The Indy 500’s Revolutionary Innovations honored at Amelia Island
Hemmings Daily Kurt Ernst on Jan 24th, 2019
A 1926 Miller front-drive racing car. Photo courtesy The Brumos Collection.
Competing in the Indianapolis 500 today requires a Dallara DW12 chassis, powered by a 2.2-liter, twin-turbocharged V-6 engine from series suppliers Chevrolet or Honda. Fuel and lubricants are restricted, as are tires, brakes, ECU, and gearbox. Once, however, the Brickyard was a breeding ground for innovation, a venue where creative Davids could compete head-to-head with well-funded Goliaths. The 2019 Amelia Island Concours d’Elegance celebrates these days gone by with a class dedicated to Indy’s Revolutionary Innovations.
In 1911, the first Indianapolis 500 Mile Sweepstakes was won by Ray Harroun, driving a custom-built Marmon Wasp, based upon the brand’s Model 32 production car. The Model 32 used a 318-cu.in. four-cylinder engine, producing 32 horsepower (hence the model’s name). For the Wasp, Harroun — an engineer by trade — added two more cylinders to increase displacement to 477-cu.in., raising output to an estimated 110 hp at 2,200 rpm. The car’s body featured a tapered and upswept tail, not dissimilar to aircraft of the day, and sported one more innovation — the first rearview mirror to appear on an automobile in competition.
It didn’t take long for technology to win out over sheer displacement. The 1914 running of the Indy 500 was won by René Thomas driving a Delage Grand Prix car, but the real news was the second-place Peugeot of Arthur Duray. Called “Baby” for its modest displacement of 183-cu.in., the car’s four-cylinder engine used double overhead-camshafts and four valves per cylinder to produce 90 horsepower. enough to set a new Brickyard lap record of 99.85 mph in practice. Soon, every winning race car at the Brickyard would mirror Peugeot’s engine design.
No discussion of innovation at Indianapolis would be complete without a mention of race car designer and constructor Harry Miller. His cars would win the Indianapolis 500 nine times, but, more significantly, made up more than 80 percent of the race’s starting grid between 1923 and 1928. While most were conventional in design, featuring an engine in front powering the rear wheels, some were front-wheel drive, and these Millers proved remarkably competitive from the 1920s until 1949, when an Offenhauser-powered Deidt driven by Bill Holland became the last front-wheel-drive car to win the Indianapolis 500.
Speaking of the Offenhauser engine, this, too was initially developed by Miller. In 1933, the race car constructor filed for bankruptcy, giving his shop foreman and head machinist Fred Offenhauser a chance to purchase the business. Offenhauser, with the help of Leo Goossen, continued development of the “Offy” engine in a variety of displacements, and its robust integrated head (monobloc) construction allowed for high compression ratios and outputs as impressive as 3 horsepower per cubic inch. Offenhauser sold the business to Meyer and Drake in 1946, and the Offy remained the engine of choice in a variety of racing series (IndyCar included) into the 1970s. The last time an Offenhauser engine won at Indy — in turbocharged form — was 1976.
The Lotus 56 turbine car, as raced at Indy by Joe Leonard. Photo courtesy the Bruce Linsmeyer Collection.
The Brickyard went through a few experimental years in the late 1960s, when Andy Granatelli debuted a four-wheel-drive chassis powered by a Pratt & Whitney turbine engine for the 1967 race. Parnelli Jones qualified the car sixth on the grid, but went on to lead 171 laps of the race. Just four laps from the checkered flag, a bearing — said to be a $6 part — failed, turning Jones’s sure win into a sixth-place finish. For 1968, Granatelli returned with a quartet of all-new Lotus 56 turbine cars, but tragedy struck when team driver Mike Spence died as a result of a crash in practice. The three remaining STP-sponsored turbine cars qualified first, second, and 11th. On race day, the turbine driven by Graham Hill was caught up in an accident on lap 111, while the cars of Joe Leonard and Art Pollard remained competitive throughout most of the race. On lap 188, Pollard suffered a fuel pump shaft failure, but a victory for teammate Leonard seemed all but certain. On lap 191, while leading the race, Leonard suffered the exact same component failure, ending his race — and with it, the turbine era at the Brickyard.
