Welcome to Martin’s Musings! This is the place where you can find articles or stories or musings that have helped to bring the people, places and things that shaped the world of hot rodding to life. Written over the years by Dick Martin, Richard Parks and others, these have been published in a number of popular rodding magazines over the years. Here they are recreated for you to read and take a peek at automotive history.
ELWIN “AL” TEAGUE
Al Teague’s 409-MPH Speed Record Capped a Decades-Long Racing Career
Written by Dick Martin, 18 June 2019. Edited by M. Kaehny 09 July 2026
Furnished to Landracing.com by Richard Parks
On August 21, 1991, the Los Angeles Times reported that Al Teague had broken a 26-year-old record for a piston-driven car, set in 1965 by Bob and Bill Summers, clocking a two-run, 409.8-mph average over western Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats. What those few words didn’t reveal were the years of knowledge it took to build such a vehicle, plus the thousands of hours and dollars that it took out of Al Teague’s wages, from working at Evans Speed Equipment, to get there.
Al’s passion for racing and his relentless assault on the salt began when his father, William (who wasn’t into racing), took his 7-year-old son to the Speedway motorcycle races at Lincoln Park. It was across from where the old Legion Ascot dirt track used to stand near Valley and Soto Street close to their home in East Los Angeles. That sparked an interest in Al. He loved watching his heroes, the Milne Brothers, Cody and Jack, race. He built a dirt track so he could race his bike like the big boys. The smell of Caster Oil stuck with him. When he was 12, his older brother Harvey took Al to the Pomona drags. Al knew exactly what he wanted to do!
In a short magazine article, it would be impossible to cover Al Teague’s extensive pursuits at Bonneville. Suffice to say that he never missed a year until he retired from racing there. Elwin “Al” Teague was born in 1941 and lived in an unincorporated community called City Terrace until his folks moved to San Gabriel in 1957. Al’s father was a pipefitter by trade and worked at the shipyards during WWII. His mother, Margaret, was a nurse at Los Angeles County General Hospital (now USC County General).
Al’s first car was the family’s 1950 Chevrolet four-door. Grateful to get it, he turned it into a hot rod, putting a 140hp wrecking-yard Blue Flame Six in his Fleetline to replace the frail 50-horse six, making it a bit of a sleeper. Al didn’t belong to any car clubs in high school. He didn’t know that many people and was “a bit shy,” he explains. Besides, his wheels, which his father had given him, weren’t exactly hot rod material. But he was “grateful to have” the six-cylinder ’50 Chevy four-door, he says. Harvey helped him replace the feeble 50-horse six with a 140-horse, 235ci Blue Flame Six out of a ’56 Chevy, which turned the unpretentious Stovebolt into a bit of a sleeper—which also describes the down-to-earth Teague.
Al’s brother Harry was very much a part of their racing days. “Teague Bros” was professionally lettered on the side of Al and Harry’s roadster that spelled out the pair’s commitment to not only drag racing but also to car-show-quality workmanship. Here the car is at a show-n-shine in Montebello in 1958. “My brother had a ’38 Chevy coupe we’d drive on the street,” Al recalls. “It had a 270-inch Jimmy [GMC]. I got interested in drag racing when I went to the first San Gabriel dragstrip in 1958.”
Drag racing for the brothers came in increments, piece by piece. “A friend of ours bought a ’29 Ford roadster from Blair’s Speed Shop in Pasadena, and we borrowed it and put our engine in it. It was in primer and kinda ratty, but it had a quick-change in it and seat belts.” They only ran the ’29 a few times when they learned of a roadster that was for sale at the Arcadia Body Shop in Arcadia. The late Ollie Prather owned the shop, which he opened in 1941 and is still in business today.
“In 1959 we bought the roadster for $350 from Ollie,” remembers Al. “It had a quick-change in it, but no engine. We took the Jimmy out of Harvey’s ’38 Chevy and put it in the roadster. I remember Harvey’s first pass. He went 98 miles an hour.” Al recalls it scared the “stuffing” out of Harvey, so to speak. “We raced it at the second San Gabriel dragstrip because they tore the first one down. We ran at Pomona at 104-105 miles an hour with the stock head a couple of times. “Later, Ollie had a Wayne head and injectors for sale,” continued Al, “so we bought them for $700, and we put them on the Jimmy in our roadster. We shared our money to buy the heads because we wanted to go racing. The car ran in the lower 120s and 11 seconds at the drags.”
Earl Evans’ name overshadowed his tiny speed shop in South El Monte, but he built some mighty Ford flathead V8s that the racers waited patiently in line for. “When that photo was taken in 1961, Earl Evans had passed away,” says Al. “Gene Ohly, who worked for Earl building the flatheads, became the owner. I worked as a machinist for Gene from 1962 to 1978 part time when he began building high-performance engines for the racers. He made a science out of it. That’s how I learned to build engines.”
