well this is a surplus aircraft starter motor that operates on 36 volts VC and the front
part is newly made or purpose made to work with this car to work to start the engine
and we'll take it out here in a minute and it has this reaction bar on it so that if
the torque that's generated absorbed by this bar being against the ground is ready to pick
you up into the cheap seats when you go to start it
well this is the Bardahl special it was
built in 1953 by Frank Curtis for a fellow from Memphis named Pat Clancy and Pat Clancy
was an old intranet indy had a new car built and this is it they qualified it in 1953 and
finished 10th missed a race in 54 because it wasn't fast enough then in 55 they picked
up about 10 miles per hour with it and the car was qualified by Jimmie Davies and finished
in 3rd place in 1956 the car was driven by a gentleman by the name Al Hermon and a tire
blew out about the 75th lap on the front straightaway and the car was wrecked bad enough that due
to it's age and the fact that it was getting kind of obsolete it was elected not to repair
it for Indy racing I don't know anything about it's history between that point and sometime
in the 80's when it was found by a guy behind a barn it changed hands two or three times
and I got the car in a trade with a gentleman by the name of John Megham out of Houston
Texas took me about 3 years to restore it to the state which you see which is obviously
it's 1955 configuration and I've had it done nearly 15 years as you see it today and we
run it each year at Indianapolis and have a big time with the car I just like the cars
when I was a kid I associated with the mechanics and the builders of the Indy cars as opposed
to the drivers and I never had any aspirations to be a race car driver either drag or any
kind of round track and so I like restoring the cars I like using them when we get them
finished and I can't explain it any beyond that just something I like to do and been
doing it now for about nearly 30 years and hadn't really lost much enthusiasm for it
but I'm 30 years older than I was when I did the first one or 35 years older so that makes
it a little more difficult so this next one will probably be the last car simply because
all the cars that are really worth restoring are pretty well already restored by others
and I can't think of another car that I know of that I would want to put the time and effort
into not to mention the money that would take to do it besides that all the engines and
rear ends all wheel parts about all the parts are about taken up because back 40 45 years
ago everything got scattered now it's about all gathered back up used to 35 years ago
within a month or so of getting a set of bones that you were gonna restore you could wind
up finding all the stuff but now you just find a piece here and there getting pretty
scarce not to mention expensive when I got it I didn't know that I'd ever be able to
find anything else so I went ahead and restored it and it's been a nice old car another thing
we like to do with the cars is when a class presents itself that is suitable I like to
go to the Pebble Beach Concours in California when we can I enjoy that because you'll see
stuff there you'd never see anywhere else plus your playing with the biggest boys on
the planet anyway so I like to do that and this car has won it's class at Pebble Beach
twice once in 2001 and once in 2010 I have a kind of mind set about restoration is that
if wasn't chrome back then I don't chrome plate it and try to make the car as authentic
a representation of what you would have seen in this car in the case of this car in 1950
if you'd have been at Indianapolis in the garage area I want this car to be as near
to what you would have seen at that time as possible not dream it into something that
it was not