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ELVA's Legacy: From Chalk Lines to Champions · BREAK/FIX the Motorsports & Vehicle Enthusiast Variety Show

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Break Fix's History of Motorsports Series is brought to you in part
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by the International Motor Racing Research Center, as well as the
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Society of Automotive Historians, the Watkins Glen Area Chamber of
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Commerce, and the Argo Singer family.
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In this remastered centered conversation, the International Motor
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Racing Research Center hosts the Elva reunion at Watkins Glen, celebrating
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the historic connection between Elva cars and the famous racetrack.
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The event featured various speakers, including Yanos Wien, who authored a
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definitive book on Elva and Burette Birdie Martin, regarded as a leading ambassador
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for automobile racing and the original Elva distributor for the United States.
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Both presenters delve into the intricacies of Elvis's history from the inception by
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Frank Nichols in 1955, to its evolution and key milestones in racing history.
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Various key figures such as Chuck Dietrich, Carl Haass, and Mark Donahue's
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early career with Elva are highlighted.
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This center conversation includes personal anecdotes from racing experiences,
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descriptions of Elvis's marketing influence, challenges, innovations, and
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its esteem status in vintage motor sports.
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Today I'm JC Argetsinger, president of the International Motor Racing
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Research Center, and we are thrilled to have the Elva reunion, Elvis's
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and Watkins Glen go back a long time.
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Perhaps we can get my brother Michael, who's gonna be coming to
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the podium to tell you a little story that he had 1958 with an Elva.
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We have a number of Elva owners, and I'm gonna introduce them in a moment.
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Now I know the Elva owners are going to be going up to the track a little later on.
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Thank you for being here.
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I've said we have two wonderful speakers here, Giannis Wien, who's our major
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speaker who has written the definitive book on the Elva, and we were able
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to coax Birdie Martin to come out.
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Birdie, as you know, probably the greatest living ambassador for automobile racing.
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Delighted he's here.
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Birdie is the original EL owner.
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You know, he was the original Elva distributor.
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And if you saw our last newsletter or saw Jonas's book, there's a
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spectacular picture of Birdie with the Elva up on two wheels.
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And maybe he'll tell us what happened.
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It's frozen in in time and you wonder, did he write it back or did he roll it over?
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But thank you Birdie.
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And maybe, maybe you'll comment on that.
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Anyway, we have this wonderful speaker in this just incredible book.
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I didn't know that there could be so much material about Elvis's.
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It was so informative and so well researched.
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The photographs are just terrific, Jonathan.
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I'm thrilled to see it, but I'm not going to say much about these two gentlemen here
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because, um, Michael Argetsinger, the good looking Argo singer and the racing Argo
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singer, I'm, uh, unfortunately the Argo singer who was, had the black sheep of
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the family who was had a nine to five job.
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My brothers, Michael and Peter have raced extensively.
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Michael has raced, I probably shouldn't say this anymore because it dates
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you, but he started when he was nine.
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He's raced for four and a half decades and think he's raced at something
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like seven different countries, 54 tracks, and over 400 races.
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Not only is he good looking and he's a great driver, but he has, uh,
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produced four wonderful books on this sport, starting with the Walt Hanskin
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book, which really brings the story of road racing from its inception
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here in Watkins Glen after the war.
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And then he picks up with his two books on Mark Donahue.
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Mark was a protege of Walt Hanskin and Michael brings the story further.
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Now.
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Our latest book from Michael, which he and David Bull Publishing, have given up any
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profit on it, and it's all for the profit of the Motor Racing Research Center.
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It is the, uh, story of the US Grand Prix here at Watkins
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Glen from 1960 to 20 years.
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Through 1980.
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So without further ado, I'm going to turn the program over to Michael r ar Singer.
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Well, it's great to have a big brother who says nice things about you.
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That's a nice introduction.
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Indeed.
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I. I want to tell you what we're going to talk about today, and then I'm going
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to introduce the speakers and before I tell you about the program, I want to
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thank someone who isn't with us, but has been really helpful, extraordinarily
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helpful in putting this together.
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And that's Roger Dunbar from the uk.
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No one to most of you.
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I believe he really worked a lot behind the scenes and he
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almost was able to make the trip.
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Yano Schwimm.
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Finn is going to talk a little more specifically about Roger,
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but Roger, thank you very much.
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Now the program today I is really exciting and I just feel terrifically
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honored to be introducing these two people who I admire so much.
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Our keynote speaker is Yosh Wien, who has come from Seattle and Bette Martin.
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Brady Martin, as he is known all over the world, came out from Chicago.
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Yosh will keynote it.
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Bri's going to come in a couple of times into the middle of the program, talk
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about, uh, some of his involvement.
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Birdie also was, in addition to having been the original Elva
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importer to this country, wore so many other hats in American racing.
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He was the series chief steward for the CCAs TransAm in its golden days.
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The 1970, which was the seminal year for that later, was then the
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uh, series Chief Steward for the Can-Am, which we all dearly recall.
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This only touches on birdie's life from 1983 actually to 2006.
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Birdie was the President of AKIs.
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AKIs is an acronym for Automobile Competition
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Committee of the United States.
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It's a tremendous honor to hold that position, but it's a really
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difficult job to maintain.
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The AKIs is the American Delegate to the FIA.
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The FIA.
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As you know, doles out the international dates, makes all the rules.
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It's where it all emanates from, and America has many competing
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sanctioning bodies, but where they come together is in AKIs.
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They're all on the board.
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And with a man like Bernie Martin there to keep them all talking to one
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another, the international dates and so many other things are doled out.
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Birdie's position with his much loved Anne, who we dearly miss, ran AKIs.
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And so many of you, if you applied for an international license during that period,
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or you worked with Anne and, and Birdie, but Birdie was chief steward at many of
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the World Grand Prix around the world.
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He was active in Paris on the FIA itself.
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He was vice president of FIA, in addition to being president
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of the American delegation.
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And he was in fact the longest serving vice president, uh,
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that the FIA has ever had.
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He also headed up the International Records Commission and the FIA is
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the ultimate verifier, if you will, of land speed records, uh, speed
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records in general, and Birdie was president of that commission.
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Again, he was one of the founding members of the FIA Trust.
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Now we say Chief Steward in Europe, they say clerk of the course.
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But as I mentioned, many, many of the World Formula One Grand PRIs and of
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course, birdie operated during that period when Formula One was in a dynamic period.
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It was a, it was a time of great change, of great controversy.
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We were so fortunate as Americans to have someone who has the wit, the charm
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and the negotiating abilities to keep these very difficult groups of people
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all agreeing to do the right thing.
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So we're gonna hear from Birdie in just a few minutes and it's gonna be a delight.
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Our keynote speaker will be an equal delight.
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Yosh Wien is one of America's great researchers and writers
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in the world of Motorsport.
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He has been a prolific writer, and that's really something to have
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published as many books as Yosh has published, because his books are
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incredibly well researched, they're in depth, they're respected worldwide.
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His background is, uh, is a PhD and he's, he's an academic, but really, he's a,
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he's a racer at heart, and, uh, he is known and and admired around the world.
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He's a third generation car guy, a member of a historic Austro-Hungarian family.
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Yanos came here at about age four.
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So he is in addition to his love of motor sports, he's a real baseball nut.
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Yanos has been to more minor league ballparks around America, and I think all
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but maybe one or two major league parks.
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And even on this trip, he's already got to the Syracuse
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Stadium and the, uh, Buffalo one.
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So he, he never misses a chance.
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He loves minor leagues equally with the majors.
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Interesting family.
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His grandfather held the Austrian driver's license, number one, and
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in fact, in taking the test, he had to give the instructions to the
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Vienna policemen because they had no idea what they were examining.
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He learned great engineering skills from his father, mechanical aptitude from his
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brother, and he did some club racing and he says that taught him he didn't have
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driving skills of Austrian such as LADA and rent, but we could all say that we
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didn't have talents like LADA and Rent.
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He has been consulting all over the country.
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In addition to his writing, he's a consultant regularly in, in Naples,
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Florida for the Collier Museum, for the Bruce McCaw collection and others.
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And he is sought after by car owners and historians, literally all over the world.
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I am very proud to, uh, be a friend of Jan OSHA's, as well as fellow author,
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and we share the same publisher, David Bull Publishing, and we were together in
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Beverly Hills this past December at the Peterson Museum for the Motor Press Guilds
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Award, the Dean Bachelor Award and David Bull, to his great credit had two of the
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three finalists, and the winner was Yosh.
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I really have so much more to say about both of these men, but
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you really want to hear them.
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So I am going to ask Yosh to come to the podium.
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Thank you very much both to Michael and jc.
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In fact, jcs a little issue there with having additional elbow owners.
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I'm so familiar with that syndrome that you work hard on something and then
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when it's actually out there, all of a sudden more information comes your way.
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It's always actually a pleasure rather than a problem.
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In fact, of course, here, it's a pleasure that we have additional Elva owners.
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I found that from the very first book that I did, which is called Time
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in Two Seats, that once I finished that and people started coming
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forward, well, you either got this wrong or you forgot about this, or.
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Here's some additional information on this or that race.
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First time that happened to me, I was kinda a little discouraged,
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like, oh, did I drop the ball here?
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Or something like that.
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More often than not, I would be comforted by other people
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saying, no, no, no, you got it.
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All right.
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But next time around, here's a little extra added information and, and
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that's interestingly part of this whole process, process of discovery, I call it.
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I get asked a lot about sort of the writing process and the creative
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process publishing process.
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All these have a lot of little nuances to them, which I can go on for hours.
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It, this maybe a separate topic altogether, but I
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think at the four of this.
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Is really the joy of learning.
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Just like those little tidbits that come to you after the fact.
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I've learned that what really is the joy of that is you learn something new.
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There's no such thing as an old dog doesn't learn new tricks.
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That's how we enjoy getting older, is learning more each day, and hopefully
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that gets incorporated into these books.
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It certainly is the case with Elva.
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I didn't know much about Elva to start with.
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I know a lot more now.
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There's still a lot more to know about this morning.
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People were coming up to me and giving me extra little bits, whether it was about
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their car or interesting tidbits they accumulated that I didn't know about.
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Always a process of learning.
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The other maybe issue of why do we do what we do that is have an
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interest in motor sport history and is it really worthwhile after all?
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It's not rocket science.
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We're not discovering a cure for some disease.
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Something like that.
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How important is it to society?
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Well, true.
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It doesn't rank up with.
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Some of those other very valuable enterprises that people undertake, but
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this is important when you think that the automobile is the 20th century's most
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significant technological achievement.
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It changed everything from the 19th century or 20th century.
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It was a sea change.
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Most of that came about because of the automobile.
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Not all of it.
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Good.
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Mind you, there are utopias and dystopias created at the same time and in some
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small way, that's what we're looking at.
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We're looking at that history, that 20th century and the most significant part of
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it we're looking at from a motor sports point of view, particularly from the
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recreational element of it, which is a major part of automotive history, was
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how it was used as a recreational tool.
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That's not insignificant, but it's also important to have
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fun while we're doing it.
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And of course we're all having fun while we're doing it.
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This is, by the way, a conversation I often have with a friend of
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mine in the uk, Doug Nye, who you may know of his books.
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He's also a very well known historian, Motorsport historian.
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Whenever we sometimes share a podium and talk about these sorts of things and his
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sort of thing is, well, we in in England don't do this kind of naval gazing.
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We just get on with it.
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Have a lot of fun and he's got a a really good point about that.
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Just one other comment about the creative process in general, and we'll
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get to the meat of the talk here.
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That, and this is again, because I periodically get asked this sort of thing
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about, well, how do you do these things anyway, I don't know if this would apply
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to Michael as well, his creative process.
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And just like in any enterprise that you undertake any kinda work, you hit
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roadblocks, you hit problems, you go, how do I write this next paragraph,
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this next chapter, in my case, it's usually the next caption to a photo.
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Those are, to me, are always challenging and you hit roadblocks.
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And sometimes you want to practice iron discipline.
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I'm gonna sit here at the keyboard until I get this right.
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Just like you practice sometimes iron discipline at fixing the leak in the,
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uh, kitchen sink, and you're gonna get it done now no matter what happens.
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And what often happens is you break the nut or whatever it is, or you're
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working on the car, you break the nut off rather than accomplish it.
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So you have to sort of step back from that.
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And I kind of call it the pleasure principle of creativity.
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I've only lately learned that there's actually a neuroscientific aspect to this.
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I don't know all the details of that, but you have to step back and
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do something that's ultimately very pleasurable, that doesn't involve a
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lot of brain activity, necessarily.
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Relax and let the creative process flow through You.
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Let the two things connected have never connected before.
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My personal preference is a morning shower.
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Think of how many times in the shower in the morning you might be dwelling
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on what you have to do that day, but it's a very pleasurable moment.
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Nobody's bothering you.
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You're by yourself.
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You get to think about what you're doing during the day, and you inevitably connect
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two dots that never been connected before about your particular problem of the day.
