Mickey Thompson vs. the Indianapolis Motor Speedway
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Mickey Thompson's Wins Spitfire Special
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When it comes to the all-time most compelling storylines in American racing history, Mickey
Thompson vs. the Indianapolis Motor Speedway ranks pretty high.
After all, Thompson was the master of virtually all he saw during his high-octane life – a
drag racing legend, a land speed racing American hero, an off-road racing titan, a speed parts
magnate, a winner in all that he touched.
Unless it involved a 2.5 mile round cornered rectangle outside of Indianapolis.
It was a place where an entrenched establishment rejected him, where a catastrophe took a friend
and a rising star from him, and where a man with the ambition of 15 men, the mind of an
empirical genius and an ego that dwarfed indie-famous pagoda could let every wild idea he ever wanted
to put into a race car come to life.
And this may actually have been the problem.
Before we get into the truly crazy race car that Thompson dreamt up for the 1967 Indianapolis
500, we have to really look at the hows and whys of Thompson's seemingly hideous record
at the track.
History gives us the benefit of perspective when we look back over stuff that happened
in the past and we can look back at media, interviews from the time, books that recorded
the events and magazines that were there.
I'm actually of the opinion after studying the subject for a while now that Thompson,
by virtue of staying true to himself and his own goals from his indie beginning in 1962
through the last time he fielded a car in 1968, accomplished more than he's credited
with.
He was the only guy on the planet that was hard-headed enough, verbose enough, maybe crazy
enough and certainly audacious enough to not only pursue the ideas that he did, but
to do so in a way that was so public and so loud that a mostly unknowing media and public
couldn't help but be convinced that he was leading a technical revolution and that victory
was imminent.
Had Mickey Thompson bought a Curtis Craft chassis or later a Lotus and an off-engine
or a dual overhead camp Ford, name the car that Mickey Thompson forged, pissed and special
and just fell in line with everyone else at the speedway, he likely would have been
very competitive to the point of likely having one of the best drivers, the best mechanics
and probably would have won multiple Indianapolis 500s.
But here's the thing, Mickey Thompson would have just as soon eat worms than do that.
His sense of accomplishment was in designing and making new things, be they speed parts,
the first slingshot dragster, the Challenger land speed car that carried him to 400 miles
per hour at global fame and of course his string of Indy cars.
He brought three of them there in 1962, the first American entries with the engine behind
the driver.
This was the year after Jack Brabham showed the world what the future looked like in his
little car.
One carried an Indy rookie named Dan Gurney and he qualified his car into the field of
33.
The others missed the show.
The next year he was back with three cars.
This time they wore 12 inch diameter wheels with ultra low profile tires for the era.
People didn't know what to make of them.
Two of his cars finished, ninth and 23rd.
The 12 inch wheels were made illegal by a rule change before the 1964 race that mandated
a 15 inch minimum diameter wheel.
It made his modified and rebodied cars sit higher, they drove worse, Dave MacDonald was
killed in one of them on the second lap of the 1964 race.
Thompson largely scorned by the establishment at the race was pilloried both in public and
private after it.
And yet he didn't quit.
Not only did he not quit but he seemingly got even more bold with his concepts and ideas.
His 1965 Challenger wheel special was among the most oddly constructed cars in the history
of the Indy 500.
A massive titanium tube about a foot in diameter ran down the right side of the car serving
as both the fuel tank and the structural core of the chassis.
Everything else was built off of it.
The engine was a one off small block Chevy with custom dual overhead camshaft heads.
The entire engine canted way over on its left side to keep the aerodynamic profile of the
car correct.
Constant engine issues plagued this automobile.
Burn pistons were a constant and through a slew of problems the car failed to qualify
for the 1965 race.
After skipping 1966, we now get to 1967.
And before we get to the wind split fire special, we have to mention one other point about Mickey
Thompson and his track record at the Indy 500.
Drivers.
There are many reasons why there was a very long period of stagnation at the Indy 500
but one of the most overlooked was right there in the cockpit.
See in order to actually win the 500, you needed a good driver and good drivers needed
good equipment.
Good drivers did not go looking kindly on new technology, long shots, unproven cars,
designs and the list goes on.
So naturally this had an interesting effect on both the race and on Mickey Thompson.
