12 replies to this topic

[Boniver]

see also http://forums.autosp...&threadid=26319

In 1925 - 1926 - 1927 - 1928

there where Miller / Cooper / Detroit / Fengler .... chassis / motors / "works" / owned / car names

in the american racing,
what was the relation of these constructeurs

[fines]

Miller doesn't really need an introduction, does he? In short, Harry A. Miller started out in the automotive field by designing and manufacturing carburettors pre-WW1, then branched out into doing repair and other maintenance jobs on racing cars, and finally building complete cars first for special customers, then for sale. His cars were soon the best (and most expensive!) to be had in the UsofA, perhaps the world. His star faded slowly in the thirties, and he died in the early forties. In a few thousand words more his story is told by Mark Dees in "The Miller Dynasty", highly recommended!!!

Cooper we have already discussed "mechanically" in the other thread. Earl P. Cooper was a famous and successful racing driver before WW1, and made a hugely successful comeback after the war, mainly with Miller cars. At 40, he was past his best years as a driver when he was given the chance to build three racing cars with the support of a big manufacturer, Buick (General Motors). Cooper owned a front-drive "Miller FD" and followed the design of that car, chassis and engine, broadly. However, Buick withdrew support in the end and Cooper entered the cars under his own name, later securing Marmon backing. I would call these cars "Cooper" throughout, because Buick was never officially involved, and Marmon merely a sponsor - and they were definitely not Millers! All three cars were broken up in 1930/31 and rebuild as two-man cars (Gauss "Goldberg" and Smith "Empire State").

Detroit was the name given to a special car conceived by former racer Tommy W. Milton, and mainly financed by car tycoon heir and racing patron R. Cliff Durant. The latter had earlier financed a number of cars under various names, usually of car companies owned by his father William C. Durant. Detroit, however was not a Durant company name, and was apparently chosen because Durant was not the only backer, and because the car was built in Detroit, MI. Or, to be more precise, it was completed there because much of it was built in Los Angeles, CA - it was a modified front-drive "Miller FD" (apparently the car Peter Kreis had raced in late 1926).

Modifications were numerous and quite significant: the engine was greatly modified, with special blocks, timing gears, valve springs and tappets, pistons and perhaps more. The supercharger, its drive and the intercoolers were of special design, as was the transmission, clutch and gearbox. It is said, and with some reason, that the car was the most powerful of its time, and the transmission was apparently superior to the Miller as well (like the Cooper, the Detroit had only two forward speeds instead of the three of the Miller).

With all these modifications, the car surely wasn't a pur sang Miller anymore. How to call it? Miller-Milton-Durant is a little bit overcomplex, and still ignores the input of Larry Fisher (financial and logistics) and Cornelius van Ranst (engineering), who apparently played vital roles. I would propose "Miller-Detroit", as it clearly indicates the provenance and uses the official name under which the car ran throughout its competition life. It was later broken up to be rebuild as the second Miller-Hartz (1932).

Fengler is an example of a little knowledge being dangerous! This was, in fact, one of Cliff Durant's earlier enterprises, and the cars were called "Locomobile Special", or "Locomobile Junior 8" after the latest example of Billy Durant's car model range, but they were essentially Miller 91s, chassis and engine! In order to qualify as a constructor, however, the "Locomobile" had to be different to the "normal" run of Miller cars, and so the cars were built to special order at the Miller plant in Los Angeles. Mark Dees has gone to great lengths in "Miller Dynasty" about this deal, and I will quote him here: "The result was a racing car generally similar to a normal 91 rear-drive but subtly distinctive in nearly every detail". Design drawings of chassis and engine parts in the book document this also very well.

This was not an unusual or even isolated deal, in fact it was rather common: the 1920 Indy 500 winner, as you may recall, was a Monroe, built in similar circumstances by Frontenac, and the ReVere and the Meteor of the same year were camouflaged Duesenbergs. In each case it is rather difficult to assess how far the derivatives stray from the original, and there's certainly no harm in calling the cars plain Frontenac, Duesenberg or Miller; however I feel that for traceability's sake (if nothing else) it's perhaps worth calling these cars here "Miller-Locomobile".