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I use that a lot in the creative process day before I'm stuck on some
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paragraph the next morning in a shower.
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Go, oh, that's a solution to that.
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Sometimes by the time I get to pad of paper, I've forgotten what
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it was, but, but that's very much part of the creative process.
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And like I say, I understand from neuroscientists that there's
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actually a part of the brain that goes into play at those times and
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works on connecting those dots.
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The publishing process is a different sort of thing because that
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involves a lot of give and take.
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Michael mentioned he and I are really, truly privileged to share what I consider
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absolutely the best publisher in the world as far as motor racing, motor
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sports books, and that's David Bull.
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I think Michael has maybe a little different relationship with him than I do.
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David is very exacting and he and I have had years and years of debates,
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just hours and hours worth of debates about how to do sometimes literally
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a particular sentence, position of photographs, something like that.
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And there's a lot of give and take on that.
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But the end of the day, the product wouldn't be the product
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without somebody like David Bone.
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A lot of tribute to him.
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Quick tribute to a couple people that I've gotten to know, particularly here
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in the center, because this is not the first time I've been to the center.
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I think there's people like Bill Green who has just been a marvelous
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in terms of helping me put together a lot of the data that goes into this.
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Been privileged to meet people like Max Nisha, Randy, Kevin, Josh, Glenda, all
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the other people involved in the center.
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You have a treasure here.
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That's amazing.
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A treasure not only in the facilities, but a treasure in
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terms of the people that are here.
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There are a marvelous group of people that do really committed and do a good job.
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That people thing is also, by the way, something that I think
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drives a lot of this history.
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Yes.
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The history of motor sports and automotive history in general is one
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about lug nuts and torque settings and carburetors and the like, but it's really
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about the people on all of this, the histories of the people involved, people
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like Birdie, Martin sitting here, and characters left and right are really
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what this history is ultimately about.
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That's what we carry on the next generation to tell the stories of the
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people who were involved there were.
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Good people, not so good people, characters of all sorts.
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And in all the work that I've done, I've discovered I go into it with sort
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of a nuts and bolts approach, and at the end of the day, come out of it.
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The respect is really for the people.
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As for Elva, why Elva?
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Well, maybe a little bit of an introduction to Elva for those of you.
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I know there are many Elva owners here who know of many cases better than I do.
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But for those of you who may not be familiar with the Elva, mark Elva was
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a British mark that existed for a very short period of time, from roughly
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1955 to roughly 1965, although there's a little bit of fading in and fading
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out for and after that, but really for a short period of time, it was
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a contemporary of other makes, such as Cooper Lotus, Lola, particularly
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those and a few others rival to those.
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It came out of a particular muu of the early fifties British scene.
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The economy in Britain wasn't that strong, but the technology was there.
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And again, in terms of the people, there was a lot of expertise
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into how to go about things.
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And we'll see a little bit about that.
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And that's just a very, very short overview of what Elva is as a mark.
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It's a unique mark in many ways.
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It's both unique and it's also typical.
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It's typical of that time in England.
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Different automobile constructors won't really call it manufacturer,
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but it's also unique 'cause it has its own particular peculiarities.
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I came into this project actually somewhat later down the line.
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I didn't originate the project.
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A project was originated by two Falls, one of which mentioned before Roger Dunbar in
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in England and Jeff Allison in Colorado.
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They had undertaken to produce the history of Elva and did
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an amazing amount of legwork.
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They interviewed many of the key people.
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Thankfully, they interviewed some of the key people who were no longer
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with us and passed away before I got involved in the project.
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They did a lot of the nuts and bolts work involved in getting
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the information, but they never got around to actually writing it.
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So I came in, I was asked to do the writing of the book, which of course
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then as I said before, got me involved in learning as to what Elva was.
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I mean, I had a rough idea before, but to learning the real nuts and bolts of
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Elva and sort of took it over from there.
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There's really one person behind Elva more than anybody
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else, and that's Frank Nichols.
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Frank grew up in Sussex County, south of England.
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He was a son of a grocer.
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He was in the army in World War ii, served in Al Maine, was injured
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Al Maine and gained a lot of mechanical skills during the war.
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Brought those back to England after he mustered out.
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So he's in the south of England, Becks Hills, the name of the village,
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which is very close to Hastings, where William the Conquer landed in
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10 66 of kind of a historic area.
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Also historic Automotively.
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That's where the, one of the very first automotive competitions
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took place in England in 1903.
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So he mustered out of the, uh, military, out of the army, and quickly developed
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an interest in automotive things because as I say, he developed the skill.
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He opened up a garage repairing cars, called the London Road
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Garage on London Road in Beville.
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And quickly became interested in racing, and this was where I
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would say Elva, this is a common occurrence that time in England.
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Young men develop mechanical aptitude during the war.
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Now have a little bit of spending money, maybe develop some kind of
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an enterprise related to automobiles and get interested in motor racing.
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Frank did that.
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He drove a Ford 10, which is a very common car of that era in racing.
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He also drove a Lotus Six, A Lotus six, with a Ford 10 engine in it.
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Modest success.
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His driving skills were never that particularly great, but he quickly
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became involved with a fall named wits and also indirectly with Harry
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Westlake, who you may know of the name from a lot of automotive development.
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In the 1960s, they developed a very unique part of the power plant.
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In addition to the Ford 10, a hop up kit, if you will, an inlet over
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exhaust valve kit that you could put on the top of the Ford engine.
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Increase his power a little bit.
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As a result of this, he also decided, well, I should really commission
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a car to go with this inlet over outlet head, and that was called the
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CSM, the Chapman Sports Motor Car.
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This is a one-off car and the CSM special was quite fast
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again because of his driving.
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Didn't necessarily win a lot of races, but.
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It was lightning fast attracted a lot of attention.
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People wanna know, well, how can we get the same thing?
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So he ended up going to business selling those kits that you saw,
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the inlet over exhaust kits, and those actually became a mainstay of
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the company for a number of years.
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They were sold up until roughly 19 60, 61, about the time that that
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engine, the Ford 10 was really, became obsolete, no longer used, but they
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were popular, sold all over the world.
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Not yet Elva.
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The term Elva really wasn't born yet at this point.
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But of course people liked this concept and they wonder, well,
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where can we get one of these?
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So you decided to go into production actually producing
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what became known as the Elva.
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Well, the Elva name, initially it was just gonna be the LRG
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car for London Road Garage.
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Not a very pleasant name.
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At one point he had this friend Bill Murphy, Bill's brother.
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Jim looked at the car one day and said, Elva the French, for she goes, and the.
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It was contracted to ELVA and thus we're forever have the name Elva.
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Fairly crude, almost cycle fender car.
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It was very much, again, the image of that era, kind of a kit car, but now
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becoming a little bit more sophisticated.
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Orders came in fairly quick on this.
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This was indeed a very successful car, successful at this point, no
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longer for Frank Nichols because he was out of driving himself.
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He was taken over by people such as Richard Maning fellow who was
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tragically killed in the tourist trophy.
22:38
In an elbow is actually the first of, I believe four
22:41
fatalities ever occur in an Elva.
22:44
Now the orders began to expand.
22:46
There's another innovation here on this car, and that is a fiberglass body.
22:51
Not all of the early elves have fiberglass.
22:53
Many of them were aluminum.
22:54
But that was, uh, again, kind of an innovative concept.
22:57
At the time, Frank wasn't trying to be technically advanced.
23:01
He was always looking at everything from a price point of view.
23:04
And that's actually one of the things that sets Elva apart
23:07
from some of his contemporaries, Lola Lotus Cooper and the like.
23:11
Frank was this kind of a stingy sort of fellow, and he liked to
23:15
build things to cost the others.
23:17
Lotus typically would be going for speed, and consequently, the Lotus cars were
23:22
famous for being difficult to drive.
23:25
All those were something easy that you could get into right away, but
23:28
because of this kind of stinginess, there were several factors about this.
23:33
One of them was that there were no ever any Elva factory racing teams, or really
23:37
nothing that you could really directly point to an Elva factory racing team.
23:41
There was adequate servicing.
23:43
In fact, he was known for being very good with communicating
23:46
with the purchasers out there.
23:48
The technical advances were kind of slow and coming.
23:51
It was many, many years before he would introduce things such as disc brakes,
23:56
but everything was always focused on this price point, point of view.
24:00
There was also another important element, and this is more external matters
24:04
than internal home market in England was never particularly strong, or at
24:09
least not strong in the early years.
24:10
This has also coincided with the Suez Canal crisis when there was particularly
24:15
a clamp on the English economy, so it became a period of export or parish.
24:19
In order for any small manufacturer, small constructor like Elva to survive.
24:24
They really had to export quickly.
24:26
Looked at the American market.
24:27
Well, one of the benefits is that the car got really good reviews in
24:31
the English press, and of course the English press was fairly widely
24:34
read, at least read as a cult matter in the us and one of the people that
24:38
picked up on that was a fellow named Chuck Dietrich out of Sandusky, Ohio.
24:42
Chuck bought one of the first elvas into the us.
24:45
No one.
24:46
Necessarily the very first one, but one of the first to North America at
24:49
least, and he became quickly one of the champions of Elva for years and years.
24:54
He was one of the main importers and there were actually many importers
24:58
and dealers and like, it's a very convoluted story in that regard.
25:01
Became one of the many people involved at this early stage.
25:05
One of the key people, Chuck actually stayed with the mark for
25:08
many, many years in most cases.
25:10
He was actually the imported, the very first of each of the successive models.
25:15
He did later on, sort of veer away and took a little vacation and drove
25:19
a bobsy for a while, then returned again to Elva in later years.
25:23
He was a very key figure in the early part of this.
25:27
Another key figure who you'll meet in a moment here will be Birdie Martin.
25:30
But before Birdie there's also Frank Bike and he had a very unusual car.
25:35
This was a car that had a Chevy VA crammed into this.
25:39
My understanding is the car went great in the straight line, but not much else.
25:43
And that was another thing about Elvis.
25:45
There are always all kinds of experimentation that went on.
25:48
We're moving now kind of into the Mark two era of the Elva, and as
25:52
you can see, it's starting to get a little bit more streamlined,
25:56
a little bit more sophisticated.
25:58
Didion suspension comes into play.
26:00
You'll see shots of these very distinctive Elva black mag wheels that remain
26:06
distinctive for Elva for years to come.
26:08
Another thing about these cars is that when we talk about these changes in
26:12
design and all that, all this was done in a very, very kind of intuitive way.
26:17
Keith Marsden was the main designer you saw in that earlier shot.
26:21
He basically just drew chalk lines on the floor and that's
26:23
what the chassis was built around.
26:25
There were no drawings, certainly no computer aid design
26:29
kind of thing in those days.
26:30
Nothing of anything from more modern period.
26:32
In fact, Keith Marsden's kind of interesting character in and
26:35
of himself because he really enjoyed this kind of work.
26:39
And in later years when a company called Trojan came into play and took over some
26:45
of the Elva production and it became more of a corporate environment, didn't
26:49
suit Keith Mars in particularly well, and he left at the company at that point.
26:53
But he was a critical factor in these early days.
26:55
To give you a little bit of a flavor of what this is like, a fell out of
26:59
Washington dc Walter Dixon becomes involved with the Elva enterprise and with
27:04
somewhat chaotic results at that point.
27:06
But when he became involved, he sent one of his people over Arthur Tweeddale,
27:11
who himself was an expatriate Brit.
27:13
Back over at England to have a look at the Elva factory and
27:16
report back as to what it was like.
27:18
Tweeddale goes over there and comes back and reports to his boss Dixon,
27:22
and said, well, you know, there's a couple welding torches over there
27:26
and there's a couple guys assembling things over here and there's a
27:29
radiator guy over here and engine guy pulling in the engines over here.
27:34
And somehow in the middle of this, the cars just happened.
27:37
And that's very typical of this.
27:40
And sort of another side is, which is also so typically English.
27:43
Uh, when Michael and I were in Los Angeles back in December, we were very happy to be
27:48
interviewed by Jay Leno and his website, not on his TV show, but on his website.
27:53
And part of that, Jay had a lot of comments.
27:56
In fact, in the segment where he interviews me, these comments didn't
27:59
quite make it into the final cut.
28:01
But it's funny because Jay started telling stories as only Jay Leno
28:04
could about his own experiences with English manufacturers.
28:08
And he said he understood when I would point out these things about how
28:12
quirky the English are about things.
28:14
He goes, oh yeah, well one time I had to call over there for
28:18
some parts for one of his cars.
28:20
They said over there we're kind of busy right now.
28:22
Could you call back later?
28:23
And he's thinking, oh, like Thursday or Tuesday or something like that.
28:26
And he said, well, when should I call back?
28:27
He says, well, maybe next November.
28:30
And that's so typically English.
28:32
And then he would go over and visit and he goes, yeah, there's a tea kettle here.
28:35
And they're too busy having tea to bother with.
28:37
Things like getting to your part right away.