It definitely drove the race toward cookie cutter status cars and the ones they had for
so many years in the roadsters.
A Curtis Kraft, an offy and a guy brave enough to hold the gas pedal down the whole way around
kind of got you a fighting chance to win.
It also meant that the small number of guys willing to work as test pilots on new cars,
weird cars or different cars was very small and worse than that either not so talented
or wantonly reckless.
Occasionally Thompson lucked out with a guy like Gurney, an unknown who was not going
to stay that way for long but a guy who needed a seat.
But for Mickey Thompson he was mostly relegated to helping get young guys a break or picking
up from the few guys willing to climb into his cars, especially after the 1964 Dave McDonald
disaster.
I'm not here making excuses for Mickey Thompson at the Indy 500 but I am here shedding some
light onto the whole picture and allowing you to make your own judgments.
It was a miracle he was showing up with this stuff that kind of ran, taking on a global
automotive superpower and multiple ones at that and far more wealthy owners from what
was really a truly a peanuts budget that he was bringing with him.
There was only one area that Mickey Thompson never lost at an Indy 500 and that was in
the media.
They ate out of the palm of his hand and he had plenty to feed him.
He did not come across like a normal car owner or crew chief.
He was constantly covered in oil and grease, thrashing on his car with the men in the garage,
he cut a dashing and heroic hot rotting figure and the media lapped it up.
After all, he was the first American to ever go 400 miles per hour and that still in the
mid 60s carried a very large aura with it.
After taking 1966 off from Indy but not from planning for Indy, Mickey Thompson announced
on January 24, 1967 that he was bringing two new cars to the Indy 500 and one of them would
be packed with so much technology and heretic level ideas, the world that effectively never
seen anything like it at the speedway.
As it turns out, he was right and likely for a reason.
Like any good promoter, Thompson knew that playing the long game with the media was the
far smarter move.
You gave them a little at a time and kept them coming back for more.
So the release in January was simple.
It stated he was bringing two cars and power would be coming from stock block style Chevrolets
measuring 305 cubic inches a piece because that was the maximum allowed for the rule
set of Indy that year for a stock block style engine.
The Associated Press covered this story and as it would turn out, they'd cover almost
every word out of Mickey Thompson's mouth on this entire adventure.
As history would show, Mickey Thompson was already way ahead of the game when it came
to the promotional side of things because about two weeks later, newspaper men and magazine
writers from across California and the country were invited to show up to St. Gabriel Speedway
to see the unveiling of the most radical of his two new cars, a machine that was to
be known as the Wins Spitfire Special.
They were introduced to the most wild conglomeration of ideas ever assembled in one car for the
Indy 500 by both Mickey Thompson and his sponsor Wins.
The timing was perfectly strategic.
The newspaper stories would hit the next day and through the coming weeks, but the magazines
which operated with a three month lead time would be publishing their May issues with
an Indy 500 preview story in them and he figured he would be in every one of those magazines
and guess what, he was right.
This car was literally everywhere and for good reason.
This was a front wheel drive, front engine car for starters.
These were two concepts that were very well dead at the Speedway.
The engine was an aluminum block 305 cubic inch Chevy small block with custom three
valve per cylinder heads developed by Thompson himself.
The engine was offset to the left of the car.
The driver sat all the way back nearly between the rear tires almost like a slingshot dragster.
Lastly, the car had a feature which no car in Indy 500 history had ever sported at this
point.
Four wheel steering.
Of honorable mention in the weird department was the fact that the car's nose extended
multiple feet ahead of the front tires and there was a radiator mounted in an almost
horizontal position inside of it.
Finishing out this Sunday of crazy was the announcement that the car would be driven
by Gary Congdon, a young pilot who had made one Indy 500 start the previous year and wrecked
his car about a football field's length after crossing the starting line under the green
flag on the first lap.
What could possibly go wrong?
We're going to examine this car in more detail as we follow it in the not too shockingly
ill-fated path to the Speedway and beyond, but save it to say this thing seemingly combined
every passe concept at the Speedway and threw a couple of more fresh ones in there for good
measure along the way.
Personally, I love the way it looks.
Many newspaper stories mentioned throughout its short life that it seemed to be inspired
by or appears to be a version of a dragster and frankly I kind of dig it.