Ollie saw how much the two brothers wanted to race with the shoestring budget they had to work with, so he threw in a single-axle trailer since the roadster was not street legal. The more they ran, the better the results. “We ran all the local dragstrips,” recalls Al. “We would go to Lyons dragstrip. Sometimes we got in for nothing, put a dollar’s worth of gas in the roadster, race it that night, come back home, change the oil, and go back next week. We’d spend 10 or 15 bucks, and we were racing every weekend.”
Al says he and Harvey “blew the Jimmy in March 1963, so our friend George Bentley, who my brother met when he worked in an auto parts store in East L.A., put his 292ci Chevy in it, and we were running in the eight-second bracket at 170 or 172 mph, one of the fastest injected Chevys at that time. Five weeks in a row at Irwindale Middle Eliminator class and at Lions as well. Sometimes we’d race Junior Eliminator class, and we’d race guys like [the late legendary Gasser and Funny Car racer] Junior Thompson. We sold the roadster to Tony Piner, less motor and tires, for $275.” Piner was also a drag racer and Bonneville record holder, 226.538 mph in 1990. The dragster with the GMC six was purchased in 2008 by Bill Smith of Speedway Automotive for his museum.
“Then we put the Jimmy in a dragster we bought, and Bentley would go out to Lyons with us. He knew everybody. Judy Thompson, Mickey’s first wife, knew George, and she’d say hi to George when she was handing out the timing slips.” Al and his brother would “hang out at Daleo and Bisetti’s body shop on Monterey Pass Road in Monterey Park, where Nick and his brother Ernie Sadd hung out. George Bentley was in and out of there, too. That is where I got to know them, and they kinda started helping my brother and me on the roadster. They had our name painted on the back of the Prather roadster, stuff like that.”
At this point, Al and Harvey learned that Nick and his brother Ernie wanted to go drag racing: “Nick paid $20 dollars for a ’29 body from Burke Le Sage.” Who were these East L.A. hot rodders? Nick Sadd had a trash truck. His brother sold men’s clothes door-to-door out of his van. George Bentley was a truck driver, and was not only the oldest of the bunch but also the most experienced when it came to racing. “I built the ’29 roadster for Nick Sadd,” says Gene Ohly, who purchased Evans Speed Equipment from Earl Evans’ widow after his death. “I built it in the shop I still have today in South El Monte. They brought me the frame and body, and I built the car and used a dragster-type roll bar that is still on the roadster today.” Teague says, “They first ran a Merc flathead with an Ardun overhead conversion at El Mirage and the drags. We went to El Mirage with the roadster after putting in Bentley’s supercharged Chrysler Hemi, setting a record of 205 mph. Then I teamed up with them and we traveled together.”
Al Teague’s wealth of engine knowledge began with Earl Evans, a competitor at Bonneville in 1952 with a top speed of 174.75 mph in his C Lakester belly tank. “I used to go to Evans’ shop when he was still alive,” says Al. “He used to go track racing at Ascot and was chief mechanic for some of the racers there. Earl was a pattern maker, and I got to know Earl around 1959. I got to learn how to make patterns and how to cast parts.
“I met Gene Ohly in 1958,” Al continues. “Gene used to work for Earl Evans when he was going to high school. He’d go to Earl’s after school and drill the stud holes in the aluminum flatheads. After Earl died, Gene bought the business from his widow, and I went to work for Gene in 1962. Gene started doing high-performance engine machining. I did the boring and valve jobs. Gene taught me a lot about how to put engines together, how to degree cams, so that’s how I learned. I worked at Evans for almost 20 years.” Ohly, 83, of Rosemead, California, is retired and no longer involved with Evans. “We did the machining for all of the top engine builders in the area including Traco Engineering in Culver City after Jim Jones took over that company,” he recalls.
Al was one of the 2.2 million drafted in 1963 into the Vietnam War. He was honorably discharged in 1965, picking up where he left off racing.
“Al had a lot of fun drag racing in those early days,” remembers Ohly. “When Al went down the dragstrip, I could read the numbers on the side of the roadster because Al liked to get the roadster sideways down the strip, and the fans loved it. On the first run the fans were sitting down, but on his second they were all standing waiting for the Sadd, Teague, Bentley roadster to run. Nick said to Al, ‘They’re going to kick us out if you keep doing that!’ Just to be safe, I checked out the caster and such, but I knew Al was doing it on purpose. ‘You’re grandstanding,’ said Nick to Al. I said to Al, ‘The next time you run, I want to see your hands off the steering wheel.’ He went straight as a string.”
“I raced at all the SoCal strips,” says Al. “San Gabriel, Irwindale, Fontana, Pomona, Colton [so close they were almost within earshot of one another], plus Ramona, San Fernando, Bakersfield, and Long Beach.” A pivotal year for Al was 1967, when he drove the Manual and Teague top Junior Fueler to 190 mph in just under 8 seconds. That was the year he first went to Bonneville as a spectator with Ohly and Bentley. Both with a wealth of salt savvy: George Bentley went in 1952 and Gene Ohly in 1956. “Ohly had his roadster there, and Bentley had his engine in it. I helped crew on the car,” says Al. “I didn’t bring any sunglasses,” he laughs about his first look at the whiteness.