28:39
Another instance like that where he called over for some part and they said,
28:42
oh no, we don't make that part anymore.
28:44
I says, why not?
28:45
I says, we are getting so many orders for that.
28:47
It was such a bother that we just we to stop making the part.
28:51
And I thought, what could be more English than this?
28:53
And this, this suffuses so much of Elva history.
28:56
So the mark two things are getting a little bit more sophisticated,
29:00
but it's still very much the intuitive chalk marks kind of thing.
29:03
One of the things here is the engine types.
29:05
I mentioned earlier on that the Ford engine was kind of
29:08
commonly used on the very early.
29:10
That changed fairly quickly because really the engine to have in those
29:14
days was the Coventry climax, FWA featherweight 1100 cc engine.
29:19
That was really the thing to have.
29:22
So for a while, these mark twos and the like, most of them came
29:25
with the Coventry climax engine.
29:27
There were all kinds of variants in there as a couple people at a Maserati
29:30
and a few Alpha Rome males and like.
29:32
But the Coventry climax became sort of the most common thing.
29:35
Well, one of the problems with the Coventry climax was that at that point,
29:39
Lotus is also becoming a big power.
29:41
Lotus was a competitor to Elva, and they were trying to put the
29:45
Gabo on Elva getting, and anybody else getting the Coventry climax.
29:49
So Frank Nichols had to look around for other suppliers, and one of the
29:54
people he came to talk to is a fellow by the name of Archie Butterworth.
29:58
He was one of the most colorful characters in this whole story.
30:01
Archie also, by the way, learned many of his skills during the war.
30:06
He was in a very unusual way during World War ii.
30:08
He was in charge of inventorying and studying, captured
30:14
material from the enemy.
30:16
So by studying these, you of course then be able to give information
30:19
back to his superiors as to how to better improve the British armaments.
30:25
And at one point there he was sifting through some of the material
30:29
and a German bomber came over and started strafing that area.
30:33
And in typical British fashion, he goes, oh, this is so bloody annoying.
30:37
And he scrambling around, reaches down, picks up this Luger that's
30:40
lying on the ground points the Luger up at the belly of the plane, boom,
30:44
shoots it, and down comes the plane.
30:46
And for which he won several awards for that.
30:48
So that's the kind of character he was.
30:50
Later on when he became involved in automotive things, he had
30:53
good mechanical abilities.
30:55
He built a really interesting car with an interesting engine handle like garbage.
30:59
He ended up selling that car to Bill Milliken, who heard about
31:03
before revered Bill Milliken here.
31:05
Bill basically bought that car as a good study of what not to do.
31:10
So he learned that from Archie Butterworth.
31:12
Archie also had a, was known for carrying a fully stocked
31:17
bar and the boot of his Jaguar.
31:19
And first thing he'd do when he had arrived at a race circuit would
31:22
be to, of course, open that up.
31:24
So at this point now, we're still kind of early in the Elva history.
31:29
They've really only produced a few hundred cars.
31:31
Many of them now are coming to the US though that's a
31:34
big, big part of the market.
31:36
So there's still very few cars, but now we've got a couple of Americans
31:41
have become deeply involved in this.
31:43
I mentioned Chuck Dietrich.
31:44
Another fellow was Carl Haas.
31:46
Very, very major player in this.
31:48
He came an importer in the uh, Midwest, and another fellow was Birdie Martin.
31:52
And since Birdie is here, I'll let Birdie talk about his
31:55
particular era as far as Elva goes.
32:06
Yano talk here was so interesting.
32:08
I'd like to rush through what I'm gonna say to hear more
32:11
about what he has to tell about.
32:13
I've got a few little comments I have to make and I was reminded today of
32:18
something that Chris Komack, he told me one time when he was hired to do
32:23
one of his first major race events.
32:26
He was looking forward to it and he'd studied, you know,
32:29
what talk about and so forth.
32:31
So as they came on the air, the other man that he was working with,
32:35
I don't recall which one it was, but he was a well-known sports announcer
32:39
and play by play man and so forth.
32:42
And they started off and this other fellow said, Chris, tell me
32:45
what are we gonna see here today?
32:47
He went into the study he had done.
32:49
He said, well, you're gonna see they've just changed the
32:52
ride height on these cars.
32:54
They've done some other things here to allow less fuel consumption.
32:58
He said, we've got some new drivers here.
33:01
He went on and named a number of things that would happen.
33:04
All of a sudden the uh, technical people said.
33:07
Cut.
33:07
Cut.
33:08
Chris said, what's that?
33:09
He said, well, that we, we are just doing a preview of the opening.
33:12
That was just it.
33:13
But we're now ready to go on live, so let's go back and start again.
33:17
So the fellow comes on who's the network announcer, didn't know very
33:21
much about Motorsport, but he said, well, ladies and gentlemen we're here
33:25
today and we're gonna see these cars are running with new fuel rules on
33:29
it, and they've got this and they've got that and they've got everything.
33:32
And he repeated everything that Chris Conac he had said in the warmup.
33:36
And then he turned to Chris and he said, now Chris, what
33:38
do you think Chris told me?
33:40
I didn't know what to say at all.
33:41
That's kind of the way I feel right now.
33:44
I think Yanos, you've told a lot of good stories here that I might have
33:47
been counting on, but with Elva and Nichols and so forth, there's a lot of.
33:51
Also, I have to say, uh, after I heard Michael introduce us and jc,
33:57
I thought, geez, I wish I could go and listen to those two guys.
34:00
They must know what they're talking about.
34:02
I was very fortunate.
34:03
I lived in a great era.
34:04
I was 21 years old in a great era and a great time to be living
34:08
in Motorsport and so forth.
34:11
I look out and I think these are Elva people.
34:14
I don't remember Elva people looking this old, you know?
34:18
'cause we dealt with guys that couldn't afford a lotus at the time and maybe
34:22
they could get a, uh, elbow or something.
34:24
And they were all pretty much younger guys just starting out.
34:27
Many of 'em went a long way too.
34:29
Unfortunately, we've lost many of them recent years.
34:33
I have the excuse that couple months here, I'm gonna be 83 years old.
34:41
Fortunately, uh, I feel very good.
34:44
I feel my health feels very good.
34:45
My doctors tell me I'm pretty good and so forth.
34:48
I hope to be around a good bit more because I really have had a
34:52
wonderful period in my life here.
34:54
Not many people can spend every day working on their passion, which is
34:58
motor sport and cars and people.
35:01
And that gets to another important part of it, people,
35:03
and that's what it's all about.
35:05
And the Elva people were very unique.
35:07
They were quite different than people that bought Lotus's and that, and a few
35:11
of the people that bought Lotus's swung over and bought Elvis, and that they
35:15
didn't have the same engineering and the same background as Lotus might have had.
35:20
But it was interesting.
35:21
I have to touch a bit on Frank Nichols too.
35:24
Uh, you went into his youth and so forth.
35:27
But I was over in, uh, England in 1953.
35:32
Right after, uh, the war was over, I visited some of the people over there.
35:36
In fact, I bought an engine in Italy for a friend and did a few things,
35:40
and I visited with John Cooper.
35:43
At that time.
35:43
I met John, and I believe I met Frank at that time, but I
35:47
didn't make a big impression.
35:48
He didn't have an Elva name on him or anything, but we
35:52
referred back to that time.
35:53
I did remember though, at that time, that John Cooper said to
35:57
me, I wanna show you something.
35:59
We just got the first one, and it was the FWA Coventry Climax Engine,
36:04
and he just had gotten the first one.
36:06
And as most of you all know, that was really a variation from a water pump
36:10
that was developed during the war, during the Battle of Britain and so forth.
36:14
And it was a very light engine for a pump that could really put out some
36:18
water, and it was very effective.
36:20
And that's why they built an overhead cam type engine for it.
36:24
He showed me that engine, and little did I know how much that would be a
36:27
part of my life in a few more years because I ended up being a distributor
36:32
for not only the elbow, but for Coventry climax parts and so forth.
36:36
Even had Weber carburetors at one time too.
36:39
I started my own racing actually in the 1947 in the very early years
36:44
right after the war, Andy Gran Elli in Chicago where I lived in that era.
36:49
Andy uh, formed a group called the Hurricane Hot Rod Association.
36:53
I had one of the first hot rods in Chicago, 32 High Boy Ford.
36:58
So I joined that and Andy was a great politician.
37:02
He got us an opportunity to run a soldier field in Chicago and even got us
37:07
a thousand dollars purse to run there.
37:09
It turned out that this hot rod racing really caught on and that first race
37:14
at Soldiers Field, we had 40,000 people attend and they probably paid a dollar
37:19
and a quarter or something to get in, but the promoter made an awful lot of money
37:23
and I can tell you that the second time we raced there, we got 40% of the gate.
37:28
Andy learned that very quickly and that was kind of an interesting thing.
37:31
I went off to college and first they got got down in Albuquerque.
37:35
I was going to the University of New Mexico.
37:37
I walked down the street.
37:39
I went by a garage and it had a midget racer inside there.
37:42
Well, I went in and I told 'em that I was a great hot rod
37:46
racer from Chicago and so forth.
37:48
I found out these fellas had just bought this midget and
37:52
they didn't have a driver yet.
37:53
So I got a job driving.
37:55
While I was in college there, drove for them for about a year or so.
37:58
I remember the first time we went out to test, I knew that you held the brake
38:03
on on a midget and they pushed you off and your wheels were locked up.
38:06
And once it got moving a bit, you take the brake off.
38:09
And I knew all that so that it looked like I knew what I was doing.
38:13
I made about two laps and spun.
38:15
I came in and they said, what happened?
38:17
And I said, well, you know, I'm used to driving on blacktop.
38:20
I'm not a dirt driver really.
38:22
And so I got by that had a lot of fun.
38:24
I made some money while I was going to college.
38:27
And of course I couldn't tell my parents that I was making this kind
38:30
of money because they wouldn't like the idea that I was driving race cars.
38:34
And I hadn't told them that yet.
38:36
Anyhow, they eventually accepted it all.
38:38
In fact, they went to one of my first races in a sports car.
38:42
I bought an MG dc, went to a race up at Wilmont Hills, which was a
38:47
brand new facility they had just bought or had ran and leased it for.
38:51
Number of years I drove the TC in the race.
38:54
I think I finished back about fourth or fifth or something.
38:57
I broke my tail driving that car as hard as I could.
39:00
And I got home and my father said to me, he said, Sonny, he
39:03
said, I like the way you drive.
39:05
You're very consistent and you're not rushing at all.
39:08
And I thought, there's something wrong about this because
39:12
I was trying awful hard.
39:14
Anyhow, Frank Bike was one of my very good friends.
39:18
We went to high school together and so forth, and uh, he was a very close friend.
39:22
Frank was very mechanically inclined and very handy in the shop.
39:27
And he did machining, he did designing and everything else.
39:30
He came from a family that produced candy and, and they were a very
39:34
famous family in Chicago area, maybe around the country in those days.
39:38
The Wiz Bar, which was a chocolate marshmallow candy and that.
39:42
But he was very good at things and he had picked up an Austin engine, I think it
39:47
was an A 40 or something like that, Austin engine, and he was doing a complete job
39:53
on it, porting it and everything else.
39:55
Frank, what you gonna do with it?
39:56
He said, well, I've seen an ad or a little article in a magazine, a British
40:02
magazine, and there's an Elva car there.
40:04
And he said, I think maybe that's something I could use to put
40:08
it into, in fact, I'm not sure it even had the name Elva yet.
40:11
I said, geez, that sounds interesting.
40:14
I said, let me go.
40:14
I'll write a letter back to them and gimme the address.
40:17
And he did.
40:17
And so I wrote back and wrote to Frank Nichols and he sent
40:21
me some stuff and on the car.
40:23
I said, why don't we buy that and then we'll buy another
40:25
complete car with an engine in it.
40:27
And so I wrote back to Frank Nichols and Frank said, listen, we just got a
40:32
first of these Coventry climax engines.
40:35
And he said, this is the hot setup.
40:36
Are you still interested in two cars?
40:38
I said, yeah, but one of them we don't need an engine for.
40:41
We just need the one.
40:42
And he said, but you're gonna buy two.
40:44
I said, yes, most days.
40:45
We sent telegrams too, you know, he came back and he said, you're buying two,
40:49
so you're now the dealer for that area.
40:53
So.
40:54
But he told me that he had dealt with Chuck Dietrich, and I knew Chuck because
40:58
I had raced Mgs against him and Susie, his wife, and that I said, that's great.
41:04
We will work together on this and I'll help and we're gonna get some
41:07
parts and stuff in and so forth.
41:09
And Chuck was a good friend and, and a very accomplished driver.
41:13
Very, very good.
41:14
The market area in Chicago at that point, economy was pretty good and so
41:18
forth was a lot better than it was in Sandusky, Ohio, where Chuck was located.
41:23
So I think we sold a lot more cars and he did a lot more racing.
41:27
The problem for me was when these two cars came over.
