Early Eddie Kuzma built Offenhauser dirt track car ©1988 The four-cylinder Offy was based on the Miller design and started winning races in 1935. The Offenhauser era emerged after World War II as cars with an Offy engine in front won every AAA or USAC race from 1947-'63. Interesting curiosities like the Cummins Diesel and supercharged Novis challenged but the classic Offy-powered roadster ruled. Frank Kurtis and Eddie Kuzma were the most successful roadster builders from the late forties through the middle fifties before being challenged into the sixties by builders like A. J. Watson and Quinn Epperly.Hero drivers of the thirties and forties who drove this car or ones like it were Rex Mays and Ted Horn. Mays was the 1940 and ‘41 AAA champion and was killed at Del Mar, California in 1949. Horn won the championship three years in a row in 1946, ‘47 and ‘48 but was killed at Du Quoin, Illinois in October of 1948. The heros of the fifties that started in these cars included two-time champion Tony Bettenhausen, three-time champion Jimmy Bryan and 1953 and ‘54 Indy 500 winner Bill Vukovich. Bettenhausen and Vukovich had family that race to this day. Bryan was a big, cigar-chomping man from Arizona who also won the Race of Two Worlds on the banked track at Monza, Italy in 1957. He was killed at Langhorne in 1960. Bettenhausen perished during practice at Indianapolis in 1961.On this car note the lack of front brakes and hand pump to pressurize
the fuel tank. |