In real life, the cars were transformed from Locomobile to Miller identity as soon as they were sold, one example going to Norm Batten (and subsequently featuring in one of the most publicized racing photographs of the century), the other via Harry Hartz to Mike Boyle. The Batten car ended up years (spent on America's dirt tracks I'm sure) later as the first Indy ride for Duke Nalon (although my earlier remark in another thread about it receiving a Miller-Hartz engine is apparently wrong ), while the Boyle car first went to Fred Frame (#4 in 1930), then Francis Quinn, Walt May (#3 in 1931) and Speed Hinkley before its trail fades out somewhere in the West.

Ah yes, and what of the name "Fengler", and the little knowledge that's dangerous? Well, Harlan Fengler was a racing driver at the time and looking for a way to secure a good job in the industry for the time after, as many of his peers did, e.g. Milton in 1927 (=> Detroit). He had driven for Durant before, and he was given the job of "director" (project manager) for the Locomobile Junior 8. Cliff Durant said as much to a reporter of "Motor Age" in 1926, and twenty years later this quote made it into Floyd Clymer's "Indianapolis 500 Mile Race History" from which Bob Laycock and/or Jack Fox must have picked it up for the "box scores" that appeared another twenty years later. There was no Mark Dees then, not even a Griff Borgeson to shine a little light onto the "dark ages of motor racing", and Laycock's and Fox's efforts must be applauded, but they are a bit out of date, unfortunately. After forty years, it is perhaps time to delete the Fengler name from the records, as it does not belong there.

[Boniver]

fines

[Doug Nye]

Michael - tremendous stuff...

DCN

[Doug Nye]

Found these shots relevant to this thread while seeking something else...


1


2


3


4


5

Photos via The GP Library - Indianapolis Motor Speedway originated by Kirkpatrick, Gray and W.Frank Jones

DCN

[fines]

Thanks Doug, at least someone's appreciating my posts, unlike good ole Boniver who appears to be thinking I am pulling his leg?

And thanks also for the pictures, much appreciated because good quality photographs of the twenties are somewhat hard to come by, yet they are needed to determine individual car histories. The Popely and Fox Indy books have almost all the starters of the big race, but the pictures are way too small to be of more than somewhat "basic" use - often you're not even able to clearly make out if a Miller 122 is of the earlier "narrow frame" or the later "wide frame" type.

Through no fault of your own, however, all five cars in the posted photographs are already well identified so their "only" use here for me is to marvel at those brilliant little racing cars of some 80 years ago. The Golden Age of the American Racing Car? Yes, definitely!

[fines]

1

As already indicated, apart from (not reliable) differences in bodywork, the easiest way to tell Coopers and Millers apart is the exhaust. All Miller engines, without fail*, exhaust to their right, i.e. in a front-drive chassis where the engine is reversed to the left side of the car - Coopers the exact opposite! This car here, sometimes refered to as chassis number 3, was qualified by Bob McDonogh 8th fastest (the others were 10th and 16th), and after being taken over by Peter de Paolo led the 1927 Indy 500 for about thirty laps before encountering trouble and finishing 6th - probably the high point of the entire Cooper saga! Btw, that's Earl Cooper himself behind the car in the lightly coloured suit.

It is not exactly clear which of the individual cars went to Monza in September, and it is possible that this one stayed at home. According to Mark Dees ("Miller Dynasty"), it ran as #32 "Marmon Special" in the 1928 Indy 500, Peter Kreis qualifying 11th fastest and retiring early with engine bother (the other two cars were 14th and 15th and retired, too). By now it had the slightly changed "Marmon" body work which it retained in 1929 when it was again a "Cooper Special":


3

According to Dees again, this is the same car two years later: Fred Frame qualified 19th, and Johnny Seymour brought it home 10th (its stablemates qualified 11th and 13th, respectively, and retired as usual). It then lay dormant for a couple of years before it was acquired by Floyd Smith and his Empire State Motors team. Smith built a nice two-seater around the old chassis, and put an old and bored-out Miller 183 engine in it for Bill Cummings to drive in the 1931 Indy 500. He qualified 4th fastest for a start on the front row, led a few laps but retired early. Paul Bost qualified 14th fastest the next year, only for the engine to let go in a BIG way after less than half an hour.