So let's get down to business.
Mickey Thompson did not scratch build this car.
Joe Huffaker did use the famed builder that created the machine to the specifications Mickey
came up with.
It's pure Mickey in design and execution, but the hands of Huffaker actually did the
job of bringing Mickey's drawings and weird ideas and in-the-moment concepts and disruptive
thinking to life.
Very few images exist of this car with no body on it.
It's a monocoque style construction car that weighed 1,385 pounds with no driver or fuel
and 1,995 pounds with both a driver and fuel.
It carried a 96 inch wheelbase with a front track width of 59 inches and a rear track
width of 56 inches.
The car was 19 inches tall at the nose, 29 inches tall at the cowl and 38 inches tall
at the top of the driver's headrest.
Four wheel air heart brakes were at the corners.
16 inch genie magnesium wheels carried Goodyear tires at 45 psi.
The odd for Indy 500 standards roll bar was made of inch and a half chrome ollie tubing
and the rear steering system was adjustable for varying levels of angle in relation to
the front wheels.
The thought here was to make it adjustable because no one really knew what the ideal
rear steering angle would be at the speedway because, well, no one had ever dared try it
before.
Thompson claimed in the release of the new car that he had secretly tried rear steering
in one of his 1963 entries but had never told anyone about it.
He was convinced that the rear steering would reduce the slip angle of the car allowing
it to carry far more speed out of the corners, reduce tire wear and it would result in some
dramatic increases in speed during qualifying in the race.
In my god, he sold the concept well.
If Thompson's former Indy entries had one thing in common, it was the fact that the
world knew he'd be showing up with horsepower.
After all, as a guy who made his living as a magnate in the speed parts universe, Mickey
Thompson knew how to make horsepower.
Issuing the off the engine, not giving the dominating dual overhead cam 4 to 2nd thought,
Thompson went ham and he decided to cast his own aluminum blocks, create his own 3 valve
cylinder heads and equip these cars with one of the most heartily interesting versions of
the Chevy small block ever made.
Looking at the engine, I know the first thing you thought of was what's so interesting
about a dual overhead cam small block Chevy but that's the thing.
This is not a dual overhead cam small block Chevy.
This car used one camshaft in the block to operate all those valves.
Don't worry, there will be a much greater look inside the engine here shortly.
Now as I previously mentioned, Mickey may have never won the Indy 500 but he dominated
the Indy 500 media and this car was no exception.
The machines on veiling was carried in hundreds upon hundreds of newspapers nationwide and
it was a bonanza for wins in exactly what they were paying Thompson for.
Exactly a month later, Thompson would once again make national headlines but this was
not for the car, it was for basically being a human superhero.
While working in his shop on one of these two cars, he noticed some oil lines attached
to a tank slithering out the door.
He ran outside just in time to see a thief jump in a car and speed off.
Thompson who had the temperament of a stick of dynamite in situations like this jumped
in his own car and the chase was on literally.
Thompson was witness going 80 to 100 miles per hour on city streets and Long Beach to
catch the guy with his parts.
Seen by patrolmen Stuart Gordon and officer William Johnke, they joined the fun as well.
Losing sight of Thompson and his quarry, they soon found the pair in a nearby alley and
Frederick Thomas Collier, then 26 years old, was described as being quote, on the ground
end quote and Thompson was holding his oil tank.
Fred Collier had picked the wrong guy to steal from and I'm assuming Fred Collier didn't
sit himself on the ground, I'm assuming Mickey Thompson's fist probably did.
Now unfortunately, that would be the last victory Mickey Thompson scored around this
car for a while, maybe ever.
Ten days after this story was reported, the race car made the papers again and it was
bad.
During a test session at Phoenix Raceway, the wind spitfire plowed into the wall after
a bolt fell out of the steering.
It wasn't specified if it came out of the front or rear steering linkage, but either
way it fell out and it was a mess.
The driver was okay, but the driver was not Gary Condon.
Sammy Sessions was reported as the driver at the time of the crash and as we'll see,
he ended up being the guy assigned to drive this car while Condon took the seat of the
second Thompson entry, which was a more traditional rear engine car that used the same wild three
valve engine as the four-wheel steering car, but none of the other dude adds aside from
well, a suspension system that employed cone shaped rubber springs instead of coil springs
because I don't know, why not?