Nothing, it seemed, could drag him away, until Al’s knack as a driver caught an owner’s attention beyond the strip. Clyde Sturdy (who built the So-Cal Speed Shop belly tank) saw that Al had begun drifting away from drag racing and knew he would do well on the circle tracks: Ascot in Gardena, 605 Speedway in Irwindale, and Perris Raceway in Perris, plus Orange Show Speedway in San Bernardino. The tracks were almost as plentiful as dragstrips, which meant Al was racing every weekend. “About 1970, Clyde Sturdy had a 250cc Modified Midget, and I drove it for him at El Toro, the Indian Dunes Speedway, and Lemoore in Central California doing quite well winning races,” recalls Al. “We took the championship in our class.”
Al went faster into the corners by slipping behind the wheel of a Sprint Car with Bentley as a partner. “Bob Hogle [1963-1964 California Racing Association Champion] was watching me one night and didn’t like what he saw,” Al recalls. “He said, ‘You’re going to kill somebody in that thing. Bring it over to my house in Buena Park, and I’ll get it dialed in for you.’ He gave me some pointers also.”
Fast-forward to Bonneville, 1972: Al heading towards his pit after a 250-mph-plus run in the Sadd, Teague, Bentley roadster with darkness falling. Al was pushing the roadster with his Ford pickup with crew member Don Barry in the roadster steering when a Ford Ranchero collided with the roadster. Barry was badly injured with broken ribs, as he wasn’t belted in. “The car is dead,” wrote Tom Senter in a HOT ROD profile of the roadster in the Dec. 1972 issue. “All those years, and all those hundreds of racing miles, wiped out in a split second on the return road.” Senter quoted Al saying, “I think it’s going to run again, but I can’t run without George and Nick and the guys. It’d have to be Sadd, Teague, and Bentley. I can’t afford to do it alone. We can’t really do without one another. As far as I’m concerned, right now there’s an 80-20 chance that it’ll run again.”
Enter Kirk White, a Philly writer who speaks more V12 than flathead. He was stimulated to make some changes after reading Senter’s article. Kirk had pulled the pin on further sponsoring a Ferrari at Sebring because of its poor results, returning the sponsor money to Marathon Oil. A new additive was being formulated by Marathon called Steed, and Kirk knew just where to put the money to good use. He tracked down Al through HOT ROD editor Terry Cook and asked what it would take to fix the racer. Al basically told him it couldn’t be done. Would Al consider some sponsorship money to ease the pain? Yes! With newfound funds to work with, George Bentley found a parts donor: a ’29 roadster owned by Russ Eyers in San Diego that had run Bonneville.
Hank Bisetti and Al had the midnight oil burning until the beautifully revamped Steed Roadster rolled out of Al’s mom’s garage ready for the Salt. And no longer was it a one-owner car. An agreement was made that the three, Sadd, Teague, and Bentley, would own the roadster jointly. If Al Teague had gone no further than his involvement with Sadd’s roadster, with George Bentley providing the money and Al doing the wrenching and driving the car into the record books, he still would have warranted his notoriety, and Al’s story could/would have stopped with the team. It had to be at the back of Al’s mind that pushing that ancient Deuce-framed, 1,000hp roadster that was meant to go 65 to 268 mph and maybe beyond was venturing into the Twilight Zone. The decision was made to park the roadster.
Al didn’t quit. He was determined to go to the next level and build a Lakester. “In 1974 I decided to build the Lakester because we had gone 268 in the roadster, and it would be nice to go 300. Of course, George Bentley was always in my corner.” Working in his mother’s garage nights and weekends, he averaged 21 hours a week for 18 months to finish the car. At the time Al said that it had become a way of life for him, a burning desire that kept him returning to his garage night after night.
Al Teague is the definition of a hot rodder: He built what he raced, and he just simply loved racing. The countless times he strapped into a race car, whether drag racing, circle-track racing, or land-speed racing, proved invaluable when it came to controlling his streamliner in crosswinds at 400-mph-plus.
The short paragraph in the Los Angeles Times about Teague’s record-breaking speed in no way revealed the years it took to get there. Al had no corporate money to support his efforts; the funds came from his work at Evans Speed Equipment and took him three years to save before beginning the Lakester project. “I knew I couldn’t do that and support a family.” Al ran the Lakester for the first time in 1976. The year had nothing to do with his number, but Al’s mentor Earl Evans used 76 when he was racing and felt honored to run it.
Al came close in 1990 with a 399 run. “Then I changed the gearing in 1991, and right off the trailer we ran 407. We worked on it, and the next day we ran 417. The salt was so wet that we only had 4 miles on the return run instead of the 5 miles because you’d just sink. On Wednesday we went 425, and on the return 390, it averaged out just over Summers’ record at 409.8. I ran a car at Bonneville from 1968 until 2002. Every year, and one year we made five meets in a row.”
That, dear reader, is doggedness to the nines. Teague left us a legacy that few will duplicate at Bonneville.
Al was 48 when he married Jane Welch, who related to Al’s passion because she had been around hot rodders all her life. Her father owned Speed-O-Motive, an engine balancing business. When he passed away in 1964, her brother Alan took over the balancing business. In 1983, Jane and her first husband purchased Speed-O-Motive from her brother. Tragically, Jane’s first husband was killed in a car wreck. Jane and her son Todd then ran the business, though they have since sold it.