Diesel engines saw action at Indianapolis as well, first appearing in the 1931 race. That year, a Cummins Diesel-powered Duesenberg Model A qualified in last place, but thanks to the engine’s fuel economy (and reliability) managed to complete the 500 without a single pit stop, finishing 13th on “$1.40 worth of furnace oil.” Cummins returned in 1934, this time with a two-car effort, including both two-stroke and four-stroke engines. Problems with the two-stroke (which finished 12th) saw the four-stroke win out as Cummins’s engine design of choice, although the four-stroke retired with transmission problems on lap 82.
Cummins next fielded a diesel entry in the 1950 race, though this car qualified in last place and ultimately retired with mechanical problems. In 1952, a Cummins turbodiesel-powered entry driven by Freddie Agabashian set a record single lap speed (139.104 mph), backed by a record four-lap speed (138.010 mph) to take pole position. A clogged turbo inlet ended the car’s race on lap 72, but its performance throughout the month validated the viability of the turbodiesel engine.
The front-engine, rear-drive roadster dominated at the Brickyard from 1952-’65, with designs growing ever more sophisticated. To reduce frontal area, engines were canted over on their side, lowering the car’s center of gravity as an added benefit. Engines were offset from the driver, optimizing weight distribution on the left-turn-only circuit. In 1961, Formula One technology once again appeared at Indianapolis, when Jack Brabham qualified a mid-engine Cooper-Climax T-54 13th on the grid, finishing the race in ninth place. In 1963, Jim Clark nearly won the race in a Ford-powered, mid-engine Lotus 29, but the (controversial) victory went to Parnelli Jones instead.
By 1964, roughly a third of the Indy 500 field consisted of mid-engine cars, and in 1965, Clark received his victory, leading 190 of the race’s 200 laps in the process. The roadster era at the Brickyard was essentially over, and 1968 was the final year that a front-engine car qualified for the Indianapolis 500 (though fan favorite Jim Hurtubise stuck with the design, attempting to qualify a roadster as late as 1980).
The 1980 race was won by Johnny Rutherford, driving a Cosworth-powered Chaparral 2K, the first Indy Car chassis designed specifically to take advantage of ground effect aerodynamics. The following year, 1981, saw Mike Mosley qualify a radically shaped AAR Eagle chassis featuring “Boundary Layer Adhesion Technology.” Much narrower than conventional cars in cross-section, the Eagle “Pepsi Challenger” sported a pronounced lower wing to supplement the small, traditionally shaped rear wing. Despite its stock-block Chevy power, Mosley put the car on the front row for the race, but his day ended on lap 17 with a damaged radiator. When Mosley went from last-to-first in the next race, at the Milwaukee Mile, CART revised its rulebook to render this AAR Eagle chassis illegal.
Rule changes can benefit savvy competitors as well. In 1991, USAC (which still retained oversight of the Indy 500, while CART was the sanctioning body for other Indy Car races) quietly lifted a rule requiring “stock block” engines to use production parts. To qualify as a “stock block,” an engine had to use pushrods and was restricted to two valves per cylinder; to make them competitive against purpose-built racing engines, they were allowed a larger displacement (3.43 liters, compared to 2.65-liters) and were permitted to run a higher level of turbocharger boost (55 inches of mercury instead of 45 inches).
The 1994 Penske PC23, powered by the Mercedes-Benz 500I V-8. The engine proved so powerful that it was nicknamed “The Beast.”
Since no manufacturer built such an engine, developing one from the ground up was an expensive fool’s errand, for all but Roger Penske and Mercedes-Benz. With the help of Ilmor Engineering, Penske developed a “Mercedes” stock-block engine for the running of the 1994 Indy 500. Remarkably, this was designed, built and tested (in secret) in a mere 25 weeks, and when “The Beast” appeared at Indianapolis in May, the engine made roughly 1,000 horsepower, or 200 more than any other entry in the field.
As expected, Penske cars dominated both qualifying and the race (at least until Emerson Fittipaldi got a bit ambitious with a pass on teammate Al Unser, Jr., crashing on lap 185), and by the time the checkered flag waved, just one other car (the Cosworth XB-powered Reynard of Jacques Villeneuve) remained on the lead lap. The week after the race, USAC reduced the amount of boost a stock block engine could run, and shortly afterward outlawed the Mercedes-Benz 500I V-8 entirely.
Look for many of these cars (and others representing Indy’s innovations) to appear at the 2019 Amelia Island Concours d’Elegance.
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