While Sessions was unhurt, the spitfire was heavily damaged and it was late in the game,
so it left the racetrack and headed straight to the shop of Joe Huffaker to be repaired.
That shop was all the way up in San Francisco.
Of course the problem here was that the team, the car and the engines all needed to be at
the speedway in just a matter of weeks.
It's important to remember, as it is with all things Mickey Thompson, as all this chaos
was going on, he was still running one of the most famous drag strips in the country,
his speeds parts business was still generating millions of dollars of revenue from a load
of different part numbers and his burgeoning tire business had just started and he had
those other ventures he was involved in which are too numerous to mention.
Back in the headlines in April, Thompson declared himself crazy for trying to take on the Ford
Motor Company single-handedly in the engine department and frankly, by the way he was
choosing to do it, he kind of was.
For the engine enthusiasts out there, now's your time to lean in because we're going to
take a look at the 500 plus horsepower, 304.5 cubic inch unit that Mickey Thompson created
out of thin air to power this car and unfortunately, it ultimately powered its undoing.
Hot Rod Magazine put this engine on the cover of the June 1967 issue.
Thompson had his own blocks cast privately out of 356 T6 Aluminum, now there's no mention
about who made them but with the relationship he had with the Reynolds Aluminum, we have
to guess they were somehow involved.
Thompson had final say on the decisions regarding the engine's design but Bill Roshikovsky,
who was the project engineer and went by Rosie for obvious reasons, called the shots on the
day-to-day basis and had to get approvals from Mickey.
Roshikovsky was the man in charge of development for all the engine parts and pieces, he was
charged with assembly and dyno testing as well.
Jim Ward and Jerry Norrick were the engine builders that worked for Rosie and they had
their hands on this beastly creation making sure all the building and assembly was done
properly.
Moldex was contracted for the billet crankshafts.
The cranks used 2.45 inch main bearing journals like a 350 Chevy and 2.2 inch rod journals
like a 427 Chevy.
Supposedly stock iron blocks were tried at first but the bottom ends fractured out of
them which caused the need for the aluminum blocks and a beefier design.
Henry's machine shop in Bellflower, California machined the blocks for steel sleeves, a lineboard
the cam and crank centers, drilled all the oil, water and bolt holes as well as making
sure all the passages were clear and correct.
Things got really serious from this point forward.
Already known as one of the premier connecting rod manufacturers in the country, Thompson
wasn't willing to chance aluminum rods in an engine that needed this much endurance so
he went a step further.
Titanium.
This was wildly advanced stuff for the time.
It had to be insanely expensive to do this back in the 1960s as well.
The pistons were also one off forging as the heads had a wildly interesting kind of pant
roof or even close to a hemmy design that kind of split the difference.
Creating new dies and all the tooling to make these was no small task either and many versions
of the pistons were made with different ringland designs for testing.
And now for the heads.
And this is where the real magic was happening and actually it was more voodoo than magic
but you'll get the picture here shortly.
Rudy Moeller who was an amazing draftsman and expert level guy in the casting world
was integral in drawing these heads up so they could actually be made.
His career in the high performance world stretched back to the 1920s working with the Chevrolet
brothers and he worked for many years in the aviation industry so this is a project right
in his wheelhouse.
Using two intake valves and one exhaust valve, two versions of the head were made.
An eight port version to be used on the Spitfire car and a 16 port version to be used on the
The valve angle was 45 degrees on all the valves and all were custom made in stainless
steel.
Actuating those valves was the truly incredible part of this engine.
Because Mickey wanted to stay with a single cam and block design, things had to get weird
somewhere and they got weird in the valve train.
Crower and Windfield both made varying camshaft designs for the engine.
Crower also manufactured special needle bearing roller lifters to kind of start this whole
valve train parts process moving.
Then the two intake valves were opened by a single Smith Brothers pushrod per cylinder
and this was done with a specialized rocker arm with an offset position for the pushrod
to work and a second nose opened both of the valves with a single rod making it happen.
This is relatively easy to visualize as it basically just looked like two rocker arms
stuck together being actuated by a single pushrod.