41:30
And you saw the one that Frank Bike ended up putting the Chevrolet engine
41:34
in and took five years to finish it.
41:36
And the other one, when it arrived, Frank Nichols came over at the same
41:40
time to the United States and he was gonna visit us and visit somebody in
41:44
Texas that had been riding to him.
41:47
So we arranged to meet Frank at the airport in, uh, New York when it arrived.
41:52
And we picked up the car the night or so before and got it loaded
41:56
and on a trailer and so forth.
41:58
We went and we met him at the airport and he said, I'm going to Texas
42:03
and then I'm gonna come back to you all because you'll be on the road
42:06
going back to Chicago with this.
42:08
So he said, could you take me over to Newark Airport?
42:12
And I said, sure.
42:12
That's no problem.
42:13
We can do that.
42:14
So we went over to Newark Airport and we were asking a lot of questions about
42:18
what was happening in the racing scene.
42:20
And believe me, in in England, the uh, 1100 G modified we
42:25
called here in the United States.
42:27
Was a hot class over there.
42:28
I mean, they had the future race drivers driving in that.
42:32
So, uh, we were talking about the racing and waitress comes back and brings
42:36
breakfast that we had and Frank got his grapefruit and it had a sparkler sticking
42:41
in it and it was glowing like this.
42:43
And I always remember that 'cause Frank said, I really don't know.
42:47
He said, is this how you eat grapefruit over here?
42:51
Other than his war ventures, which I don't think got him
42:53
to very many nice restaurants.
42:55
He hadn't really been in a place that was a little fancy.
42:58
So anyhow, we did that.
43:00
Frank came back from Texas.
43:01
I don't think he was terribly successful with that venture.
43:04
But anyhow, he came back and we met him in Chicago.
43:08
We had a great time with Frank.
43:09
We talk about what he was able to do and what he did.
43:12
He wasn't really a great engineer, but he was capable.
43:16
But he didn't reckon that he was an engineer anyhow.
43:19
He figured that somebody, they, you'll have to hire or use who he already has.
43:24
But there was something about Frank that you had confidence in him
43:27
that he could do what he was saying he was gonna do and he had plans.
43:31
He wanted to run right up there with Lotus and with Cooper and so forth.
43:35
And I have to tell you, even in his greatest success, well,
43:38
Colin Chapman, I, he died.
43:40
I actually talked to him a few hours before he died.
43:43
I was in Paris at the time and he was coming out of a meeting of the,
43:47
uh, what was the Foca at that time?
43:49
The Formula One people?
43:51
I was with Max Mosley and a couple other people I knew Max
43:54
from Watkins Glen here in that.
43:56
Chapman was never very accommodating to anybody.
43:59
I mean, he, he really, he almost thought you had to have a slot where
44:02
you could put a quarter in and then he would talk to you or something.
44:06
Years later when Lola was first coming along and started to win all
44:10
the races in England, I remember I asked him at Sebring that year, what
44:14
do you think about this Lola car?
44:16
He said, oh, it's fly by night.
44:18
They just built a couple cars and they're not gonna matter.
44:21
They're not gonna mean very much.
44:23
Which was interesting because a third friend that I went to school with at
44:27
that time was a fellow by the name of Al Ross, who was my mechanic.
44:30
And he wasn't a very good mechanic, but he was a good worker, which
44:33
you really need at that point.
44:35
And he imported the very first Lola into the United States.
44:39
I, he didn't tell me, in fact, until after it was well on
44:42
the way and I went with him.
44:44
In fact, when he cleared it through customs in Chicago, it was a super car.
44:49
But I always thought of what Chapman had said earlier that year
44:52
when I talked to him about it.
44:54
Frank was always very good about people, but.
44:56
He re recognized he was working his way up in the pecking order of
45:00
motorsport, but he did very well.
45:03
He impressed a lot of the journalists.
45:05
I don't know, he got some really good write-ups on his things and
45:08
that did very well with that.
45:10
It was an interesting time and I started to say when these cars came over, it
45:14
seemed like Frank Nichols would always come over 'cause he knew he'd get another
45:18
order from me when he came over and.
45:20
I would generally take that new car that I just got, which was like the mark one
45:25
that we ordered complete with an engine.
45:27
And I would sell that car because I wanted the later one, and then I'd get
45:31
the later one and then I would sell that one because somebody else would buy it and
45:35
I would get the newer one all the time.
45:37
But I did squeeze a few races in on some of them when they were new.
45:41
And I was very fortunate and it did pretty well.
45:44
And the truth of the matter is, the success of of Velva was the fact that
45:48
the people that got 'em were people that were willing to work on them,
45:52
willing to learn how to set it up.
45:54
Frank really delivered you a car that was complete in all the pieces, and they were
46:00
all bolted together one way or another.
46:02
He didn't really do an awful lot.
46:04
Most of the guys that were driving Elvis in, in England even were guys that were
46:08
doing all their own work, and that there were no big factory teams as s just said.
46:13
It brings back an instant later on after the Dixon era when, uh, we
46:18
were gonna run an actual team at Sebring and Dixon arranged everything.
46:22
He arranged the rooms for the cars and the mechanics and everything, and I
46:27
sold two of those cars to two people that each were gonna drive them at
46:31
Sebring and as part of the Lola team.
46:34
Another interesting point, Frank was a really good public relations man
46:39
too, from those first cars we bought when he shipped them over here.
46:43
They had our names on the doors, all written by a sign painter.
46:47
Really done nicely, which was kind of neat.
46:50
It really thought that was nice.
46:51
You might have liked to have done it, but in those days you probably
46:54
wouldn't do that on your own.
46:55
People would make a big issue.
46:57
But when they came on an Elva with your name on them generally was pretty nice.
47:01
And if you got one that you didn't buy ahead of time, but you bought
47:05
it from the dealer, you would also get somebody's put their name on
47:09
the same way because it was pretty common on the, uh, Elvis at that time.
47:13
I had a mark two that I drove.
47:15
I had a mark three that I drove.
47:17
I had a, one of the first Mark fours.
47:19
Generally he would send Chuck and I the first cars that that would come out
47:23
until he got Dixon involved and then Dixon would get the first cars there.
47:28
But I got a Mark four that year and that was 1959.
47:32
And I got it earlier in the year, I believe, because I raced it several times.
47:37
Actually, it's the one I sold to Bill Jordan at the time.
47:40
That was the Sebring car that Mark four.
47:42
When I saw it, I knew exactly where he got the design for it that I had.
47:47
And Abarth 2 0 7, I had that.
47:49
And when Frank first came over, he saw that car.
47:52
He really liked the looks of it.
47:54
That is where Frank got the idea for the knife edge on the, uh,
47:58
bodies of the, uh, marked IV cars.
48:01
And it so happened in 59 that those were the cars that we were
48:04
gonna race that uh, Sebring.
48:06
And you could always tell those 'cause they had an extra set of headlights
48:09
built into the, uh, bonnet of it.
48:11
We picked up, ours went with Bill Jordan and I and his wife, and we went to,
48:16
uh, Washington to pick up the Mark iv.
48:18
We were gonna drive at Sebring.
48:20
They were bringing down the other one that I had sold and one that was gonna
48:23
be driven by, uh, Frank Batista, who was the national champion in G Modified,
48:29
was a very good Lotus driver, very good.
48:31
Arthur Tweeddale was gonna be the other one who worked for Dixon also.
48:36
They were bringing those cars down.
48:37
We went to, uh, Dixon's place there in, in Washington and
48:41
or Baltimore, I guess it was.
48:43
And got the car and that we got down there and first time we took the
48:47
car out it, it handled terrible.
48:49
It was awful.
48:50
And Frank was there, had arrived and got down to Seabring Fellow that I knew very
48:55
well, who was a Lotus driver, who was very good mechanically, was down at Seabring
49:00
and he wanted to help us set up the car.
49:02
And he was very good in setting up the front end of the car.
49:06
But I always remember his name was JC Kilburn.
49:08
He was from Rockford, later moved down to at Dallas, Texas.
49:11
And that.
49:12
Still races at Monterey and that and uh, junior, I guess he told me that,
49:18
he said to Frank, what kind of camera setting do you set up on the front end?
49:22
And Frank said, how the hell should I know?
49:24
I only make the cars.
49:25
I don't set 'em up.
49:27
And that was typical of him.
49:29
Listen, I'll skip on and come back a little later.
49:32
Sorry to take up.
49:50
Delightful indeed.
49:51
And you know, birdie has touched on, of course, the name Walter Dixon,
49:56
who's a, a major player in this.
49:58
Not always in the best way.
50:00
One of the key things that happened, Walter Dixon, as Birdie mentioned, he
50:03
was, he's actually a Washington area.
50:05
I'm a Baltimore Washington area dealer of a number of different cars.
50:09
In an early meeting with Frank Nichols suggested to him that you ever thought
50:13
of something like an MGA MGAs were quite popular at the time, very successful
50:17
car, and that you might want to consider building something like an MGA.
50:21
And Frank thought that a really good idea.
50:23
That's what became then the courier.
50:25
So the courier was really born out of a discussion between the two, and
50:29
that became the production car that later actually to some extent led
50:33
to a temporary downfall for Elva.
50:36
Continuing on with the story here.
50:38
I just wanted to quickly mention Archie Butterworth and there's another
50:43
key person in in that particular period, and that's Archie Scott Brown.
50:48
So the Tale of two, Archie Archie, Scott Brown was one of the real iconic
50:52
English drivers of that era, and he was, as far as the Elvis saga goes, he drove
50:57
several elves of the more particular Mark gre and he also one of the few who
51:01
could drive this Butterworth engine car.
51:04
Archie was born with only a stub of one hand.
51:08
Left hand was fine, right hand was just AUB, and yet drove in ear along before
51:12
political correctness and all that.
51:14
He was a very successful handicapped driver.
51:17
Very few people even knew that, that he was handicapped.
51:20
Quite a success story during that period.
51:22
I'll talk more here about the couriers.
51:25
The courier was, in some ways was an MGA, if you used an MGA engine originally.
51:31
Later on the MGB, it was Nichols's big move into being
51:36
a proper producer of road cars.
51:39
And ultimately though, these weren't really road cars, they
51:42
were road cars meant for racing.
51:44
Again, there was this element of no compromise.
51:48
They weren't particularly comfortable for creature comforts.
51:50
They were famous for the engine being located somewhat further back.
51:54
So the cockpit was rather cramped.
51:56
So the courier was quite a cramped car, but it had a really good advantage.
52:02
The power to weight ratio was spectacular.
52:05
Even though it was cost a little more than the competing cars like the MGA,
52:09
like the Triumph, TR three, it became quite popular among people who wanted this
52:14
kind of no nonsense race car, something they could drive to the track, race, and
52:20
drive home in the production categories.
52:22
In many ways, the design of the courier presage the Spitfire many.
52:27
In fact, somebody who came up to me this morning said, yes.
52:29
A friend of mine sent me this photo, says, oh, look at this interesting
52:32
spitfire that ran at violin in New Jersey, but it wasn't spitfire.
52:36
It was a courier.
52:37
They were often mistaken for that.
52:39
When the courier came online, there was a kind of a problem with Elva because
52:43
they weren't really equipped to remember.
52:44
They were just drawing chalk lines on the floor.
52:46
Now they actually had to do actual drawings and they had
52:49
to move to a bigger facility.
52:50
It was no longer they were behind a fish and chip shop.
52:53
Initially they had to move to a bigger facility.
52:55
Initially they moved to facility in a drill hall that rented out,
52:59
eventually moved to Hastings itself.
53:01
I mentioned.
53:02
That's where the Battle of Hastings took place.
53:04
Later on, production would move on to Croyden near to London and be taken
53:08
over by a company called Trojan.
53:10
Frank Nickles had, I think, kind of an ambivalent relationship with the courier.
53:14
Hoped that they would be a cash cow.
53:15
They never turned out that way.
53:17
He never really wanted, I mean, he expected people to race
53:20
them, but wasn't really there to support the racing activity.
53:23
This is a period now, 1959 to 61 that the courier was built.
53:27
So it was a period of rapid growth for Elva.
53:30
The couriers themselves were built on later on, 62, 65 in different stages, and
53:35
they were raced for many years after that.
53:37
In fact, uh, as recently as 2002, a courier won the e production
53:42
National Championship with SCCA.
53:44
One of the key things about the courier are some of the drivers involved.
53:48
And we talked earlier about drivers such as Chuck Dietrich, can't forget
53:51
Susie Dietrich, who was in that rare sorority of really fine women drivers
53:56
of there is Susie Dietrich, Denise McCluggage, pinky, Rollo, Donna May Mims,
54:01
Margaret Wiley would be another one.
54:02
Her husband, doc Wiley was also Major Elva driver of that era.
54:06
A few others of that era, but now we're Mo we're moving on to the courier.
54:09
The courier also was a great starting point for a number of drivers.
54:14
People like John Quartz, John Cannon, Peter Revson, Jim Downing, who became
54:19
a big more recently and and Insa racing, got a start with a courier.