Todd went to Bonneville in 1986 and met Al. On his return home, he said Jane should meet Al. “I’ve often heard about him,” began Jane, “because my brother and Al were good friends, I said, ‘No, no, no! A 45-year-old bachelor who lives with his mom,’” Jane recalls with laughter. “But I met Al at El Mirage, and we dated for two years. We’ve been married 30 years. I never missed going with Al to Bonneville.”
Earl Evans passed his knowledge on to Gene Ohly. Ohly passed that wisdom to Al. And Al found the time to do likewise. “I taught engine performance machining classes at Cerritos College after work, eight hours a week, which I did for 10 years. I would get off work at 3:30 and the class would start at 6.” Every competitor at Bonneville, myself included, goes for one reason: to get a record. It’s our checkered flag. But there also comes a time when we realize it’s time to quit. “You never have any time off,” Al reflects, looking back. “You’re always thinking of Bonneville. You got January, February, March, April, ah gee whiz, you better start doing this and you better start doing that. Pretty soon Bonneville is right there. Pretty soon, you come back from Bonneville and go back for the World of Speed and back for the World Finals. I had to do all of that, and my summer was gone until the next Bonneville. But it was what I wanted to do, and it was great.”
June 22, 2026
The Jim Travis Story: Indy Legend, Bonneville Icon
Written by Dick Martin, 2012
Furnished to Landracing.com by Richard Parks
Hot rodders, the so-called hooligans, didn’t hang out in bars, they hung out at speed shops and drive-ins; drive-ins to find out who was going faster and speed shops to learn how to go faster. Jim Travis met his future wife, Deloris, by cruising the drive-ins. Deloris went to Whittier High School and moonlighted as a carhop at George’s Drive-In in Pico Rivera, California, plus Jim hung out at Automotive Specialties in Montebello that sold new and used speed equipment. It had the allure of burning rubber and a trace of fuel in the air with two owners who were skilled fabricators, mechanics, and most importantly—racers. Jim probably made a nuisance of himself, but owners Jerry Eisert and Bill Fowler took a liking to him and introduced the young man to the hot rod world of Bonneville and Indianapolis. Because of that initiation, Jim eats, sleeps, and drinks hot rods. Actually, he lives on bologna sandwiches, sleeps above his shop, and until a short time ago, drank Pepsi. Jim would later go on to chop one of the most hammered ’34 Ford coupes, racking up more miles on the Salt than a cab driver in Fargo, North Dakota—we’re talkin’ Bonneville baby! Jim is also a highly respected and sought-after restorer of historic race cars. Between 1991 and 1999, Jim restored 28 race cars of distinction, including the late Jack Chrisman’s (Art’s uncle) chopped Hemi-powered ’29 Model A sedan, plus Mickey Thompson’s four-engine Challenger 1 Streamliner and the Assault, and Mickey’s single-engine Pontiac dragster that looks more like a Bonneville Streamliner than a streamlined dragster. Read on.
Jim Travis of Whittier, California, was born in Bradford, Pennsylvania (home of Zippo lighters), in 1934, but his grandfather, who was in the Spanish American War with Teddy Roosevelt, contracted Malaria and was told to move to a warmer climate. Jim’s grandmother had a brother who lived in Montebello, California, so the whole family moved to the racing town. Jim rode in his dad’s ’34 Dodge four-door and Jim’s mom in Grandpa’s new ’47 Olds to California. When he got here, Jim hit the shop classes with both hands at Montebello High School: “I took metalworking, and in radio shop I made a one-tube crystal set (which needs no battery or power source but runs on power from radio waves using a high antenna), machine shop, and auto shop.
When Jim turned 16, he found a ’37 Plymouth Coupe at one of the garages that he used to deliver papers to for $70. He sold his bicycle for the down payment and gave his paper route to his brother. To pay for the Plymouth, Jim started working at some of the gas stations that he used to deliver papers to. Of course, they all had lube racks and tools, but all that free equipment couldn’t save the Plymouth. “It didn’t take me long to blow it up,” Jim laughs. The car Jim had through the remainder of his two years of high school was a ’31 Fordor, which his dad saw for sale on the bulletin board at work. Jim paid $60. He had to upholster it and make a top for it. The roof fabric was gone when he bought it, which is why the interior was no more. Taking various shop classes, Jim worked on the car in school. Not exactly a girl-magnet but it was wheels, and, for some reason, the too-many-door Model A landed in the high school yearbook. Jim graduated in 1953. When he got out of school, he worked at a gas station. There was a ’40 Ford Tudor for sale. Jim bought it after selling the Model A, which sat on the street for years till it finally got hauled to the junkyard. He started drag racing the ’40: “I was doing a lot of street racing. I ran it at Santa Ana in 1954 with the Flathead V-8 with two carburetors and nothing else. That was back in the days when they drag raced four abreast.
