is owned by A.J.Watson, I suppose that Rodger Ward's 1959 dirty car was a Watson too... but I think Watson made similar cars before 1959. Do you know the year when Watson begin to make dirty cars with this design?

  Sorry for the slow response, ovfi. I'm afraid that I do not have a great knowledge of these cars. I just have access to good sources, like Dick Wallen's Fabulous Fifties book.
  AJ Watson was building upright championship cars in the early 1950s. He built a very good car for John Zink c.1955. It was driven to victory by Bob Sweikert and, later, Jud Larson. I suppose there is a generic resemblance between those early cars and the Watson dirt car in Vince's picture and the Blum copy in your picture - in the sense that all dirt cars look somewhat alike. But if you compare photos of the Leader Card Watson or the Blum to other cars of the same era, you will see some obvious differences - particularly with regard to the suspension design. When Watson hooked up with Jim Wilke's Leader Card team after the 1958 season, he was given the money to build two roadsters and a dirt car. That dirt car is the car in Vince's photo. It was not the same as Watson's pre-1959 dirt cars. Watson may not have invented that front suspension design (the prominent cross tube, etc.), but his 1959 design made it successful. You will need someone else to tell you how it worked and why it worked so well. Rodger Ward and Wilke's other driver, Don Branson, won a lot of races with it. The car that Watson built for Ward in 1959 was still competitive in 1973. George Snider used that very chassis to will the USAC Silver Crown championship. It is also, BTW, the chassis that Jimmy Bryan was killed in at Langhorne in 1960. Quite the history for one car, isn't it? Little wonder that Weinberger wanted one. The Weinberger is certainly a copy of the Leader Card machine. How it came to be, I do not know. It must have been assembled by Blum - hence its designation as a Blum, rather than a Watson. Watson may have sold the plans to Blum, or he may have sold him a kit. The bodywork is identical, which suggests that it was purchased from Watson, but I'm really just guessing. Rather a long winded way of answering your original question, eh? Bottom line: the car in your photo is a Blum copy of a Watson dirt car, of a type that first appeared in 1959.

[Collombin]

Originally posted by m.tanney
AJ Watson was building upright championship cars in the early 1950s. He built a very good car for John Zink c.1955. It was driven to victory by Bob Sweikert

Watson built John Zink's 1956 winner, but the Sweikert 1955 winner was a Kurtis, although Watson was chief mechanic on the car. Sweikert himself stripped down and rebuilt the engine before the race though, as Watson had had to return home following his wife's miscarriage.

[ovfi]

Mike, thanks a lot, again. As I said earlier, I have intention to build 1/32 scale model of this car... I was looking who made its body design and when, and you informed: Watson, 1959... but meanwhile I made some Google search and found that, in october 21 of 1956, Jud Larson won Sacramento 100 driving a Watson dirt car, but didn't found any pictures of this car, so I would like to ask if it's possible that the body design of this 1956 Watson is similar to the 1959 Leader Card's car? I found that in 1957 Jud Larson won some races with the car and Elmer George won a race in a Watson dirt car too...

[Peter Leversedge]

raceannouncer2003 - Re the photo of the Leader Card Roadster. I can not say for sure that it is the car that I saw being restored at AJ Watson's shop back in '81 but it looks a lot like it. What a great looking race car

[fines]

Henry "Hank" Blum was one of many guys hanging around the LA scene in the fifties and sixties and helping A. J. Watson and other builders in their shops. He probably had a shop himself, and a few CRA Sprint Cars are credited to him. He was also the original (if possibly cover-up) entrant of Watson's first "customer" roadster, the one which was bought by Lee Elkins and which Dick Rathmann subesequently put on pole for the 500.

Chuck Hulse was CRA Champion in the late fifties/early sixties (although I think for Morales), then began running USAC with Blum. IIRC, in late 1962 Blum build this car for Hulse, and Hulse continued to run it for his new team Dean Van Lines the following year, even though Dean still had a relatively new four-bar-car. When Hulse was injured in a Sprint Car wreck in early '64, Dean sold the Blum dirt car to Weinberger & Wilseck, who needed a car for the up-and-coming Johnny White, fresh from winning the IMCA Chamionships for them. Well, things didn't really work out that way and poor Johnny met a sad fate...

Dean ran his 1960 Kuzma dirt car (I believe for Jud larson?) that year, and Hulse later ended up subbing for an injured Johnny Rutherford at Leader Cards - but wait, that was 1966. I can't recall what he drove the rest of '64 and '65 at the moment. W & W finally got another guy from Michigan, but this Johncock guy didn't like running on dirt, so the Blum dirt car was run by Joe Leonard, Bobby Unser and others, from memory.

[fines]

As for the "four-bar" design, it was first used on the roadsters of Frank Kurtis, after some refinements as the type 500C in 1954, with trailing arm front suspension and leading arm rear suspension, transverse torsion bars fore and aft. Virtually all roadster builders copied this, amongst them A. J. Watson. But Watson wasn't the first to introduce this technique to the dirt cars - that was Wally Meskowski, then chief mechanic for John Wills's Hoover Motor Express team after stints with Ernie Ruiz (Travelon Trailer) from California and Peter Schmidt from Missouri. I think Wills was from Ohio or Indiana, Illinois, somewhere...

Meskowski hadn't been too successful building Indy, Champ and Sprint Cars before, but in 1958 his new four-bar dirt car shook the establishment, it also started Don Branson's Champ Car career. He built a second such car for second-tier car owner... damned, I forgot the name! The cars ran under his name as well as the name Tiz So and Bell Lines Trucking (he was a tall guy, and I think he was from the south)! Anyway, the second was also very successful, giving drivers like Bob Veith and Gene Force their best years, and later Roger McCluskey - it is the left car in the picture with the Watson Champ Car.

Watson (Leader Cards) and his buddy Jud Phillips (Bob Estes) built four-bar Champ Cars of their own in 1959, the first ones to follow the trend - pretty soon everybody else followed suit. And yes, Watson's '59 car was the one that killed Bryan, but no, it wasn't the same one that Snider drove to the Dirt Track Championship in '71 (an often repeated mistake - that was the almost identical 1962 Watson). The Watson that Jud Larson used to make his name in was a conventional "cross-springer", i.e. a car with transverse leaf springs front and rear.

[fines]

Sclavi! Fred Sclavi is the name of the (southern?) gentleman.

A little break and a cup of Cappuccino to jog the old brain

[ovfi]

Thanks a lot Michael, you answered all the questions I had about these cars history.

[tyjak]

DAMN FEW DIED IN BED by Andy Dunlop is a good read of this period and has alot of good pictures as well.