54:23
John Osteen, another IMSA driver much later.
54:25
Gotta start with courier.
54:27
Nobody bigger than Mark Donahue, of course.
54:29
If Michael has written quite a bit about Mark Donahue, got his start in courier,
54:33
this very kind of brutish car, and which he won a national championship with.
54:39
Couriers weren't, of course, the only thing going on.
54:41
In fact, this became a very, very busy time for Elva.
54:44
They were producing couriers stole the sports racers, and they would slowly,
54:49
surely move into Formula Junior as well.
54:52
They produced and Birdie touched on it, the, um, later sports racers.
54:56
And these became actually the last of the front engine Elvis sports racers,
55:01
which were the Mark four and the Mark V.
55:04
This is really where Frank Nichols's passion remained, was
55:07
still with the sports racers.
55:09
The Mark IV was first independent rear suspension car that Elva built.
55:14
It was actually a competitor to the Lotus 11.
55:17
The Lotus 11 was, in terms of mass members, was the most
55:21
common car as Birdie mentioned.
55:23
That class of racing was particularly popular in England
55:26
and the Mark IV was to some degree, a competition with the Lotus 11.
55:31
Mark IV was a more aerodynamic version of the earlier Elvis.
55:35
Most of them were now fiberglass.
55:37
Not all of them.
55:38
Most of 'em were fiberglass.
55:39
Very low built.
55:40
Again, mostly climax engines, few alpha males, even one Buick engine, in fact,
55:45
that spoke with the fellow here who, uh, has that car with the Buick engine.
55:49
Bernie Keller was the original owner of that.
55:51
One of the differences though, with say the Mark four, the Elva, mark Fours
55:55
and the Lotus, is that the Elva was always considered a true club racer.
55:59
As Birdie mentioned, you had to know what you're doing with an Elva.
56:02
You had to tinker with, you had to work with it.
56:04
It was meant as a club racer, not really as a stepping stone kind of car.
56:08
The Mark IV was also important.
56:10
That was the first car that Carl Haas really got involved with.
56:13
If I'm not mistaken, uh, birdie mentioned that that car won
56:17
its class at Sebring in 1959.
56:19
Second place to that car was the car driven by Birdie.
56:22
That was driven with Carl Haas and was managed by none other than Tex Hopkins.
56:28
Also, another famous figure here at Watkins Glen.
56:31
One of the interesting comments, I think always about these early elvas,
56:35
as Birdie mentioned, that they were kind of just put together, but even so, Chuck
56:41
Dietrich was one that always thought that the Elvas were better than the Lotus's.
56:45
Lotus's would have to be welded together between qualifying in the
56:49
race, Elvas at least held together a little bit better than that.
56:53
After the Mark IV came to the Mark five, the LA very last of the front
56:58
engines, it was even lower than the Mark IV had arched wheels because it
57:03
still retained the old 15 inch wheels.
57:07
One of the things was that, again, Nichols and his conservative way
57:11
didn't move to the smaller wheels that were common at that time.
57:14
The 13 inch wheels, as I mentioned, that there was really three different
57:18
kinds of production going on.
57:20
Here we have these couriers.
57:21
They're really gearing up, talked about the sports racers, and
57:24
then there's Formula Junior.
57:26
Remember in motorsports there's always this kind of tension
57:29
between cost and competition.
57:31
You try to keep the cost down, people develop new technologies, be more
57:35
competitive, the cost goes back up.
57:38
So it's always this kind of battle back and forth to try to keep costs down.
57:43
And there were a number of formulas already existing in the 1950s that were
57:47
intended to keep costs down, but they were usually basic used motorcycle engines.
57:52
500 cc would be one such classy early Formula three was such.
57:56
Johnny Ani from Italy came up with this idea of the formula Junior.
58:01
Essentially, why not build more or less spec cars?
58:04
It'll be a thousand cc cars later, 1100 cc.
58:07
Use production components, have them as single seater cars, have the races
58:12
on a kind of a national championship basis, get this approved by the
58:16
FIA and spread it around the world.
58:18
The idea really caught on and from about 1959 to 63 Formula
58:23
Junior was the stepping stone.
58:25
Of motor sports in that era, stepping stone.
58:28
Also, a lot of club racers, it was, you could be a junior fungi or scar
58:32
or what have you in your formula.
58:34
Junior, they looked like race cars.
58:37
Italian cars typically had one liter fiats in them were garage built.
58:41
Around that.
58:42
There were French cars with DB pan hards.
58:44
There were German cars with D three cylinder, uh, two stroke D kws.
58:49
And then the English cars typically use BMC Austins.
58:52
Nobody really jumped to the fore right away and built them in England.
58:56
In fact, none of the countries had really constructors of formula juniors.
58:59
But then Frank Nichols jumped in and I believe some of the early conversations
59:03
with that actually took place in Birdie's kitchen, where Frank saw a
59:07
midget that Ed Crawford had brought over from the west coast, a small
59:10
midget racer from amusement park.
59:13
And that kinda gave frank some ideas that later germinated in
59:16
becoming the formula Junior.
59:18
Frank Nichols.
59:19
Elva was the first to produce Formula Juniors in any kind of significant
59:23
quantity and beat Cooper and Lotus Cooper and Lotus at that time were
59:27
very busy with their Formula One programs and really didn't pay
59:30
much attention to Formula Junior.
59:33
Also, the Formula Junior that Frank Nichols developed had an advantage when
59:37
it came over to the US 'cause the US caught on to Formula Junior right away.
59:41
They were a little bit larger.
59:42
Cockpit area was a little larger.
59:44
Americans tend to be a little larger people than most Europeans, and it was
59:48
very comfortable and convenient for that.
59:51
I would like to go back to one moment there.
59:53
Sure.
59:53
Because you were talking about the, uh, there he is again.
59:57
I'm back again.
59:58
Oh, there he is again.
59:59
Oh, this was, that was where the Mark four too, but that was my own one there.
1:00:03
That's one I did with the Lolas at that time.
1:00:06
But the thing that happened was we had a number of friends in
1:00:09
Chicago, in the Chicago region.
1:00:11
Eddie Crawford lived quite close to me, and he was one of my best friends.
1:00:16
We used to go over there and it started out in his yard.
1:00:19
He had five acres there and the people had raised horses and that,
1:00:23
and so they had jumps in their yard in when he bought it, well, he left
1:00:27
them there and we laid out a race course around those jumps in his yard.
1:00:32
And we started out because somebody bought a Henkel uh, moped and
1:00:36
somebody else had something.
1:00:37
And we started racing in those mopeds.
1:00:40
And one Sunday we were going up to Milwaukee, about six of us in the
1:00:43
car to a champ car race up there.
1:00:46
And we were saying, wouldn't it be nice if we had some little cars we could race?
1:00:50
And I said, wait a minute.
1:00:51
I know I saw an ad in the paper for a company that makes these things for a
1:00:56
carnivals and for, uh, off-road racing.
1:00:58
They have a little Wisconsin engine in them and so forth.
1:01:02
And so at that moment we said, well, who would buy one?
1:01:05
And I said, I'll order 'em if you, you know, get enough guys.
1:01:08
Well we got six guys together.
1:01:10
We ordered six of them.
1:01:11
I mean, we even included Wacky Arnold who was the MG distributor
1:01:15
in Chicago without telling them.
1:01:17
'cause we knew he'd buy anything, you know?
1:01:20
And anyhow, we bought those and they came and we had started racing in his yard with
1:01:26
these things and we had a ball with it.
1:01:28
And then we actually even went on and had the fellow who built Meadowdale,
1:01:32
Leonard Binger, who was a really a housing builder at that time.
1:01:36
And he built a, a shopping center and he invited us out to race at
1:01:40
his shopping center on Sundays.
1:01:43
And he would get a great big crowd of people coming out there.
1:01:46
And we were using up all of the wheelbarrow tires that we could find.
1:01:51
And because they'd only last a couple races or that, and that's how we got into,
1:01:56
uh, that Frank Nichols was coming over.
1:01:58
So I took Frank over to Eddie's house.
1:02:01
And we had a little race there, and Frank drove one of those little cars.
1:02:05
He thought this was a lot of fun.
1:02:06
And we said, Frank, what we need now is we need one with a
1:02:10
shifter in it and we need a car.
1:02:12
And at that time, the van wall was the hot setup in Grand Prix racing.
1:02:16
So we said, Frank, I said, I've got a picture of a van wall.
1:02:19
We just want to shrink that down and have it look like a van wall.
1:02:23
You put some kind of a motorcycle.
1:02:25
Any, any motorcycle engine that's got a five speed gearbox or something.
1:02:29
We don't want a big one.
1:02:31
We want, we said two 50 and we said, go ahead and do this.
1:02:34
This was kind of in the spring.
1:02:36
Well, he started work on that car and I remember the time he sent a
1:02:40
letter to me and said I was down to, uh, Italy and Johnny Ani has this new
1:02:45
program down there for Formula Junior.
1:02:48
He said, I'm gonna make the car a little bit bigger, because then
1:02:51
they can use it for Formula Junior.
1:02:53
Also, when we got the first ones in, we said, my God, this is the biggest
1:02:57
little car we ever saw in our life.
1:03:00
But it was neat and they drove nice.
1:03:02
When I said I was an owner, I still own the first one I got, and I still own that.
1:03:06
It's at my son's race shop and that, and he's been going to restore it all.
1:03:10
It's probably only run in about 10 races.
1:03:13
Major thing was I drove it in the first US Grand Prix at Sebring.
1:03:17
I drove it in the preliminary race that morning for the uh, formula Juniors.
1:03:22
Which was the first big formula, junior race, I shouldn't get into
1:03:26
going further, so I'll stop right now.
1:03:28
But the thing was, it was about that time I decided I really wasn't
1:03:32
gonna do that much more racing.
1:03:34
I'd just been married and my wife was pregnant and I thought
1:03:38
I, I'll just stop for a while.
1:03:40
And Carl was anxious and this is something I should have talked
1:03:44
about before, how Carl got involved.
1:03:46
Carl was a good friend of mine.
1:03:47
We raced together and so forth.
1:03:49
He was driving a Porsche and he came down to Nassau with us one year.
1:03:54
You know, in those days Nassau would give you two rooms.
1:03:56
So Al Ross and I had, were sleeping in mine, but Carl didn't have anybody.
1:04:01
With him, and so he had an empty bed in his room at the hotel.
1:04:05
Frank Nichols came over.
1:04:06
We didn't know for sure that he was coming, but Frank came over.
1:04:09
He said, Carl, can you put up Frank in your bedroom?
1:04:12
He said, sure.
1:04:13
Well, they got talking at night when they were laying in the bed,
1:04:16
start talking, and Frank Nichols sold Carl a car at that time.
1:04:21
He had a Porsche and he sold him a car, and Frank told him
1:04:24
about this wonderful thing.
1:04:25
He had been to Massachusetts, the fella Candy Pool was his name up there, who
1:04:31
had designed a four emo carburetor manifold for the Coventry climax
1:04:36
engine, and he was sure that that would give you 15 horsepower more than you
1:04:41
were getting out of the stock one.
1:04:42
Carl wanted the car like that with the candy pool manifold on it.
1:04:46
Well, when it came, it wasn't that much faster, if it was any faster at
1:04:50
all, and that was in a Mark three body.
1:04:53
But Carl got very interested in this thing and he wanted to get
1:04:57
involved in the sale of those cars.
1:04:59
At the time, he was working for the Ford Motor Company in a, uh, training
1:05:03
program for middle line people.
1:05:06
Carl came to me and he said, I wanna get involved.
1:05:08
I said, okay, Carl, you now work for me.
1:05:10
You're a salesman and you get a commission when you sell 'em.
1:05:13
We didn't make much money on the cars anyhow.
1:05:15
We made more money really on the parts in those days.
1:05:18
So Carl came, at this time, Nichols was having a bit of a problem.
1:05:22
He had some cars that had been ordered by a dealer to
1:05:26
Houston Game rhymes with Dixon.
1:05:28
They were sitting on a, uh, dock down in Florida and I said, Carl,
1:05:32
here's your first assignment.
1:05:33
You go down there and you see if you can't sell those cars down there somewhere.
1:05:37
And he did.
1:05:38
And he went over because he knew Jim Hall pretty well.
1:05:41
He went over to Texas and he sold Jim Hall one and one of Jim's other friends,
1:05:45
not Sharp, but another fellow that he sold two juniors that were sitting there.
1:05:49
So that's how Carl got involved.
1:05:51
When he came back, I said, Carl, I'm gonna step out of the sale of the cars.
1:05:56
Why don't you just take it on?
1:05:58
You can pay me whatever you want out of it.
1:06:00
Whatever you make something.
1:06:01
I don't know.
1:06:02
He did give me some money, believe it or not, but it was pretty informal.
1:06:05
But I said, I want to keep the Coventry Climax business and that, and so I
1:06:09
did that for quite a while before I sold that part of it to him too.