“I wanted something more powerful. I was hanging out at Automotive Specialties. The more I hung around guys with cars in high school and guys like [owners] Bill and Jerry (Bill Fowler and Jerry Eisert) the more I learned about working on cars. In Pennsylvania cars were only to get you back and forth to church and to work. My mother drove in Pennsylvania, but she never drove when she moved to California. “This police officer came to our club meeting one night and he had this association over in Maywood called the Police Officers Car Club of America; I still have a decal on my toolbox. He wanted clubs to race off the street, not on the street. He had a track built on vacant lot on the corner of Slauson Avenue and Eastern Avenue in Maywood near the Chrysler assembly plant and the Lincoln/Mercury plant. He got Bethlehem Steel to donate the land where we raced.”
“Bill Fowler set me up! I was racing my ’40 sedan with an Olds engine, I was spitting out gearboxes, rearends, and drive axles. I’d have to take it to Automotive Specialties to get it fixed. I was working for U.S. Rubber and I had to have a way to get to work. One night Fowler and I were out cruising the boulevard, and we went up to Tiny’s Drive-In and a ’34 three-window, full-fendered coupe pulled in. I didn’t know Bill was setting me up. He said ‘Jim you ought to have a car to get back and forth to work and you should have a car for racing. Every time you blow that SOB up on a Saturday night or Sunday, you have to have it towed into our shop and we have to bust our butts to get it done by Tuesday so you can go to work.’ I said, ‘What do you have in mind?’ ‘You know, a coupe like that ’34 that just pulled in, or a roadster.’ ‘If you could find me a roadster, I’d buy it.’ ‘I happen to know that a bunch of kids tore a ’29 Model A all apart and they’ve lost interest in it. You can buy it for a $150.’ ‘SOLD!’”
“A couple days later Jerry Eisert had the Model A piled in the back of his ’40 Ford pickup. When the gaskets disbanded, the Flathead was taken out of the five-window. I went and got the engine and put it in the ’40 sedan and sold it.” When Jim first got the roadster, it didn’t have an engine. “I had a girlfriend who had an extra garage, and I started working on it at her house.” Jim tried to stuff the Olds in his new roadster but soon realized that there was no way to put headers on it, so he pulled the engine back out. Ed “Big Daddy” Roth bought it and put the Olds in “Tweedy Pie”, a ’23 Model T roadster. Jim had a nothing-special ’34 Ford Flathead V-8 given to him that he put in the Model A bone-stock roadster “just to get it running till I got a paintjob on it. It’s always been one color for the last 55 years, Goldenrod Yellow. I probably had probably two or three different Flatheads in that roadster over the years.” Jim still has that Model A roadster.
“In 1956, I heard Bill and Jerry were going to go to Bonneville. I asked if I could go along. ‘You can but you buy one tank of gas, chip in on the motel, and you’ll have to sleep on the floor. ‘” Jim and Bob Opperman were riding in Kay Kimes’ Buick (Kimes later designed the body and chassis of the “Lead Wedge”, an electric Land Speed record holder that went 139 mph with Jerry Kugel driving) following Eisert’s pickup. Kimes had a belly tank with Ed Johnson’s Nailhead Buick in it with six Stromberg carburetors: “Eisert was driving his ’40 Ford pulling a single-axle trailer with the belly tank on it he had a healthy Flathead in it. We’re out there in the middle of nowhere, it’s midnight; just north of Ely, Nevada, we’re doing 55. There’s a set of headlights coming up pretty fast. The guy was about to pass us on this two-lane road, he turned out to be Tom Beatty with his ’40 Ford pickup with a Caddy in it, towing his tank. (Beatty would set a “C” Lakester record of 211.88 at Bonneville that week.) Jerry put his foot in it and wouldn’t let Tom over. Those two guys were drag racing down the two-lane a couple of miles before Beatty passed us.”
One of Jim’s shop teachers in the Army Reserve encouraged his students to join. Jim did and while on his two-week summer training (he had graduated from high school by then) he’d upset one of the officers enough that Jim was told he was to report for the draft. Knowing that he had to act fast, Jim enlisted before the draft notice came through and it worked. He was ultimately sent to West Point, New York. Mind you, Jim wasn’t at West Point as a cadet, he was an Army enlisted man who repaired radio equipment, public address systems, and telephones for two years until his discharge. Jim and Deloris were married two weeks before Jim went into the service. Deloris went back to Highland Falls New York just outside of West Point to join Jim for a brief visit before returning home to give birth to their second son, Wage.
Never one to lay around the barracks on weekends, Jim made good use of his time at West Point, and it wasn’t spit and polish. Jim and fellow soldier Orv Schultz had a shop doing engine conversions putting Chevy engines in Flathead Fords (on the side naturally) doing a little street racing, plus racing at the drags at York, Pennsylvania, on a Saturday night, and also at Newberg, New York. “A guy at the shop wanted to trade me his 1948 F-100 Ford pickup with a Flathead in it for my ’50 Plymouth. I found out that the Texaco Testing Laboratories was selling some reconditioned ’54 Olds engines for $100. So, I bought one with a Hydro and put it in that pickup. We started racing it at the dragstrips. I went to York, Pennsylvania, and cleaned everybody’s plow with the automatic.”
