For your car

Nine drivers were inducted into the National Sprint Car Hall of Fame last year. The Ripper was surely best known to most of you. Jac Haudenschild, Roger Rager, Freddie Rahmer, too. I doubt many of you recognized the name, Cavino "Kelly" Petillo. But if you'd been around Legion Ascot or Gilmore back when, you have hardly missed knew "The Shiv." Fred also acquired a draftsman named Leo Goosen who knew about pent-roof combustion chambers, cams and valve guides, and bottom ends that would make power over a wide range and stay together. Goosen had done the drawings for the all of the exotic little Miller straight eights that won pretty much everything everywhere in the '20s at the shop in Vernon. Later on, he'd pencil the beastly Novi V8's, as well. But in 1933, Leo and Fred were reworking an earlier Miller-Goosen four-banger that Harry himself had lost interest in. It was a time not unlike the one we live in now. People were out of work, and auto racing had had to step way back from the high-tech clockwork Harry loved. Leo pushed the original 220-cubic-inch dirt track motor up to 270 and re-engineered it to stay together for as long as, say… 500 miles. Fred went looking for drivers to run the thing. At the time, a new, $3,500.00 "Miller" wasn't an easy sell. Most of the guys were either recycling old, pre-blower equipment from the mid-'20s or making what they could out of stock block motors. Even comparatively well-heeled owners like Harry Hartz and Louie Meyer were sticking with seven- and eight-year-old Millers and all the spare parts they could either rustle up or have Fred knock out. But there was this hot shoe truck driver from Watts. The guy was a piece of work. Cocky, rude, pushy, hair-trigger volatile and often-as-not liquored up. Plain scary, according my grandfather. But The Shiv knew the old Grapevine better than anyone from his produce-truck-driving days, and he'd won the big road race from Bakersfield to LA in '29 when nobody'd heard of him. In '32, he...

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