1:06:13
So that's how Carl got involved.
1:06:15
Sorry.
1:06:15
Oh, I love it.
1:06:16
I, we didn't ever get enough time to really spend time to get together.
1:06:19
Right.
1:06:20
No, that's great.
1:06:21
I I, I never knew the end of that story as to what happened with that car.
1:06:24
Just outta the phone.
1:06:25
I know it became an ad for Johnny Walker.
1:06:26
B Bourbon though.
1:06:27
Yeah, that was Well, we've alluded to these problems with Walt Dixon and
1:06:31
basically issue there is, remember you got a shoestring operation, Elva,
1:06:35
it's basically living hand to mouth.
1:06:37
Nichol have been living hand to mouth.
1:06:39
So for that matter was Walt Dixon and with his dealership in the DC area.
1:06:43
And in fact he started playing quite a shell game with his cars.
1:06:46
And his deal with Nichols is he was gonna prepay for this big order of
1:06:50
couriers, but after a while the checks weren't coming or they were bouncing.
1:06:54
Well, the same thing was happening with the creditors that Dixon
1:06:57
had, that he wasn't paying them.
1:06:59
And after a while he was doing shell games where he would to get
1:07:02
more loans to get, increase his letter of credit with the bank.
1:07:06
He would do these games where he would use the cars as collateral
1:07:10
and then have his customers come back with the cars to do servicing.
1:07:15
And then when the bank came around to make sure that the cars were actually
1:07:18
there as inventory, there they were, but they had already been sold.
1:07:21
So he had all sorts of ways to do this.
1:07:23
Well, eventually that caught up with him.
1:07:24
And in December of.
1:07:26
59. He was visited by a certain team of US Marshals and that
1:07:31
closed the Dixon Enterprise.
1:07:33
And that had immediate repercussions on Frank Nichols and Elva back in England.
1:07:37
He was basically left holding the bag, no more income coming, and
1:07:41
it was the worst possible time.
1:07:43
'cause the production was ramping up with all the couriers, formula
1:07:46
juniors, the various sports racers was at the end of Elva.
1:07:50
Well, of course not.
1:07:51
It was really just kind of the in, in some ways, the midpoint.
1:07:54
Elva recovered quite quickly, really thanks to three different people
1:07:57
or three different organizations.
1:07:59
One is we heard Carl Haas.
1:08:01
Carl Haas stepped to the plate and invested a lot in the restructured Elva,
1:08:05
which is called Elva Cars, 1961 Limited.
1:08:08
Another fellow was a guy named Frank Webb, who ran a company
1:08:11
called R Tune Engineering.
1:08:13
He stepped to the plate and built some of those last of the front engine formula.
1:08:17
Junior cars, as you saw, those were called Scorpions.
1:08:20
They were built out of the, uh, the Elva plant.
1:08:23
But because of this liquidation process, they couldn't be called Elvis.
1:08:27
They were somewhat different actually than the original Elva
1:08:30
one hundreds, as they were called.
1:08:31
Juniors.
1:08:32
And then the other company that came into play was Trojan.
1:08:35
Trojan had been around since something like 1910, involved in a
1:08:40
variety of automotive enterprises.
1:08:42
Most recently at that time was the importer of Lambretta Scooter from Italy.
1:08:48
And they also, in fact, were involved with a big go-karting
1:08:51
operation in the United States.
1:08:52
Sold many, many go-karts.
1:08:53
They took on the production of the couriers.
1:08:56
So essentially all the post 1961 couriers were actually built by Trojan, which
1:09:03
is located in Croydon near London.
1:09:05
Pretty soon now, Elvis's back on its feet and they're producing cars again.
1:09:10
They're producing another round of formula junior cars.
1:09:14
And you kind of quickly saw some of those.
1:09:16
These were the rear engine formula junior cars, because by that
1:09:19
time, front engines were obsolete.
1:09:21
And Formula Junior, as they were.
1:09:23
In Formula One, the rear engine formula Juniors called the 200 later
1:09:26
the 300 200 ones with the, that vertical fin, the three hundreds
1:09:30
with the very, very low boxy ones.
1:09:33
The thing about all the formula Junior cars is they came to be
1:09:35
driven by some significant people, particularly in the United States.
1:09:38
Bob Bonderant drove one at one point.
1:09:41
Charlie Kob won a championship with the Formula Juniors.
1:09:44
The later the rear engine formula Junior, one of those was driven by Mark Donna.
1:09:48
You didn't have as much success with that as he did with the courier, but
1:09:52
it was a major, major stepping stone for Donahue that carried forward
1:09:56
later into a single seater career.
1:09:59
It also kind of coincided with more or less a general fading of formula.
1:10:02
Junior Formula Junior suffered this fate of a lot of these low cost formulas.
1:10:08
Basically, somebody got in there and took it all over.
1:10:10
In this case, it was Lotus Lotus 18, and not only was it the Lotus
1:10:13
18 more successful VAR or anybody else and dominated the formula, but
1:10:17
they also brought in factory teams.
1:10:19
Jimmy Clark, a number of others, drove Formula Junior Cars.
1:10:22
So it really defeated the very purpose of that.
1:10:25
Now we have this shift to the rear for, uh, Elva.
1:10:29
Very significant time to join the modern age.
1:10:32
You have the engine in the rear.
1:10:33
So there were now two things going on.
1:10:35
The formula Junior era was over.
1:10:37
Trojan is taking over the production of the couriers.
1:10:41
Elva, meaning Frank Nichols, Keith Marsden themselves can focus a little
1:10:46
more again, what they really love, which is two seater sports racers, and now
1:10:50
they're all rear engine from here on out the mark, six being the first one.
1:10:55
The Mark VI is, again, very often climax engines.
1:10:58
They were successful pretty much from the onset.
1:11:01
One of Elvis's heydays came at Boxing Day.
1:11:04
That's day after Christmas in 1961 when Chris Ashmore almost defeated Graham
1:11:10
Hill's, Testa Rosa at Brands Hatch, and this is a real high point, it really made
1:11:15
people take notice again, just like they did very early on with the Elva potential.
1:11:19
The Elva and Elva got a lot of orders as a result of that.
1:11:23
Also, a lot of characters, again, though endlessly stories of
1:11:27
characters and all this, you'll see in the moment Dan Blocker.
1:11:30
But before Dan Blocker, there was a fellow Tony Land, Frankie in the uk,
1:11:34
who was another one of these characters.
1:11:36
He came to Frank Nichols and boldly said, I want to be the your factory driver.
1:11:40
Frank Nichols said, no, I don't do that land.
1:11:42
Frankie went out to the casino down the road, won a bunch of money that
1:11:46
night, and came back the next day and bought his car with all the
1:11:49
coins and all, and went racing.
1:11:51
At one point his transporter broke.
1:11:53
He's on his way to an international race in the uk and his transporter
1:11:56
broke down along the way, so he did the only sensible thing.
1:11:59
He pulled his Elva out of the back of the transporter and started
1:12:02
driving through the circuit.
1:12:04
Un muffled and all.
1:12:05
Well, the local constabulary didn't take kindly to this.
1:12:08
Stopped him.
1:12:09
He convinced the policeman that rather than book him, it would really
1:12:13
be best interest of England in this major international race if he would
1:12:17
receive a police escort to the race.
1:12:20
He did.
1:12:20
So that's shows you a kind of talking point.
1:12:22
It could be another character.
1:12:25
A whole story of Elva here is, is as you can see, Dan Blocker, I believe
1:12:29
that's Linda Vaughn with him and Dan Blocker, of course, the Bonanza actor who
1:12:33
became involved with the Elvin Mark vi.
1:12:36
He had a couple of Mark Sixes, one of 'em, which he put a Maserati engine into it.
1:12:41
And in fact, both of Hi his cars featured in this particular film, Viva
1:12:45
Las Vegas with Elvis and Ann Margaret.
1:12:48
Uh, so we have Elvis and Elva tied together conveniently enough.
1:12:51
In fact, it's interesting because Blocker's Maserati engine
1:12:55
never ran particularly well.
1:12:57
So for the film, they actually had these two identically painted Elvis,
1:13:01
this one with I believe, a Coventry climax that was actually used in
1:13:04
the action sequences in the film.
1:13:06
And the other one, which was only in the garage.
1:13:08
And you see the engine lifted outta that, which is the Maserati, which is very
1:13:11
appropriate because that's usually the condition that that particular car was in.
1:13:15
Another thing about Dan Blocker's team is he very often used the
1:13:19
driver by the name of Bill Harris.
1:13:21
Bill Harris was actually a stunt man from the Hollywood area, but you
1:13:25
know, Dan Blacker, of course, knew him from his professional connections.
1:13:28
And if any of you have read.
1:13:30
Sylvia Wilkinson's, great book.
1:13:32
The stainless steel carrot, which is pretty much mostly about John
1:13:35
Morton, but there's this great little vignette in there about
1:13:38
Bill Harris and Bill Harris would organize these stunts for the movies.
1:13:42
And he had this one particular stunt, and I think it might've been a Daytona, where
1:13:46
he had to catapult the car over the rail.
1:13:49
So he arrange us all with a catapult and put a dummy in the car and all that.
1:13:53
And the film crew ready in the car got vaulted over the the rail.
1:13:57
And then he went out in his pickup truck to go retrieve this car.
1:14:00
Well, as he went outside the track, he noticed that a crowd had
1:14:03
kinda gathered around civilians from driving around the area.
1:14:06
They thought that, oh, you know, here's this terrible racing
1:14:09
accident that just has happened.
1:14:11
Of course, bill Harris saw, figured out what's going on here.
1:14:14
He runs up to this car, this crash, pulls out this lifeless
1:14:18
driver and starts punching.
1:14:20
This says, you dirty so and so, look what you did to my race car.
1:14:25
So there all these characters, this, this particular album, mark six that
1:14:29
you see here, nothing particularly significant historically about.
1:14:32
This is actually driven in a series in the Midwest Midwestern
1:14:35
Council Sports Car Clubs.
1:14:37
You might have noticed in some of these shots, it has kind of a, almost
1:14:39
a Ferrari esque rebo to it that was designed by these two brothers, Dave
1:14:44
and Dean Cozy in the late 1960s.
1:14:47
And the Coys were known where they jumped into the big doune buggy craze
1:14:50
that was going on at that period.
1:14:52
Wanted to make a lot of money on dune buggies, so they
1:14:55
built a bunch of dune buggies.
1:14:56
The only problem is that their source of the chassis for these
1:14:59
dune buggies were stolen VW beetles.
1:15:02
They just go out in the street, steal VW beetles, convert 'em
1:15:04
into dune buggies and sell them.
1:15:06
They quickly graduated into manufacturing license plates after that so that they,
1:15:11
that was a short, I love these particular sequence of shots because this is now
1:15:15
the courier marks three and four that were built by Trojan, and it shows you
1:15:21
some of the advertising that was used.
1:15:23
Don't ask me why they did this particular pose, but there
1:15:27
are all these, these shots.
1:15:28
They're also, I think some, maybe some shots I don't have in there
1:15:31
of bathing beauties in the English winter holes on some of these cars.
1:15:35
As you can see, not all the couriers are Roadsters.
1:15:38
Couriers had a very unique, this reversed rake coop that they developed.
1:15:42
Very few of those were built and they are among the most sought after cars right
1:15:47
now in the courier collector market.
1:15:49
Couriers were also somewhat similar in concept to the sports racers
1:15:53
that virtually no two were alike.
1:15:55
There were constant variations of the suspension types.
1:16:00
So there were two plus two seating arrangements.
1:16:02
There were the coops or the Roadsters, all these constant variants.
1:16:06
'cause I was never quite sure, is this a road car?
1:16:08
Is this a race car?
1:16:09
Is it primarily a road car?
1:16:11
Primarily a race car?
1:16:12
Nobody ever quite came to grips with that, which was actually, in many
1:16:15
ways it's failing, if you might say.
1:16:17
And in fact, it's something that frustrated Carl Hala because he
1:16:20
was the principal importer of the couriers to the US and he was really
1:16:24
frustrated by this idea that was constantly switching back and forth.
1:16:28
There was one last courier that was kind of a, an interesting story
1:16:32
that this is a Lama courier coup.
1:16:34
There was two American expats in France, one military, one non-military
1:16:40
who raced couriers with each other and they had a really good time.
1:16:44
And over uh, some Van Rouge.
1:16:45
One night they decided they were gonna enter Lamont.
1:16:48
Ron Lu, Dick Goldstein.
1:16:50
And they hatched this idea over napkins.
1:16:53
But this one sort of worked unlike most napkin hatched ideas that we have.
1:16:57
They ordered a car from, well, that point, Peter Ag from Trojan
1:17:01
came as more or less a bag of bits.
1:17:03
They got a local technical college to put it all together.
1:17:07
Found when they got to LA Ma, that windscreen cracked right away.
1:17:10
They got a renewal windscreen to replace it.