Smith then installed a small Studebaker stock-block engine in it and ran it for various sponsors until selling it to Mike Boyle in 1936. In this form the car picked up a 6th and a 9th place finish at the 500, although it was generally amongst the slowest qualifyers. Still, it was part of Joe Thorne's bumper acquisition of race cars in 1937, but Zeke Meyer failed to qualify it that year and that was that.


* It is often said that, because of their internal symmetry, Miller engines could be build to order in whatever layout a customer wanted, but from my experience this appears to be not true; in fact in both instances when a "reversed" layout was needed (for the Lockhart and Sampson 16-cylinder projects) excessive redrilling of oil and water passages appears to have been necessary.

To the best of my knowledge, all the early Miller engines, perhaps due to Peugeot influence, always exhaust to the left, but from Jimmy Murphy's Indy winning Duesenberg/Miller hybrid onwards (May 1922), all subsequent Miller engines exhaust to the right. Interestingly, some later "hybrid" engines (e.g. the Miller-Hartz and Miller-Brisko Indy winning engines of 1930, '32 and '34) also mirror the Miller layout, making it rather easy to identify them.

[fines]

2

Jules Ellingboe in the "Cooper" Miller - this was the car Earl Cooper qualified fastest for the 1926 Indy 500 at 5'22.19", which was actually three and a half seconds faster than he had gone the year before in a supercharged 1980 cc Miller 122, and that had been a track record (although it would be beaten three times later on that same day). Ellingboe managed to shed another four seconds (5'17.91"), but that was good enough only for 6th fastest, as Lockhart had raised the bar with the first qualifying run in under five minutes! That would have made the Indy 500 field even twenty years later, and comfortably at that - so much for the speed of those lovely little 1478 cc Millers...

As already related elsewhere, Jules walloped the car against the unyielding Indy walls, damaging it, and then some! It was rebuild with Cooper-ish bodywork and some other modifications as the Miller-Shafer, run by Babe Stapp in 1928 (qualified 5th fastest and finished 6th) and Red Shafer himself in 1929 (qualified 17th, "finished" 12th). After that, Shafer disposed of the now obsolescent machinery to a visiting Englishman.

That Englishman was Douglas Hawkes, himself twice a starter in the 500 during the twenties, and now a representative of the French car company Derby which sought to improve its image by tackling a number of (European) speed records. Driven by Gwenda Stewart (later Hawkes), the car became known as the Derby-Miller, taking many records at Montlhéry and Brooklands during the next six years, the story of which is told splendidly not only by Dees in his "Dynasty" book, but also Bill Boddy's "Montlhéry" and "Brooklands" books.

[fines]

4

That's good ole Bob McDonogh again, this time in a Miller. This car is the former Peter de Paolo car, now owned by a chap called M. R. Dodds, formerly the owner of the "Sievers Junior", a somewhat mysterious 1441 cc 4-valve straight-8 engine in a Miller 122 chassis. Dodds soon (re)tired of racing and sold the Miller FD to Harry Hartz, who was hoping to make his racing comeback after his very serious Salem-Rockingham crash in 1927 in the sister car to this one. Before that, however, the car was broken up and rebuild as the first Miller-Hartz (see "Indy Car constructors of the Thirties").

[fines]

5

This is one of less than a handful of originally circa two dozen Miller 122s to have a continuous history throughout the twenties, which is truely a shame because the 122, even more so than the 91 in my humble opinion, was probably the most strikingly handsome, breathtaking and trailblazing car to have ever been build for racing, perhaps only rivalled by the 1901 Mercedes 35 which was, it has to be said, not a racing car per se. The elegance and functionality of the basic design of the chassis and bodywork, along with many of the speed marks established by the Miller 122, would remain an often elusive target for decades to come. Truely a milestone, both technically and aesthetically!