Automotive Specialties is where Jim learned there was an Indy—the Indianapolis 500. “When I went down to Bill and Jerry’s the day of the race, you couldn’t say a word because they were listening to the race on the radio.” Out of the service, Jim was initially working at a Union 76 gas station and hanging out at Automotive Specialties. Bill Fowler had left Jerry Eisert and went to work for Frank Arciero Racing then ultimately for Dan Gurney in a small shop in Costa Mesa in 1962. “I found out they were going to Indy in 1963. I asked Bill, ‘If I come back to the Speedway, do you think you can find me work?’ ‘We’ll see,’ he said.” (Jim was separated from Deloris who was killed in an auto wreck in 1965.) By that time, Jim had a Ford Sedan Delivery with “L.A. Roadsters Tow Car” plus Travis Automotive lettered on the side.
“I drove it back to Indy with a mattress in the back and my toolbox. I was walking back to the garage area one night with Dan and Bill when Bill handed me a tray of tools. I put the tools away in the garage and cleaned up the place. I ended up working in the garage while wearing my L.A. Roadsters jacket. The guard just assumed that I belonged there and never asked me for a badge. I worked on Gurney’s Lotus for a couple of weeks. Dan had crashed [in practice] and we had to take another tub and take all the parts off of it, plus the bladders for the fuel and switch them over. Gurney did not have any help from Colin Chapman (Lotus founder),” Jim adds. “We weren’t allowed to touch the engines; they came in a crate from Ford already dyno-tuned for 500 miles. The PR guy from Ford asked Dan, ‘Who’s that guy eating all our sandwiches and drinking all our Pepsis? Get rid of him. ‘”
While the PR guy needed a lesson in tact, it mattered not because Jim (who wasn’t paid nor did he expect any for his efforts) took part in getting the Lotus back on the track, plus hot rodder Dan finished the 500 miles in Seventh Place. “I went to Indy for the experience,” Jim says. It was like old home month because the garage area was crawling with hot rodders from the L.A. area who Jim knew. He next knocked on Ermie Immerso’s garage door. Immerso was a card-carrying 200-miler at Bonneville in 1956 when he built and drove a belly tank to 213.190 screaming miles per hour. “I’m looking for work. I’ll work for free, I just want the experience,” Jim told Immerso. He said, “I certainly need the help.” “I helped him for about a week; Paul Russo the driver never qualified the car. Ermie and I stayed friends until the day he died. Then I worked on an old Kurtis of Ozzy Olson from Denver Colorado. His driver was Don Freeland. The last day of qualifying Freeland blew the motor all over the track at 9 o’clock in the morning. They put it in the garage. We replaced one broken motor with one good motor, but we were in line when the gun went off and qualifying was over. I watched the race and then I drove home.” Jim’s brashness got him in a place many of us only dream about, Gasoline Alley, but his ability kept him there for a month. Not too shabby for a guy with a mattress in the back of his wheels for a hotel room. After returning from Indy, Jim opened up a shop, Travis Automotive, on Whittier Boulevard.
But it was always in the back of his mind. He called his friend Opperman about how the Ford did at Bonneville. “Opperman told me Jerry and Bill went to Bonneville (in 1957) with the blown Cadillac in the coupe and Stricker drove it. Stricker had it until 1970; it just sat in his garage. The coupe changed hands a number of times before Jim acquired it, but it was Jim who got the car to handle and drive safely: “The coupe was a mediocre handling car at best,” Bill Fowler says. “Jim, by reworking the front steering geometry, was able to kill the lift that the car was getting. He took all the bumpsteer out of it, we didn’t even know what the term ‘bumpsteer’ meant at the time. It started going down the racetrack pretty straight after that.” “I drove the ’34 mostly at the drag races and the thing was absolutely perfect but when I drove it at El Mirage. The handling problem reared its head, and the car began to lift in the rear, and it would start pirouetting on the front cross spring; it definitely wanted to hunt. Jim got it to handle.”
Jim, a member of the Gear Grinders, ran his faithful A-Bone roadster almost into the ground from 1961-68 at El Mirage, at the quarter-mile drags, and the SCTA half-mile drags at Riverside Raceway where he set four records. That wasn’t a typo! SCTA went drag racing in the winter months at Riverside and Lions Drag Strip when the dry lakebed of El Mirage became a lakebed. Plus, Jim and racers like Al Teague (the multiple record holder who went 409.978 in 1991) went to a huge dry lake, 60 miles long in Laguna Salada in the Sonoran Desert of Baja, where Jim set a record of 110 mph in the Street Roadster Class. Jim got to Bonneville only to find out he couldn’t run the A in the Street Roadster Class there, only at El Mirage and the drags. They put him in Gas Roadster, which is a highboy with the engine set back into the cowl. “I ended up putting all those guys on the trailer and sending them home by Saturday (the end of Speed Week). I had the record of 124 mph with my 3/8×3/8 Flathead.”