1:17:13
The problem, and still was that the windshield wipers wouldn't even
1:17:16
touch the screen, but they kind of solved these things one by one.
1:17:20
They also had the interesting things that went on that day that they had a problem
1:17:24
with a badge shimmy in the alignment.
1:17:26
So they took it to a local shop.
1:17:28
That was just kind of the beginnings of electronic alignment for wheels.
1:17:31
Didn't help at all.
1:17:32
And there was this guy in the next paddock stall over, heard all this
1:17:36
going on and said, I think I can fix it.
1:17:38
As a Dunlop technician, I think he just got, picked up the wheel, put on a stand,
1:17:42
rolled it, took a weight off here, put a weight on there, gave it back to him.
1:17:46
They expected the worst, and the car handled brilliantly.
1:17:49
After that, they still failed.
1:17:51
They still didn't make the start, and it was kind of the last, one of the last
1:17:54
times that Elva tried to run at Lamont.
1:17:57
The last of the rear engine series that were pure elvas were the
1:18:02
Mark Vi's and the Mark eights.
1:18:04
These were now thoroughly modern cars.
1:18:06
At this point, they were much more professional.
1:18:09
They were lightweight, very, very lightweight, really designed
1:18:13
from scratch as rear engine cars.
1:18:15
Whereas the Mark Vi was more or less a front engine car turned around.
1:18:19
They were dealt with actually problems such as grip.
1:18:22
And the like, which was a new concept at that time.
1:18:25
They still use primarily Climax and Ford engines.
1:18:28
In fact, it's interesting 'cause later on in history of many of these cars, they
1:18:31
got Hondas, Dotson, VWs installed in them.
1:18:34
But what really became interesting is when the sevens became the mark seven
1:18:38
S's, this is about 1963 or so, again, there was an engine supply issue.
1:18:44
So Nichols at that point opted for BMW engines, A BMW, which is not
1:18:49
yet a household name in the us.
1:18:51
It was considered to be a very reliable, very easy to fit in the car.
1:18:55
It was quite easy to reconfigure the car for the BMW engine.
1:18:59
It was a two liter dry sump engine that they used.
1:19:02
Tony Le Frankie again comes into play.
1:19:04
He was a champion with this particular BMW engine here.
1:19:07
The BMW engine also is about that same time that Ali Schmidt, who
1:19:12
was the Porsche importer to the us, watched an Elva race of Puerto Rico
1:19:18
along with Ska Van Stein of Porsche.
1:19:21
They were quite impressed by that.
1:19:22
They thought, Hmm, maybe we should adopt some of these concepts to the
1:19:26
Porsche, because at that time, the Porsche spiders as sports racing
1:19:29
spiders were a little long in the tooth.
1:19:31
They were reliable, but they were heavy.
1:19:34
They were not doing particularly well.
1:19:36
So they took this idea, actually back to Ferry Porsche, about maybe
1:19:39
doing something together with Elva.
1:19:41
Porsche was always very conservative about any other constructor using their engines.
1:19:46
But they thought, well, maybe this is a good idea, and thus
1:19:49
was born the Elva Porsche.
1:19:51
The Elva Porsche became actually sort of the last great highlight of Elva
1:19:56
history, came with the Elva Porsche developed partly by Herbert Linga.
1:20:00
The very famous Porsche test driver helped a lot in setting this up.
1:20:03
There's a lot of reconfiguring of the chassis that had to go on
1:20:07
to fit Porsche engine into it.
1:20:09
It was brought over in August of 1963 to the US just in time for the Road
1:20:15
America 500, which at that stage was one of the major endurance races in the
1:20:20
us and it was now waged against big Bo cars, cobras, Ferraris, and the like.
1:20:27
Were running in this race.
1:20:29
Bill Woff, great American driver from the Midwest started the race.
1:20:34
Frank Nichols was there, one of his many, but still sporadic visits to the us.
1:20:39
Immediately.
1:20:40
This was a success from the start of the race, actually from qualifying on on.
1:20:44
It was fast, and more importantly, it was very, very fuel efficient.
1:20:48
There was a problem with a co-driver.
1:20:50
They didn't have a co-driver nominee.
1:20:52
Carl Haas at one point was going to drive, but he and Westoff are
1:20:56
so different in physical size that Carl didn't quite fit in the car.
1:21:00
They ended up at the end of the day deciding on Augie PS as a co-driver.
1:21:03
Augie had never driven the car before.
1:21:05
He stepped out of Roger Penske's Ferrari and when Bill Westoff came
1:21:10
in halfway through the race in the lead, handed the car over to Augie.
1:21:13
Augie had never driven the car before, spun off at the first lap, slowly gained
1:21:17
confidence and ended up winning the race.
1:21:20
It was one of the great moments of Elva first, big two liter win for a car
1:21:24
in a major endurance race like that.
1:21:26
And it was a win for Elva immediately led to a large order of Elva, Porsches.
1:21:32
And it's actually in interesting because in terms of Porsche history.
1:21:37
It's maybe the only non Porsche built chassis that is accepted as a Porsche.
1:21:44
Lessons that Porsche learned from that were put to use later on when
1:21:48
they built the other space frame.
1:21:49
Porsches, the 9 0 8, the nine seventeens, and the like.
1:21:53
Kinda last of the true elves as it were, was the GT one 60, and this is a very
1:21:59
special, not one off, but three off built on a marked seven s chassis, but
1:22:05
with a coop body, a very nicely styled coop body, designed by a guy, call
1:22:10
him two names out there, Trevor Frost.
1:22:12
Trevor Fiori.
1:22:13
He just thought that Trevor Fiori di Torino sounds better than
1:22:17
Trevor Frost of latent buzzard.
1:22:20
And so he just went with this kind of Italianate name that he created
1:22:24
and designed this car called the GT one 60, which only three were built.
1:22:28
And again, in sort of typical fashion for small constructors of
1:22:32
this type, they misjudged some of the calculations on the weights and
1:22:36
misjudged some the calculations on cost.
1:22:38
And as a result, the car never went into production.
1:22:41
All three of those cars do survive.
1:22:42
One of them went on and raced at Lamar the following year, not with
1:22:46
a whole lot of success, but it was always a very attractive car.
1:22:51
Elvis story doesn't quite end there because it really ends with McLaren.
1:22:55
Bruce McLaren when he first was thinking about starting his own race team and was
1:23:00
actually thinking of constructing sports racers, thought I can construct the basic
1:23:05
idea, but I can't make customer cars.
1:23:07
So he came to the group now led by Peter Ag, which was the uh, CEO of
1:23:13
Trojan, and asked them and worked out an arrangement with them to build the
1:23:17
original McLaren, which became known as the McLaren Elvis's, the M1 a. At a time.
1:23:22
This is now 65, 66 when Group seven racing big boar sports
1:23:27
racing is becoming popular, not just in the US but also in Europe.
1:23:31
Build a series of 25 customer cars from me, Bruce McLaren saying, and this became
1:23:36
sort of the last, this real story of Elva kind of ends there with the McLaren Elva.
1:23:41
There were a series of other McLaren elves built that usually never
1:23:45
were called McLaren Elves usually only went by the name of McLaren.
1:23:49
They were the kind of the last chapter of the Elva story.
1:23:53
Elva does live on in a number of different ways.
1:23:57
Frank Nichols himself went on, became part of a partnership with Len Terry and Carl
1:24:01
Haas called Transatlantic Consultants.
1:24:03
They helped develop some of the BMS of the late 1960s of King
1:24:07
Crowborough in the late 1960s.
1:24:09
So he kept his hand in with other automotive concerns, although later
1:24:13
he really moved into boat building, built boats that were used for various
1:24:17
rescue and fishing services in Britain.
1:24:20
Nichols became very active in sort of the next phase of Elva, which
1:24:23
was its afterlife, if you will.
1:24:25
Elva became and remains today one of the most popular cars
1:24:30
in vintage and historic racing.
1:24:32
One of the nice things about most of the elvas that you've seen in this,
1:24:34
and almost all of these still exist.
1:24:37
Very few were destroyed, almost all still exist, and almost all
1:24:40
can be found in vintage racing.
1:24:42
One kind or another, one of the first people who really stoked
1:24:45
this flame was Sterling Moss.
1:24:47
Sterling Moss's first vintage racing car when he got back in the sport
1:24:51
in the 1980s was indeed an Elva Mark seven s. And he to this day, remains
1:24:56
a real champion of Elva in the history of Elva, which is one of the reasons
1:24:59
he wrote the forward to the book.
1:25:01
Another key player in this kind of late stage of Elva, and he's mentioned
1:25:05
at the beginning was Roger Dunbar.
1:25:07
Roger Dunbar owns the Elva name, supplies the spares.
1:25:11
As many of you deal with, Elvas know he's actually involved in the
1:25:14
project in bringing Elva back again.
1:25:17
The recreation of Elva and brand new Elva courier remains to be
1:25:21
seen if that's gonna be done, if the investment is there for it.
1:25:24
Roger is also involved in restoring, he restored a a mark two recently that
1:25:28
now resides in the museum at Beckville.
1:25:31
But if you were to go over to that McLaren sitting over in the lobby,
1:25:34
in the, in the research center, if you look at the cellular level, there
1:25:38
might be a little bit of the DNA of a little shop that began behind a
1:25:44
hotel, began a fish and chip shop.
1:25:47
There were the chalk lines on the floor that McLaren in there.
1:25:50
Its Origins due date back to the shop in Beil on Sea.
1:25:54
So with that, thank you very much.
1:26:01
Stay up here.
1:26:07
What a wonderful presentation led by Yosh and augmented by Birdie.
1:26:12
What a treat for all of us.
1:26:14
Yos is such a pro.
1:26:15
He brought it in right on time.
1:26:17
We are gonna do some q and a. We're gonna bring Birdie up for that as well.
1:26:20
We're gonna take a few questions and answers.
1:26:22
And by the way, that wonderful photo of Birdie up on Two wheels is
1:26:26
by Ron Nelson, who has been a big supporter here of the research center.
1:26:30
So I wanted to get his name in there, but Birdie, I'll start it out.
1:26:34
How did you, uh, manage to get along with, simultaneously with Bernie
1:26:37
Eckles Stone, Jean Beer, blessed Max Mosley, Colin Chapman, and all the
1:26:42
other, uh, Remicades of Motorsport?
1:26:44
That's a good question.
1:26:45
I'm not sure how I did it myself, but I. I like people and, and that's one
1:26:49
of the reasons I like Elva, because Elva had the nicest people to work
1:26:53
with and it was always fun to have a guy call and that was what problem
1:26:57
somebody wanted to Pistons or something.
1:26:59
We'd spend more time talking about different things and what was
1:27:03
going on and that, no, I, I really meant to bring that into this.
1:27:07
The Elva people were just turned out to be great people to work with and
1:27:11
it's continued to those of who have bought 'em in recent years and that
1:27:15
it's the same kind of group of people.
1:27:18
It's really fun to be with and talk about the cars.
1:27:20
So any questions from the floor?
1:27:23
Rumor,
1:27:25
original Elva that Mark had as a tour?
1:27:29
Is that a bathroom?
1:27:31
That it's what the, well, he owned it as a tour.
1:27:33
He just liked it as personal and he had an he on his, well, I'm aware of the Elva.
1:27:41
You mean the courier that he.
1:27:43
Raced or a different courier.
1:27:47
I know one that he drove on the road as his biographer.
1:27:50
That may be true, but I missed it if it's so sorry.
1:27:53
Don't know of his race car, which I saw some photographs earlier.
1:27:56
Somebody had of one that was painted up as Mark's original car, but I don't
1:28:01
believe that is actually the chassis that he had because my understanding is
1:28:06
his race courier, and I'm not sure about nothing, about a road courier, but his
1:28:11
race courier sort of disappeared into the overall fabric of American racing
1:28:16
as, as years went on before people realized that it was marked on his car.
1:28:20
I know.
1:28:20
Passed on to a fellow's surname is Gaunt, G-A-N-U-T.
1:28:24
I think Robert Gaunt, who raced it for a while, but then it disappeared after that.
1:28:28
That would be, uh, he's from Fort Wayne, Indiana.
1:28:30
Yeah, Harry Gaunt.
1:28:31
Harry.
1:28:31
Harry Gaunt.
1:28:32
He's the fact, he was my wife's jeweler.
1:28:34
Oh, okay.
1:28:35
By the way, just one administrative note I was gonna mention.
1:28:38
There were some films here we didn't have a chance to show them.
1:28:40
Primarily show Susie Dietrich.
1:28:42
They're from the Susie Dietrich Archive.
1:28:44
And there's one actually that shows the British Racing Show of 1960.
1:28:47
Kinda a nice period piece.
1:28:49
And I wanna put in a plug, another book to get is Michael's book, because you want,
1:28:53
again, this idea of people and racing, the Formula one at Watkins Glen, 19 61,
1:28:59
81 is a real treasure in that regards.
1:29:02
So thank you.
1:29:03
I don't see any questions coming from the audience.