The exhaust side of this cylinder head though, and the valve train anyway, is science fiction.
Because the exhaust valve was effectively on the other side of the massive cylinder head,
it was an actual daisy chain of craziness.
Multiple rocker arms were used, there was a bell crank in there and I'm going to walk
you through this and hopefully you can put your visualization mind to work and I'll
show you the photos that I've been able to glean of this setup.
Now for starters, the exhaust pushrod was in the same position it would have been in
a traditional small block Chevy right next to the intake pushrod.
What would happen next is, multiple rocker arms would be used in this process.
Now one of those rocker arms was in the traditional position next to the intake rocker on the
same shaft.
That arm would actuate a transverse pushrod that basically ran across the head and then
operated a bell crank that would open the exhaust valve.
Now it's miraculous that this engine worked at idle, let alone on a racetrack.
The whole thing is pretty difficult to visualize and frankly there's not a ton of good period
photography to really lay it out, but it's just amazing and when you think about how
it worked and again, you have to look at the engine and see the twin rocker covers.
Just know that there is a pushrod not only coming up off of the camshaft on the intake
or inner side of the head, but one that is also running basically straight across to
the outer side or the exhaust side of the head and that is operating another arm to
open that valve and let the exhaust out.
Yeah.
Crower and wind field as mentioned provided a bunch of different cam grinds for testing
and power making purposes.
The cam was gear driven off the crank.
The engine had a custom front cover that held a bunch of stuff including the gear drive
for the magneto, the water and fuel pumps and fuel injection was through freshly made
hillborn injector bodies and hillborn fuel distribution parts, but instead of going full
hillborn with all its parts, a British made Teclimate Jackson injection system was being
favored by Thompson after early dyno testing.
Now, at the close of the hot rod piece about the engine, they mentioned that the magazine
would be out before the race.
Now I know it was the July issue, but it arrived in Holmes early as magazines always did and
they hoped the engine would help Mickey make the show.
Little did they know at the time when they made this story that the engines almost didn't
even make it to the racetrack.
Mickey Thompson had an engine problem that even he and all of his knowledge, power and
superhuman might could and would not fix.
His aluminum engine blocks were more like aluminum sponges.
They were so porous that they didn't just leak oil, they wept it.
And from virtually everywhere.
On May 2nd, 1967, the car arrived at the Speedway to Much Fanfare.
It was received with excitement on the same day that the world got a look at a new rear
engine car made by Clint Bronner and Jim McGee as well.
Bronner's car went out and cruised around at 163 miles per hour in practice with Mario
Andretti at the wheel.
Thompson's car didn't even have an engine in it, nor was the engine even in the same
state.
Mickey for the first time mentioning to reporters of a quote, little porosity problem, end quote,
with the blocks that he said he was working to fix.
He also said that the engine was now making 560 horsepower and capable of revving to 8,000
RPM.
This was a quantum leap from the 6,000 RPM it had stumbled through in early dyno testing,
and at 560 horsepower it was making more power than the mighty Ford dual overhead cam engine.
When the engines arrived a couple of days later, they were installed in both cars.
Gary Condon took the four-wheel steering car out for its first practice, gaining speed
into turn three.
Front wheel fell off and he went skidding, thankfully without harm to himself for the
car, a rather auspicious start indeed.
After the better part of 10 days of testing, both cars with Sessions and Congdon in their
respective seats, Sessions in the four-wheel steering unit and Congdon in the rubber suspension
rear wheel drive car, Thompson's tone in the media began to change and not for the better.
He was openly combative, talking about battling the establishment, talking about the wins
program being a multi-year deal with 1967 simply being a shakedown effort and 1968 being
the year they could really make some noise.
He was also openly declaring that 1968 would be the last time he'd race the Indy 500 in
any capacity no matter the result.
It wasn't going well, it wasn't that both cars were slightly off pace, they were both
too slow to even make official qualifying attempts.
The engines ate oil, ate pistons and seemingly ate the hopes and dreams of every guy and
the crew every time they tried to lean on them.
Sessions described the four-wheel steering car as being quote, spooky.
Congdon could not coax enough speed out of the rear engine car, whether it was the finicky
engine or the rubber suspension, it just wasn't working and they were not close.
On May 18th, Congdon did something pretty wild.