“Jerry Eisert built a 1/2×1/2 Ford Flathead V-8, put it in the ’34 coupe, and ran it on 90 percent nitro at all the local dragstrips. They painted it red and put Automotive Specialties on the hood, but Richard Stricker still owned the car.” Jim painted the ’34 coupe blue and white as soon as he got it in 1970: “I didn’t like solid red. I ran it in 1971-73. I got the record with the Flathead, the same engine that was in the roadster. I had to redo the rollbars to make it legal, and I had to move the fuel tank to the nose because you couldn’t have it next to the driver. Then I went to Dean Moon and Fred Larsen (Moon Equipment), and we started talking about a front-mounted blown Chevy. I took the blower off of Stricker’s Cadillac engine and put it on the Chevy engine. I rebuilt Moon’s engine in his roadster, and he gave me everything I needed and Larsen picked out the parts for the blower setup. That’s when I started running a blown Chevy in 1976 at Bonneville.
In 1978 I hurt the motor, so I went down into Wendover and bought a junkyard motor, put my blower, oil pan, oil pan, oil pump everything on the junker. So now the pistons are flush with the top of the deck. I was told to build the engine with 7:1 compression because of the supercharger. I ran it on straight alcohol. I ran 187 mph on that $20 motor. I got Bill Miller (Bill Miller Engineering, Carson City, Nevada) in to make me some rods and repaired the broken engine using them so the pistons were flush with the deck. I started going 190. I started learning a lot more about the 300-inch Chevy and ran 230 mph. The record was 238 and I never got closer than 230. I probably had 50 or 60 runs well over 200 mph, but that doesn’t count unless you break a record—you have to break a record in order to get into the 200 MPH Club.”
Jim wanted to bring back another famous old race car originally built by Bill Burke: the “Pumpkin Seed” that went 205.949 with a 156-inch Falcon engine in 1959. Then Mickey Thompson purchased the Streamliner to test his Pontiac four-banger Tempest engines. Danny Thompson, Mickey’s son, had taken it to the Alhambra High School Auto Shop where Mickey went to school. Jim checked on it over a seven-year period. Finally, the school wanted it out. It was in pretty sad shape and Jim offered to buy it from Danny. The concern was the car was in pieces, so before stuff came up missing, the timing was right to get it out of there. “No deal,” Danny says. After all the work Jim had done for the family, Danny gave the Streamliner to Jim. Jim not only restored the Challenger but the “Assault” Pontiac-powered dragster that Mickey set 12 new world records in May 1960 at March Air Force Base.
While it had possibilities, a new ‘cage was needed, the frame had to be replaced and stretched 2 1/2 feet because it had held the six-cylinder Ford Falcon engine. (Mickey built the aluminum body.) Right off the trailer in 1999 at Bonneville Jim set a new record of 217.586 mph with the “Pumpkin Seed” (named as such because it looked like one) powered by a GMC-6. Then in 2004 it went 253.563 with the Ardun-Ford V-8 and became the World’s Fastest Ardun. How’s that for an old racer about to be thrown in the trash? At the same time Jim was thrashing to get the Streamliner ready for Speed Week, Steve Chrisman called and asked, “Do you want to do my dad’s car?” Steve’s dad was Jack, Art’s uncle. Jack and Art drag raced a rather harmless-looking (but chopped) ’29 Model A two-door in the late ’50s that was anything but. It was a nitro-burning A/Fuel Coupe that, at its peak, it did 129 mph in the quarter-mile. Of course, the answer was “Yes!” And so, he’s said “yes” 28 times to restoring historic race cars.
Jim’s seven children can be proud of their dad for all he’s achieved, including going 203.502 to gain entry in the 200 MPH Club at age 64. The same year, in 1998, Jim was inducted in the Dry Lakes Hall of Fame in Buellton, California; the late Don Francisco nominated Jim for the honor. Jim wanted to acknowledge the influence Art Chrisman, Don Ferguson Sr, and Bill Fowler had in his path to success when it came to racing, plus the assistance they gave to the many race cars that Jim has restored over the years and life in general.
June 14, 2026
The Ak Miller Story: One of Hot Rodding’s Oldest Legends
Written by Dick Martin for Rod & Custom magazine, October 1999
Furnished to Landracing.com by Richard Parks
In 1935, Ak Miller’s brother Zeke towed a 1928 Chevy roadster from Whittier, California, to Muroc Dry Lake (now Edwards Air Force Base). The journey took all night with Zeke driving the truck and Ak being towed in the Chevy approximately 130 miles. There were no traffic and stoplights in those days. “I was thrilled to be able to sit in the car,” tells Ak. “I had to keep the line taut and be very observant. I didn’t dare let the chain jerk much. I remember when we got up the next morning, it was cold, close to freezing, but when you’re young and strong, that didn’t matter much.”
“Zeke had a nervous condition,” Ak recalled, “and when it came time to pull the car up to the line, he was shaking and said, ‘I don’t feel good. Do you want to drive?’ I said, ‘Hell yes!’ They ran six abreast in those days. I ran 98 mph and beat all those Fords, but then it just quit! I had to let those guys all pass me. I left a screw off the condenser, and it fell off. I veered off to the left toward the crowd and stopped. We had good brakes in those days; two wheels,” Ak laughed.