1:29:05
I will say this about that courier.
1:29:07
Let me just finish this point, Tim, and I want to get your question.
1:29:10
That may be true that it went into the miss that courier, but there are
1:29:13
people who believe that car did exist.
1:29:16
And when we had the Mark Donahue reunion here three years ago, that car was there.
1:29:20
His son Michael drove it.
1:29:22
That car then was sold to uh, Johannes, Willem Park who took it to Austria.
1:29:26
And Johannes has an interesting hobby.
1:29:28
In addition to a lot of great classic race cars, he also collects the first
1:29:32
race cars of famous race car drivers.
1:29:35
If you can imagine that.
1:29:36
Tim, the records were lost in a fire.
1:29:41
Probably finding out about some of this, just the estimates, like what
1:29:45
the total number of sports racers, carriers, and junior early, right.
1:29:50
I think the records lost in the fire might be somewhat there.
1:29:54
It seems like that happens a lot.
1:29:56
The records are lost in fires, you know, and you're looking for, so I
1:29:59
got, yeah, I can probably write a chapter about records lost in fires.
1:30:03
I think it was more records lost because we don't want, Hm, revenue
1:30:07
to find out what really went on.
1:30:09
That was probably more what really happened.
1:30:11
But the records are really confusing with Elva production and the really,
1:30:16
the number one reason for that is not because of any skullduggery, but because
1:30:21
of unfinished kits coming out the door.
1:30:24
You have finished cars coming out the door, you have some that were
1:30:27
supposed to go out, kits came back in the door and were finished sent out.
1:30:31
So because of the nature of this kind of hodgepodge, industry,
1:30:35
records weren't kept that closely.
1:30:37
And then add to that, these issues with the Dixon Saga,
1:30:40
the Dixon problem recovery.
1:30:42
After that Trojan coming into play, you have all kinds of opportunities for
1:30:47
things to go awry and record keeping.
1:30:49
That had a lot to do.
1:30:50
But to answer your question about numbers.
1:30:52
As best we can tell, there were about seven, 800 couriers built of all stripes,
1:30:59
and this includes actually a, a handful that were built way after the Trojan era
1:31:04
because Trojan then handed it off to a fellow named Ken Shepherd, then handed
1:31:08
off to fellow named Tony S, and they built the few cars after just a handful.
1:31:12
But the number 800 fits juniors, that's actually the, I don't know the number
1:31:17
into my head, but the juniors happen to be the one that we're pretty well documented
1:31:21
on, and it's right around 100 in total of the three different kinds of juniors,
1:31:26
actually four, if it includes Scorpion.
1:31:27
I don't have that in my head, but I know that number is pretty concrete.
1:31:31
The sports racers in the neighborhood of three to 400, some of those
1:31:37
with the later ones, 6, 7, 8, we know the numbers exactly.
1:31:42
Earlier ones.
1:31:42
No, that's where we get into this kit.
1:31:44
Car problems.
1:31:45
You raise a a point there and I'm gonna ask both of you.
1:31:48
Are you aware that there is a controversy that maybe there is someone
1:31:52
in England or somewhere else who is manufacturing historic race cars and
1:31:56
passing them off as Sterling Moss's car?
1:31:59
And is anyone doing this with Elva?
1:32:01
Is any clever mechanic who had built Elvis at one time, are they manufacturing
1:32:06
new ones that they're passing off?
1:32:07
No, because Elvis's aren't that valuable.
1:32:09
After all, we, you know, we have this, this wonderful cult following
1:32:13
of Elvis, but they're not Ferraris.
1:32:15
That problem exists with Ferrari.
1:32:17
Cobras, Ford, gts.
1:32:20
Coopers.
1:32:20
Coopers, yeah.
1:32:21
Yeah.
1:32:21
Coopers, some Lolas, it happens with a number of, some of
1:32:24
'em actually are licensed.
1:32:25
Some in some cases, like Lola for example, now is licensed, what
1:32:28
they call continuation license.
1:32:30
Somebody to build it.
1:32:31
So those are legit.
1:32:32
But then you get in this problem of, okay, they're built just like the old
1:32:36
cars, are they the same as the old cars?
1:32:38
They're built with modern techniques and all gets into all these issues.
1:32:42
There's a couple different problems with that.
1:32:44
One is there is the fraud aspect where people try to pass off a car
1:32:49
as having this and this provenance and it really doesn't, and that
1:32:53
happens over and over again.
1:32:54
I've been involved in some of those cases, in fact.
1:32:57
And then there is the other kind of aspect, which is, well, we want
1:33:02
to build this continuation, but now where are you gonna race these things?
1:33:05
Because the different vintage and historic sanctioning bodies, they
1:33:09
have a wide variety of rules.
1:33:11
Some are very, very strict.
1:33:13
This particular car you raced, the car itself must have documented
1:33:17
history of having done X, Y, and Z.
1:33:20
Other sanctioning bodies are much looser.
1:33:22
They'll say, we'll accept cars that have been modified, modernized in some way.
1:33:26
We'll also accept cars that have been built as a continuation.
1:33:31
So those, those, there's the issue too of what you can do with these cars besides
1:33:35
this, what their particular provenance.
1:33:38
I got involved in a lot of this just recently because after I
1:33:42
retired, my wife had done most of the, uh, papers for historic cars
1:33:47
for the FIA in the United States.
1:33:49
She wanted to continue doing that 'cause she enjoyed talking
1:33:53
with the people and so forth.
1:33:54
And so when we retired, my successor Nick Crawl asked if
1:33:58
we wouldn't continue doing that.
1:34:00
And I said yes, but I didn't want to do inspections because
1:34:03
I didn't want to travel.
1:34:04
And we used Jeremy Hall who was the, uh, FIA inspector that inspected
1:34:09
all the cars for us, and we got involved in a number of those.
1:34:13
We didn't have any problems that I can recall on any elvas at all.
1:34:17
But we did have a lot of them on other cars and the FIA had a procedure,
1:34:22
they started out doing it for a, uh, historic papers called Heritage Program.
1:34:28
And it was fairly expensive because it required the car to be, regardless of
1:34:32
where the car was located, you had to have an inspector go out to it, had it go back.
1:34:37
And generally it took a couple times to do it and if there was any other car
1:34:42
or any other person that claimed the Providence car that you had, they would
1:34:47
not accept either one of them until it was resolved and it got kind of difficult.
1:34:51
I actually have a Cooper still that I'm the only owner of the car.
1:34:56
I bought it from Reg Parnell and he was the original buyer of the car.
1:35:00
It was a race team and I bought it from him and it's been in my garage
1:35:04
almost completely since that time.
1:35:06
Yet we know of one in England that has claiming the same numbers on it.
1:35:11
You know the sad part, when these were first built, we didn't look into the
1:35:15
things that you all look into now.
1:35:17
We knew the cars because we knew it.
1:35:19
It was a red Elva so and so owned it, and if he put a blue stripe on it, it
1:35:24
was the red Elva with a blue stripe.
1:35:26
Nobody ever asked about a serial number or anything.
1:35:29
It's really a shame that we didn't do more.
1:35:32
But I think on the first Elvis, we get, I remember the only thing I saw that
1:35:36
had a number on it, and I'm not sure it looked like a little tin strip that
1:35:39
you'd get at a arcade for a quarter where you could print your name on
1:35:43
a piece of metal or something, and I think Frank would go down to the arcade
1:35:48
and get 'em made when he needed them.
1:35:51
And it was really kind of funny.
1:35:53
It's sad, but it makes it interesting too.
1:35:56
If it was all cut and dried and we knew where everyone was and everything
1:36:00
that had done, it'd be different.
1:36:01
But it's fun.
1:36:02
You know, there are people that collect cars just to do that sort of thing.
1:36:06
They don't care about racing them or anything.
1:36:09
They like to look at 'em and they love enjoying the, uh, history of them.
1:36:13
And it's kind of fun when you find out your car had some
1:36:16
kind of providence do it.
1:36:18
Comment on that.
1:36:18
It's interesting about how, yeah, this thing about chassis numbers and
1:36:21
so forth is, is of issue now because of the cars that become valuable.
1:36:26
And then we, when you do dig through the history, there are all these
1:36:28
problems come about for a variety of reasons that, that Birdie had mentioned.
1:36:33
And many of 'em had to do with legal issues back in the day.
1:36:36
Because particularly before the onset of the European Union crossing every border
1:36:41
in Europe, you had to show that the car has, yeah, left and entered the country.
1:36:45
And so the documentation had to match the chassis number.
1:36:49
But if you crashed a car, that means you still had to export that car.
1:36:52
So you take the plate off and put it onto another car.
1:36:55
That kind of switching went on all the time.
1:36:57
And it goes on today, like probably current racing quite a bit.
1:37:00
'cause I. The writing that I do, and I was, there was a particular car in
1:37:04
the A LMS race that was crashed at Lime Rock, and a week later, the next
1:37:09
race of mid Ohio, I was there and the team had this brand new car, and I went
1:37:14
up to him, I said, oh, I want to get the chassis number of your new car.
1:37:17
And the guy tells me the chassis number and I said, no, no, that's
1:37:20
the one you crashed last week.
1:37:22
He goes, no, no, that's this one.
1:37:24
And I said, no, that can't be.
1:37:25
You've got a new car here.
1:37:26
He goes, no, we repaired it.
1:37:28
And I said, wait a minute, couldn't I?
1:37:30
It was there at Limerock.
1:37:31
It was badly damaged.
1:37:33
It was destroyed.
1:37:33
You didn't repair that car.
1:37:34
It said, no, we repaired it.
1:37:36
And I said, no, this.
1:37:38
And I looked and sure enough had the same chassis number I saw a
1:37:40
week earlier, and I said, well, how can I have the same chassis number?
1:37:43
He says, well, we sent it back to Germany.
1:37:46
They repaired it, they sent it back to us.
1:37:49
It's a repaired car.
1:37:50
No customs duties paid.
1:37:52
I got that Juergen Barth.
1:37:54
Let me just tell you.
1:37:55
Tell you, Juergen Barth told me that Porsche.
1:37:58
Even did the same thing.
1:37:59
They built a lot of race cars, team cars, and none of them have plates of their own.
1:38:04
They just would move them from whatever they were taking them with, and
1:38:08
that's the company as big as Porsche.
1:38:09
We have a question back here.
1:38:11
Yes.
1:38:11
Did you really know anything about Gas?
1:38:17
Yes.
1:38:18
The name, name shows up Trust was 5,000 Drive.
1:38:21
Well, he drove, I know he drove very successfully in the Continental
1:38:25
series at one time and that I don't ever remember him in a courier and,
1:38:40
well, there were quite a few of them down in Atlanta and it may be some
1:38:44
place he worked or somebody he knew or something, but it's possible.
1:38:48
The name very much rings a bell and I believe he's in my database that comes.
1:38:52
With the books, we can probably take one here.
1:38:54
Just Dave, introduce yourself.
1:38:56
I'm Dave Wild.
1:38:57
We have an Elva courier that I started racing after racing
1:39:01
at MGTD for quite a few years.
1:39:03
The courier, we were racing, uh, early sixties into mid sixties.
1:39:08
Anyway.
1:39:09
This is a story that I never shared with my wife until many years later.
1:39:14
It had been raining for oh, three days down here at Watkins Glen.
1:39:20
That time we're still doing standing starts.
1:39:23
False grid was mud at that time.
1:39:26
Curious mix of Watkins Glen, clay, and.
1:39:29
The oil leaks of a thousand British cars that had gone before.
1:39:33
It was kind of a sticky mess at that time.
1:39:36
They slowly put us out on the grid and when the flag fell, I pulled a good
1:39:42
starting position in the second row, staggered just behind a Porsche 3 56.
1:39:48
As the flag fell, the 3 56 spun its tires unloaded its load of mud directly
1:39:55
in my face because we're sitting kind of exposed in an Elva courier.
1:40:00
Initially, I let off on the gas almost immediately, then
1:40:04
instantaneously, easily got back on it.
1:40:07
Because I realized there were a hundred cars behind me at a hundred miles an hour.
1:40:12
We had to get moving, so I put my foot back down.
1:40:15
I could not see a thing trying to get enough water off the cow of the
1:40:20
car to clear the mud off my visor, and was unsuccessful for a while.
1:40:26
But just on instinct alone and experience running the course there, I managed to.
1:40:33
Come up from the old start, finish line up the hill through the S and out onto
1:40:38
the strait before I could see again.
1:40:41
Great story, great story.
1:40:44
It was hairy one other time.
1:40:46
I was up on the back straight and somehow or another it collided with a bird.
1:40:52
It must have been a crow 'cause all I could see was black feathers.
1:40:55
It spun the helmet sideways to cover one eye, and it felt
1:41:00
like a pterodactyl, not a crow.
1:41:04
But thank you.
1:41:11
Well, with that, I'm gonna say very special thanks to Burette Martin to Y win,
1:41:17
and to all of you for being here today.
1:41:18
Thank you today for a great.
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