Pete Craig was a well known AAA driver of the thirties - apparently, he had been around for a while! He was from Gainesville or Atlanta, Ga. Finished second at Lakewood Speedway Sep 11, 1938, was 34th in Eastern points that year.
May I suggest you write to these people then and offer your corrective skills there. http://www.historicracing.com/top100.cfm?fulltext=7639&today=on&fromrow=570 . . . .
The frame, front axle and spindles, radiator cap, exhaust stubs, steering arm and brake cable are identical to the Wisconsin Special. I'm pretty sure he simply put a new body on this one for the "record car". There wasn't much special about that anyway, except for the outrageous speed claims. Incidentally, today even more people fall for this swindle than back in 1922 - ahh, the glory of the "Information Age"!
That is the 1936 Vanderbilt Cup @ Roosevelt Field and i believe that is Ted Horn in the Stevens Miller.
Sorry, please don't take it personal! I know I can be blunt when commenting on other people's posts, but my aim is purely informative. Like Jim Dillon said a few posts back, it's important to get things straight. No harm intended!
I'm sorry, but that is definitely Thorne in the Miller '255'! Here are pictures of the car at Indy in '36 & '37: I will try to look for a pic of Horn and the Hartz/Miller, stand by...
So, what number is the car wearing in the photo posted by Buildy? To me it's a #22 and that is listed as Ted Horn. If it's #42 then it's the Tony Wilman Stevens-Miller.
I may be confused, but didn't Leo Goosen pen the Thorne/ Sparks engines? Hence the architectural and aesthetic similarities between the Miller engines and Thornes.
Ahh, see what ya mean! You're right, that grandstand looks like Vanderbilt Cup in the Thorne picture, which leaves me puzzled. Only explanation I can offer is that he may have run the car as #22 (his favourite number, as I said) in the events leading up to Roosevelt, and the picture may be from an early practice session. I only know that he bought the car following Indy, and that he competed at Roby (July 4), Springfield (Aug 22), Milwaukee (Aug 23 & 26), Roby again (Aug 30) and Pikes Peak (Sep 7), and possibly Syracuse (Sep 15) and Goshen (Oct 3) also. Only trouble is, I have very little info on what car he drove, and since he owned also the two cars he had entered at Indy (now with Offy engines), plus three sprint cars he purchased in June (Duray/Miller, Pirrung-Cunningham/Miller and Sparks-Weirick/Miller "B car"), he may have driven a different car at each and every event, and possibly numbered all of them #22!!! Oh, misery...
Peppered, All I can do is take a guess that it is a cycle powered home built,maybe a bit smaller than a Midget racer.
Oh, forgot... Thorne owned two more cars by then: the 1933 Snowberger/Studebaker, and the 1936 Moore/Miller (the former 4wd car rebuilt to rear-drive spec)!!!
I believe he did, but that is as far as similarities went. Well, that and DOHC/integral head architecture, of course. Mark Dees says that "a few small parts would interchange with the normal run of Miller and Offy engines", but all the basic parameters were very different.
I found a little more information to ad to the Allen-Kingston, Houpt-Rockwell story. I finally found a photo of an Allen-Kingston on the track during a 24Hr grind that was won by the Renault that is p***ing it, the caption is below. Renault driver Louis Raffolovitch p***es the Allen Kingston car on his way to win the 24 hour race in Morris Park New York, September 1909 In the summer of 1906 Walter Allen began building three experimental four-cylinder cars, the year following he put two of them to the test of New York City streets, the third he took racing. The few 1907 cars marketed were built by the New York Car & Truck Company of Kingston and were called New York's. That firm had failed by March of 1908, however, at which time Walter Allen moved his Allen-Kingston Motor Car Company into its factory and the former New York became the new Allen-Kingston. By year's end, Allen had produced 100 cars to sell in the $4000 range and had put up an admirable compe***ion record on the East Coast.
All these drivers look like Snidley Whiplash to me, remember him?. How about some more pics of this super charged six cylinder almost-an-Offy.
In 1907 and 1909 in New York, on the horse racing tracks of Brighton Beach and Morris Park, Renault had two wins. They took victories at the Twenty-Four Hours New York Race at Morris Park, first in September 1907, with Paul Lecroix and Maurice Bernin at the wheel of a Renault 35/45 CV, and again in September 1909, at Brighton Beach, with a schoolmate of Louis Renault, Russian born mechanic Louis Raffolovitch, taking Lacroix's place, and the mechanic Basles taking Bernin's place The prize was $1000 and a diamond tie pin in the shape of a horse. When the overjoyed Raffolovitch cabled his friend Louis Renault with the good news, he received the following reply: We are not amused. [We remain] behind the Michelin-Renault official ban on racing. Photos from September 1909: Written on the first photo, I play the cavalier, alone. Caption on the second photo. Raffolovitch leaves the pits after refreshments. The third photo is a photo of the grandstands and track. Caption on the forth photo is Refreshmentswater, air, oil.
I had just arrived at the same conclusion, Michael! The stand is indeed identical: in the Smith Hempstone Oliver book there is a race day picture of Thorne pushing the car (numbered 23) off the course after retiring. He looks to have the same helmet but a different pair of goggles and is dressed in overalls rather than the T-shirt (although the latter is no proof of course). However, another indication that it's an early practice picture is that the car does not yet bear the "USA" shield on the side. Rather than a riding mechanic, I'd have thought any p***enger would most likely be a journalist.
T-Head- I've been searching the net for more pictures of Mabel Cody's Fronty... have you been able to find a good profile shot of the car (I'm trying to get a better idea of the shape of the tail)?
T-Head- I've been searching the net for more pictures of Mabel Cody's Fronty... have you been able to find a good profile shot of the car (I'm trying to get a better idea of the shape of the tail)? Mac can you post a picture of it so I have something to go by?
They're the ones of #11 that Sig is driving in the pics you posted Apparently, he drove the car for Mabel Cody at times- there are a few action shots of her going from the car to plane on a beach around, and the ones you posted, but other than that, I've hit a dead end.
How would you like to find this in a barn? ...... Well I did but unfortunately it was just the photos, the car was long gone. I was cleaning out a barn at a restoration shop which closed that belonged to the famed early collector George Waterman, Jr. He had the Benz racing car in the barn where I found these photos at one point but probably sold it fifty to sixty years ago. He had other great cars and this one at the time might have been to rough for his tastes, as things were different then. Back then someone of his means and determination could come up cars that you might be able to get running in a week or two. There was no need to deal with an old junker like this but today it is a whole different story. Every time I look at these photos I wonder where it ended up. Anybody Know? It probably looks similar to this photo of one on Daytona Beach that David Bruce-Brown drove.
Ah, Richard, that's interersting! However, if it's #23, the car should look more like this one: (if I got that one right, that is...)
What does the #22 Ted Horn Miller from the '36 race look like? I'm only taking a wild guess, but could Thorne actually be sitting in the Horn car?
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