It was the final day of qualifying for the race and he was as desperate as anyone to
find a shot into the show.
He abandoned the Thompson car and drove a total of seven different machines in one day.
He was simply trying to find something, anything, to get a spot among the starting 33.
He drove supercharged A-fi cars, a turbocharged A-fi car and of course the Thompson V8s among
others.
All for naught.
Al Miller qualified 33rd with a speed of 162.602 mph.
Now some media claim that one of Mickey Thompson's cars missed the field by .2 mph and the other
by .7 mph, but the official record of the race shows that neither car actually completed
a full qualifying attempt.
This indicates that they were either waved off for being too slow or the drivers pulled
in with maladies before they were able to post an official time.
An Associated Press story in the 20th of May that was carried around the country sheds
more light onto the troubles that the Thompson crew was having regarding the engines.
The story claims that the teams had gone through six of the engines, which is likely more accurately
stated that they have had to go through the engines six times.
If the engines were consuming oil and leaking it profusely as to all the reports which seem
to indicate that, there is a chance they were also suffering from serious detonation issues
which would kill pistons at a high rate.
Oil in a cylinder when an engine is running at full song or trying to be running at full song
is disastrous to both longevity and performance.
The presence of oil in an engine like that causes pre-ignition or detonation or spark
knock, whoever you want to say it, and it will wreck everything in its path, especially at high RPM.
Now the claim is that Thompson had $300,000 tied up into these two cars and how much of
that was wins money is left to be speculated, but save it to say he had a lot of personal dough
in these things.
Thompson reiterates what he had already said regarding his Indy 500 future and that 1968 would
be it for him when loser draw.
It also mentions that the engines were being run on the dyno all the way until May 11th
before being sent express to Indy.
That seems like a bit of a tall tale and does contradict the earlier month timeline in some
of the newspapers, but again, it makes for a good Mickey Thompson story.
Proving once again that he was the master of the media at that time,
days after the car's fate was decided as a non-qualifier, a story appeared in the papers
about Larry Burton, who Thompson called the chief mechanic on the car.
What made this story so compelling was that Burton, once a prospective racing driver,
had been stricken with polio at the age of 20 and lost the use of his legs.
He serviced the whole car from his wheelchair to the point that Thompson claimed he had
stripped it bare to the chassis and rebuilt it all himself.
On May 25th of 1967, the LA Times reported on the car's failure to qualify and the fact
they had never registered an official qualifying attempt.
Thompson affirms that he'd be back the next year and that it was a two-year effort.
He laments in the story that if GM were actually involved in racing, perhaps they could have
gotten his blocks made and he could have gotten the blocks through GM and this
porosity issue would have been solved and it would not have stymied his team.
The story ends with a line, quote, he couldn't and it wasn't, end quote.
By May 28th, the story of the wind spitfire and the rubber suspended challenger were off
the pages of America's newspapers and sent into the bin of history, except it wasn't.
The wind spitfire had more work to do and that work was done at Bonneville.
In October of 1967, a team headed up by Smokey Unick went to Bonneville to break production
car speed records on a massive circle of some 10 miles around.
Thompson, Curtis Turner and Bunky Blackburn were the drivers and they wiped out a couple of
hundred production car speed records. Now it's a couple of hundred records because they kept
counting the records they were breaking when they would break them again and again,
but it made for good headlines. Otherwise, there was another big story here,
well it wasn't that biggest story but in the terms of this story, it kind of is because,
you know what else was there? A canopy equipped version of the wind spitfire.
I asked Danny Thompson about this and he said the car was going to be run around the same course,
but you guessed it, the engine failed to cooperate, spit the bit very early in the action.
But the spitfire was at Bonneville, was equipped with a canopy and was planned onto being run to
set some speed records, but it couldn't even pull that off. In 1968, Thompson returned to the
speedway but without winds on the side of the car and without the spitfire.
Instead, the wind's challenger was renamed the City of Long Beach Special and he intended to
have Danny on Gaius as a driver. The speedway officials rejected on Gaius on the basis of
lack of experience and so he found Bill Pewterbaugh to take the wheel. Now despite mighty effort,
the results were a nightmare. Pewterbaugh was nowhere close to qualifying, spun the car and
harrowing fashion twice and decided enough was enough walking away from the Thompson entry and
attempting to qualify in other cars. This time the engine was not to blame. How do we know?
