WINNERS!

Here is a row of winning cars from the 90's back to the 60's.
This one gets special mention as it is Shiersen Racing's 1990 winner driven by Arie Luyendyk. My formula Atlantic was an ex-Shiersen car. He had owned March's for years. Changed to a Lola and Arie and won!

A March 83C driven by Tom Sneva won in 83.

You get two pictures of the March.

Jim Halls Chaparrals. The 1980 winner driven by Johnny Rutherford in the foreground.

1973 Eagle driven by Gordon Johncock.

1972 McLaren driven by Mark Donohue.

68 Eagle driven by Bobbie Unser.

Carb Day at Indy

Here are a few pictures and videos from Carb day at Indy. Carb day consists of one hour of practice to get your race setup. When you get to a video TURN UP THE VOLUME!Here are the cars getting ready. For your $10 you also get to go almost anywhere at the track to watch.

Typical.

After practice if you go to the right spot you can get all kinds of good pictures.

One of many I took as the cars headed back to Gasolene Alley.

This old guy shows up every year for the 500.

Start of the Indy lights race. It was a very good race from the top 5 guys.

Lotus at Indy

Having been a Lotus owner I have to have a special day just for the Lotus of Indy. I am going to start with the type 38 that won. To see a fantastic painting of the car go to Car-A-Day.
Nose

Goodwood stickers.
I just love the bundle of snakes.

This is the type 29 that Jimmy Clark got 2nd in 63.

Very simple but effective.

The office.

The type 56, the turbine powered car. This was Graham Hill's. He qualified 2nd and was running 4th when it broke a suspension member. Certainly a different design for Lotus and a car I still haven't made up my mind if I think it looks good or not.

Misc. cars at the Indy museum

One of the great things about the Museum at Indy is that they like race cars, any race cars. So they have some really cool cars from other forms of racing that you can see.The 1991 Benetton. Driven by two guys named Schumacher and Patrese. I think some guy named Brawn was involved with this car also.
Oh, look! A diffuser, what does that do for a car?

Going back to the roots though, here is a 1906 Renault. Lets put Alonso in this and I bet he would get everything he could out of it and then some.

Do you think Aerodynamics is the new trick? This is the 1906 Laurin & Klement which is in the lineage of the current Skoda company. Look at the nose, sloped for extra downforce. Notice the fin in the back. It was actually tied into the steering to help get the rear end around corners without skidding. A movable aero device to help with oversteer.

A 1907 Italia.

What collection doesn't need a Bugatti. Here is a 1929 model 35-B.

Front view.

1954 Mercedes W196. Does this look like a 55 year old design?

1961 Birdcage Maserati. I wish I could get a picture with the skin off.

A rare Scarab. An American race car that competed in several levels of racing.

Their 1965 Ferrari 250LM. One of the prettiest Ferrari's ever built. This car won the 1965 24 Hour of LeMans.

A.J. Made Things Go

Here are two of the cars that A.J. Foyt drove to wins. The first is the 1967 car for his third win. It was a Coyote (Foyt's) chassis and a Ford engine

Notice the chassis offset to the left for left turn ovals only.
They were starting to pay attention to aerodynamics.

Zoom in for all the info.

I love the little flipped up tail.

Here is the 1977 winner his 4th winner. This car was all Foyt's even the engine was a Foyt. It was still pretty close to the Ford Cosworth.

I really like the lack of restoration on this car. It is pretty much the way it came off of the track. Notice the nice high tech rope for pulling the protective plug out of the turbo. You can also see the sideways "T" part of Foyt cast in the engine cam cover.

The engine and mechanical bits are still oily and a light covering of dust. They keep the body shiny but that is all. The cover plate on the header was where they bolted on the pop off valve to control the amount of boost.

Really nice sway bar adjuster.

Engines That Make Them Go

Here is a brief history of some of the major engines used during the first 50 years of the 500.This is the Cummings diesel 400 cu. in. engine, it is NOT a major engine from Indy. They tried diesels twice in the 30's and twice in the 50's without much success. The diesel was tried because it could go 500 miles on a tank of diesel without refueling. However the car was so heavy that it wore out tires quickly and they had more pit stops to just change tires.
This is the 1920 Monroe-Frontenac engine. A 4 cylinder 16 valve double overhead cam design. The Meyer-Drake Offy running in 1966 has the same configuration.

The 1920 Duesenberg strait 8 engine. Duesenberg ran Indy all through the 20's with basically their production engine. If you bought a Duesenberg for the street you got this engine. Today it would be like buying a Toyota Corolla and getting their F1 engine in it. Ooh doggies!

The 1926-29 Duesenberg. Eight cylinders and 90 cu. in.

Their biggest competition was the Miller supercharged engine. 91 cu. in.

During the 30's Duesenberg fell out of favor and Miller really took over. Here is the 1932 Miller-Offenhauser. 220 cu. in.

Here is the basic Offenhauser block used up until 1966. Very simple but very rugged. Everybody thought they had a better idea on how to coax a few more horsepower out of it than anyone else.

Another version of the Miller engine used during the 30's. The differences where mainly caused by the Miller race cars being front wheel drive so the engines were in their cars backwards.

In the 50's Meyer-Drake took over building what had been the Offenhauser engine. This would be the engine of choice until 1966.

The other side of the Meyer-Drake.

This engine based on a stock Ford block was designed by Mike Costin and Keith Duckworth and opened the door to all sorts of engines. However the Cosworth engine has probably won more major races than any other engine.