This particular car was build in late 1923, as part of the second batch of cars along with Jimmy Murphy's "goldbug" and Ralph de Palma's first Miller, for example. This one, however got off to a real flying start by winning its first race, courtesy of Bennie Hill, Miller "works" driver for much of the twenties. A year later Hill took another win in the car, and another "first" (for a supercharged Miller), but then suffered a run of misfortune and retirements in 1925. Early in 1926, however, Hill and his trusty 122 were back on top with a third win in a 250-mile board track race before he was to get his new Miller 91 for Indy.

Most 122s continued to be raced throughout the 1.5-liter formula by destroking the original engine a radical 7/8 inch, making for a rather untypical (for the time) short-stroke engine of 1485 cc. These "rebuilt Millers" were still a force to be reckoned with when pitched against anything other than a Miller 91, but the technology of the time wasn't yet ready for a bore-to-stroke ratio of only 1:1.12 to yield enough rpm for a benefit in power output, so that these cars remained very much "second division" racers.

Not so "our" 122, which was lucky enough to be blessed by the installation of a brandnew Miller 91 engine before it was sold to a man named F. P. Cramer, who put former outlaw star Jules Ellingboe into the car and must have been pleased no end when Jules qualified 6th fastest, ahead of Bennie and his new "works" chariot! In the race, Ellingboe retired early but the following year veteran driver Earl Devore brought the car home second in the Indy 500, ahead of all the "regular" 91s.

A year earlier, Devore had caught a lot of attention when he had raced the special 1924 Miller-Durant, not only for his good results (he'd won the last race of the 2-liter formula in 1926), but also for the high-polished finish the car had received during his ownership, amongst other modifications. Now he and Cramer set about modifying the ex-"works" 122 out of all recognition: to quote Mark Dees again, "the result was one of the most eye catching and technically interesting Millers ever assembled, as well as the first fully chromed racing car" - the Miller-Chromilite.

Once again, for further details on this amazing car the reader is advised to get a copy of the wonderful "Miller Dynasty", suffice it to say that the car was faster than before but not a success. At some point, perhaps even after the rather minor Indianapolis accident, the special body was replaced by a conventional one (maybe the original if removed before the rebuild), and that's how the car appeared at Indy in 1929, with a new driver after Devore's death in a marine accident. "Speed" Gardner qualified the car indifferently, and it was his namesake Chet Gardner who brought the car into the top 10 and finished 6th in the end. After two more inconsequential results on the Altoona board track the car disappeared into obscurity.

[fuzzi]

Thank you both Michael and Doug for a superb thread.

It's a wonderful appetiser as a copy of Miller Dynasty is on it's way to me from Texas. I can't wait!

[Doug Nye]

Michael, you're a marvel. Wind you up and away you go!

I too adore Miller cars and the late Mark Dees' book is absolutely one of my favourites, not least because of the invaluable errata sheet(s) which he subsequently had the integrity to provide. The late Chuck Davies shared much of his hands-on Miller experience with me - though sadly it was not in circumstances in which I could do other than try to commit it all to memory (and failed). He and Mark Dees had an initially fiery relationship, with Chuck pointing out Dees' errors - but the latter was a big enough man to take Chuck's knowledge on board. Both learned from the relationship.

By the way - which is correct - Bob 'McDonogh' which looks incorrect - or Bob 'McDonough'????

DCN

[fines]

Well, being sick at home may have something to do with it! Having a bad cold, you see... :sneeze:

Doug, these errata sheets, I suppose they were provided for the first edition only, and their content incorporated into the 2nd? I only have the second edition which says "revised & expanded" on the cover, and makes some references to the first in the text. If you have errata for the second edition also, I'd be more than delighted if you'd let me know!

I think part of what makes the book so great is its mix of engineering drawings, hands-on stories and racing lore, combined with the unbelievable wealth of photographic documents, and all of it well told in a sort of "Armchair Evening with Uncle Mark" tone - simply brilliant! It's always close for quick reference, and even if by now I'm well enough versed to detect the odd mistake, my respect and admiration will never cease. It's a true legacy!

And, of course, the book's great because it is about Miller! Congrats, fuzzi - you'll enjoy it!

About McDono(u)gh, I can't be sure but my feeling is McDonogh's right.