Thompson had gone to an iron block. The proof of this came many years later when the engine was
disassembled and the City of Long Beach Special was restored at 955 Automotive in Pennsylvania.
Having never been taken apart, these images show an iron production cast small block Chevy in use.
Jason Orr of 955 Automotive in Pennsylvania that did the work said it was evident that the
engine had been, quote, scabbed together with existing parts as there were things that clearly
mismatched each other and were used to get the engine in running order in what looked to be a
pinch and it was clear to Jason that the engine had never been taken apart after the 1968 race.
Now this also explains why only one car went back in 1968. Having ravaged the engine on the salt in
late 1967, Mickey only had enough parts to make one complete engine and have some spares and
backups to take with him. It also helps to explain why there were mismatched parts in the engine
according to Orr. They were down to whatever was left and so they made it work at the time.
So that's where it ends, right? Wrong. These images from Thompson's triumphant return to
Bonneville in 1968 with a trio of young kind of pre-production 1969 Mustangs show the Spitfire
now powered by a Ford wedge engine on the salt. Thompson, who is now aligned with Ford,
destroyed many of the records they had set with the Camaros in late of 67 and he was planning
on blasting the existing land speed record to pieces with his Challenger 2 streamliner
using Ford power and was in the process of building two of the most innovative
and dominating funny cars the sport of drag racing would ever see. The blue car, driven by
Danny Ungaius, was virtually unbeatable in the 1969 season. So how did the rework spitfire car do
at Bonneville with traditional Ford power? Unfortunately, there is no record of it that I
can find and the only existing thing I can find are these photos to show it even existed at all,
so the answer is it likely didn't do all that well. Remember, front wheel drive, total weirdness,
even not great on the salt. So from there, the story actually ends. There's no real record of
what became of the car after its trip to the salt, which has to be in the 1968 season because of the
Ford engine and logos on it. The City of Long Beach special was restored as mentioned and has
been shown at places like Pebble Beach. And yes, the three valve Chevy engine runs and screams as
you'd hope because of the awesome work done by 955 Automotive. So we're left with one last
question to confront. Is the legacy of Mickey Thompson at the Indy 500 one of abject failure?
The tragedy of Dave McDonald's death is impossible to look past and it haunted Thompson until his
last day. While I can't say that I have the perspective that his legacy is one of success,
it can be argued that his efforts, which always paled in budget, time and outright scope is compared
to those of successful owners and racers, were part of the forces of change at the fabled racetrack
in Indianapolis. The tire innovation alone was game changing. Thompson was a disruptive force in
the history of the Indy 500 and that can't be denied. He was the favorite of hot rodders the
nation over. He was also, despite the lack of outright success, a massive curiosity and publicity
driver for the Indy 500 of the 1960s. Like the designs of his cars, the answer to the question
is complicated. How do you answer it? I'm Brian Loans. Thanks for watching. Like and subscribe
for more explorations into racing machines, racing minds and the history that binds them all together.
About this episode
Mickey Thompson's tumultuous journey at the Indianapolis 500 is explored, focusing on his innovative yet ill-fated 1967 Wynn's Spitfire car. Known for his audacity and unique designs, Thompson faced rejection from the racing establishment and a series of mechanical failures. The episode delves into his creative engineering, including a front-wheel-drive layout and a groundbreaking three-valve engine, while also highlighting the tragic consequences of his ambitious pursuits. Despite never winning the Indy 500, Thompson's legacy as a disruptive force in racing and a media magnet is examined.
f there is a story in American motorsports history more compelling than Micke Thompson versus the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, I am not sure what it is. The man conquered everything in his path over the course of a titanic career, except Indy.
His ideas were wild, his concepts extreme, his timelines always stretched. In 1967 he would unveil a car so far out there that the media went crazy, the tech inspectors didn't know where to start, and engineers the country over scratched their heads.
Front engine, front wheel drive, four wheel steering, and a driver seated basically between the rear tires, it was incredible. It was also powered by a custom made 3-valve small block Chevy.
It was also doomed to fail. This is the story of the 1967 Wynn's Spitfire of Mickey Thompson.
