Just learned Roy Lewis, founder of Chassis Engineering and land speed racer here in West Branch passed away this week. RIP and may the speed gods in the sky look after you.
Mr Lewis' passing was noted here a few days ago in two separate threads. Lots of posts expressing condolences and admiration for the man. Ray
Roy developed many great bolt on improvements making it easy to update early Ford frames. I never realized he ran A stremliner on the salt Thanks for posting the pictures. Gods Speed Roy.
I was his first employee at C.E. in the early days. Roy's parts were always right on. He was a Mechanical Engineer - graduate of the University of Iowa. I set up dealerships with friends of mine to use complete kits to merge '68 - '74 Nova running gear into '35 - '40 Ford's. Terry, along with his son in St. Louis, did one a week in his home garage for quite a few years. During the week a Nova and early Ford would "magically appear" in his yard. When he came home from his regular job on Friday night his boy would have the radiators and gas tanks drained and removed. They would pull all the running gear out of them and bolt in Roy's brackets, springs, engine mounts, trans mount, steering box and column mounts, etc. Then the Nova bodies were used by local racers as dirt track fodder, and the Fords would get the engine, trans, rear end, driveshaft [right length], steering box, steering column, front brakes, wheels & tires, and even battery. The owner would drive away on Monday in their "new hot rod". There are hundreds - even thousands - of cars like this still on the road today because of his quality parts. Many of their owners probably never met Roy or knew of some of his other exploits - Like building a chopped and channeled Model A Coupe with a Chrysler Hemi with a hacksaw and a torch when he was only 15 years old! Like many award winning paint jobs on local street cars and race cars. Like hopping up everything he got his hands on, including cars, motorcycles, and even snow mobiles. Like being the first to go faster than 300 MPH in a diesel powered vehicle!!! My favorite story about Roy is when a newspaper reporter asked him "What's it feel like to go 300 miles an hour??" Roy asked him if he'd ever had a nice open stretch of road and 'let the horses run', and ran his car up to 100 MPH? "Sure, everybody's done that." To which Roy responded, "Well, it's just like that! Only Three Times FASTER!!
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