My name is Bill Akin and this is my 9th time to the Hot Rod Reunion and this is my 1 time
year, won't miss event, I enjoy it a great deal and all my friends come, and we have
a big time up here looking at cars, prowling through the swap meet, and just having a big
time in general.
This is a 1970 Bernie Cedoz built championship dirt car, built for running on the mile tracks,
as part of the United States auto club championship trail and it raced at places like Springfield
Illinois and dirt mile at the fair grounds at Indianapolis, and it was driven by a gentleman
named Karl Bussen, raced about 5 or 6 times during those 2 years and the car would have
had to been severely changed to comply with new rules for 72 and the guy put it away and
he finally past away and his son pulled the car out of the shed and sold it to me and
I've left it in original condition pretty much except I got it running and safe to drive,
and have driven it on the mile dirt track at Illinois, plan to do so again.
I just have a general interest in old Indianapolis race cars and championship cars in general
and would probably been an Indy car mechanic or builder if I would have grown up in either
Indianapolis or LA, and I love the old hot rods and got several but also love the old
race cars and I find them when I can and buy them and sometimes I'll restore them and sometimes
I'll leave them original like this car.
This is just the way it came out of the barn and that's gotten to kind of be a big deal,
leaving stuff in original condition, you can always restore it later but something is only
original one time, so I've chosen to leave it this way for the time being, I can always
restore it later if I choose to do so.
This is the original engine, small block Chevrolet, 302 cubic inches it was 5 liter, and that
was kind of the power of choice at that time for these cars, there were a lot of these
cars that ran with small block Chevy's in them.
That's a Hillburn mechanical injection system, the car burns alcohol, burns methanol fuel,
it's got a vertex magneta ignition system.
The cars would usually have on a dirt track that was really loose and the dirt was really
flying, they'd have to have a screen over the grill to keep dirt from the track from
coming back and clogging up the radiator and keeping it from getting full of dirt and obviously
overheating very badly, these cars need to keep moving at a 50-60 MPH clip to get enough
air through the radiator because obviously it doesn't have a fan and doesn't have a battery
so you have to start it with a remote battery pack, and if you get out somewhere and kill
the engine, you got wait till the guy gets there with a little red wagon with the battery
in it.
Has a dry self oiling system to where the oil is pumped out of the pan as it accumulates,
to an oil tank that's under the seat of the car and then it's sucked back into a pressure
pump that feeds the engine in a more or less conventional manner and the reason for that
was, as many G forces as these cars would get on them in the corner, all the oil would
slide up into one side of the oil pan, you wouldn't have any oil, since you got about
4 gallons of oil in a tank under the seat, then it has plenty of capacity and is unaffected
by left turns.
Well you don't shift gears, you put it in gear and you take off and it just has high
gear, and when you let out on that clutch with it in gear you better be ready to start
steering because it's gonna take off on you.
So basically it's a 2 speed trans?
One.
One speed?
High gear and that's all.
Alcohol on it has about half as much energy per pound as gasoline, so it takes twice as
much, and so you had the 100 mile dirt races were run continuously, so the car had to have
enough fuel on board to run 100 miles, and it burns the alcohol at a pretty heavy clip
so it takes twice as much as it does for gasoline.
Cars would run the dirt miles with about 100 MPH lap average on dirt on a mile.
I'm not sure what the top speed at the end of the straight away was on the car but, that
100 MPH lap average was a pretty good lap average, some faster obviously, some slower,
but that's a pretty good average.