If you like noise, power, and torque, you’ll like this car,” said Tom McRae in a Texas accent so thick you could cut it with a steak knife. “Come on down here, and ride this thang to Indy with me.”
It’s 1200 miles from Granbury, Texas, to Indianapolis, and I tried to imagine what it would be like to do it in three days, riding in the “mechanic’s seat” of a vintage-’30s two-person Indy car. The right-side seat, you see, more closely resembles a modified barrel — flat on the bottom and round at the back, with just enough room for a middle-aged butt to slide into place. Sitting almost straight upright in the car, the rider’s head and shoulders are open to the wind, which can whip by at an impressive velocity. There are no seatbelts, no padded dash, no airbags. The riding mechanic could hope for only good driving, and good luck. And in our case, good weather.
Day 1
McRae dabbles in old cars, the way a priest dabbles in religion. Since 1983, he has organized and promoted the “Great Race,” a coast-to-coast timed race of any pre-1951 vehicle, as well as sports cars, racecars, and motorcycles of vintage 1951 through 1959. The event has paid out more than $5 million in purse money to date.
The 1999 event was over a back-road course from Marietta, Georgia, to Anaheim, California, and attracted nearly 90 entrants. To promote the event, McRae rolled out the Shafer 8, a car he simply refers to as “the Special.” Built two years ago after six years of meticulous research, it is nearly identical to a line of mid-’30s cars that raced at Indianapolis. Those cars were built by Herman Rigling and Cotton Henning at their Indianapolis shop, using Buick straight-eight engines on steel-rail frames. A Pontiac dealer in Des Moines, Iowa, one Phil “Red” Shafer, purchased one of the Rigling cars in 1931, christened it the “Shafer 8,” and drove it to a 12th-place finish at Indy. The car’s best finish at the Brickyard came in 1933, when H.W. “Stubby” Stubblefield finished fifth with J.C. Brooks riding alongside.
McRae cringes when he is asked if the car is an accurate replica of the original Shafer 8. “I hate the word ‘replica,'” he said through a snow-white beard, “because most people think that means a fiberglass something on a Volkswagen chassis, and that’s not what this car is.”
Stock-block racecars such as the Shafer 8 were a direct result of the Great Depression. Deeply concerned with the effects of the economic collapse of late 1929, Indy racing officials introduced new rules in 1930 to encourage less-expensive stock-block cars to compete with the sophisticated and dominant Miller and Duesenberg engines. Shafer eagerly seized the opportunity, running Buick-powered cars at Indy from 1931 to 1936, and then moving to the fast-rising Offenhauser engine. Why the Speedway required a riding mechanic during this period is not really known. What is known, however, is that from 1930 through 1937, 17 participants perished at Indy, nearly one-third of the total of 66 fatalities from 1909 to date. Two-man cars clearly doubled the danger with every crash at Indianapolis.
McRae’s machine is powered by a 1937 200-hp, 320-cubic-inch Buick straight-eight with a Buick three-speed transmission. The engine configuration of the original cars varied slightly from year to year, and McRae’s powerplant uses the same components as those found during the Shafer era. The wheelbase is 112 inches, with 20-inch wheels and six-inch tires that look like bicycle tires compared with today’s wide rubber. Although all the Shafer cars carried mechanical brakes, McRae elected to fudge a bit when he installed hydraulic brakes on his car. “There was no way I was going to put mechanical brakes on a car that will do more than a hundred miles an hour,” said McRae, “because I might want to run a hundred miles an hour.”
We rolled the car out early on a Wednesday morning in front of McRae’s Granbury museum. A century ago, McRae would have been the guy who brought the circus to town; he is a born promoter with a keen ability to attract a crowd and then play to it. With a noisy send-off by a dozen or so locals, he spun the rear tires of the Special and we were on our way.
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