Unfortunately, it was time to park the race cars because WWII was calling. The government had other plans for Muroc, and racing wasn’t one of them. As soon as Ak finished basic training, he was shipped to Belgium, attached to the 41st Armored Infantry, 2nd Armored Division. He was thrust right into the middle of the Battle of the Bulge during the dead of winter, on the front line. A lieutenant cried out to his group, “Which one of you bastards is big?” Ak replied, “I ain’t big, but I’m strong.” He said, “Do you know anything about radios?” Ak answered, “A for Able, B for Baker, C for Charlie.” He said, “Good, that makes you a sergeant.” So, Ak carried a 60-pound radio on his back through the snow in the Ardenne Forest. The Americans were completely surrounded by the Germans. It was during this time when asked to surrender by German General Luttwitz, that Brigadier General McAuliff replied, “Surrender? Nuts!”
As his unit pushed forward through the forest, Ak was instructed to stay with the scout, since he had the radio. He had to call in artillery fire, but because of heavy fog, no planes could fly. It took a week of sleeping on the snow-covered ground and walking through frozen water before they reached a village, which the Americans had taken over. Ak went to one of the houses, kicked a guy out of bed, and fell fast asleep. Around midnight, he was awakened to go on guard duty. As he went to stand up, he fell back to the bed in pain. His feet, which had been frozen, had developed “trench foot” (gangrene). That essentially ended Ak’s tour of duty. He was hospitalized in England and remained there until the war ended.
After the war, the returning veterans had a lot of catching up to do; families to start, educations to finish, and business to begin. They had a lot of time to think about cars while overseas, too. Ak and his brothers Larry and Zeke started their business. Says Ak, “That’s how I started, right after the war, Miller Brothers Automotive, the three of us. I’ve been in business ever since, and the garage is still going. Larry was the best Ford mechanic around. He’s dead now. Zeke’s still alive. He’s 83 years old.
“After the war, I built a car called the ‘Miller Missile.’ In those days, I was studying a lot about chassis development, so I decided to build my own independent-rear-suspended car. Of course, I had no money to build it with. When it came to the universal joints, they were real expensive. We used to throw away all the early Ford U-joints, they were loose, and the standard Ford joint had bearings on both sides of it. So, I took that joint, took it apart, and made some shims so I could tighten it up, then I covered it with a piece of cloth, put some grease in it, and made my rear suspension. After the war we had a lot of surplus aircraft parts. I made my leading trailing arms out of landing gear arms. I made a plate to hook to my Ford hubs, and welded it up, and that was my rearend. I had the engine hooked directly to the Halibrand rearend. No transmission. It only had a 100-inch wheelbase, so there really wasn’t room back there to install one. For the front, I had an old tube axle.
“I knew Frank Kurtis and went over to talk to him, and he gave me some Midget race car torsion bars, so I had torsion bar suspension all the way around. A guy named Marvin Faw built the body. I knew what I wanted and handed him a sketch. He wanted $300 to fabricate it. In those days, that was equivalent to a good week’s work. I thought, well, I could never build that,’ so I told him to go ahead. He hammered it all up. It was beautiful. I had my buddy in the Roadrunners Club paint it.
“One day I was working in my garage, and the T was sitting there, and a fellow wandered in. ‘What are you building there, young man?’ he asked. ‘You don’t mind if I hang around and bother you?’ I didn’t mind, hell no, he was an aerodynamicist on the P-51 Mustang. Art Ford was his name. He said, ‘Can I make some suggestions?’ I said, ‘I’ve got broad shoulders, and I don’t know a thing about aerodynamics.’ He started out with many little things such as the bearings. On the front end, he suggested using generator bearings. Before you put them all together, he had some special lubricant to apply to them. Apparently, the central bearings on the first jet engines were failing because of lubrication, so they designed a lubiam-type lubricant to solve the problem. He grabbed a handful of it from work, and we lubed all the bearings. You could lean on that car, and it would do 20 mph.
“I remember working eight hours in the shop on customer cars, and then I’d work into the night on the T till I just dropped. Not only that, everything was done on limited funds. I knew I wanted a tube frame for the chassis. About 3 miles from the garage, there was a big oil field which had a lot of tubing in a stack. I asked a guy working there about it. He said, ‘that’s pump rod, it’s all plated inside.’ It was beautiful stuff. It was heavy, but I didn’t care about that. I asked the workman, ‘What would a few pieces cost?’ He said, ‘I’ll give them to you. You’re going to make a frame with it? I’ll tell you son, you’ll never break that stuff. It’s chrome moly. You’ll never cut it, either.’ But I figured how to work with it. Unlike aircraft tubing, I didn’t have to run a bunch of cross braces with it because of its strength.
“Before fitting the T body on the frame, I had to make a decision: Do I want the car to sit high or low? Everyone’s car sat low, 2 inches from the ground. Art, my friend the aircraft engineer, suggested going high. ‘You want to keep the air out of the bottom of the belly pan when you run low, because it wants to push the car up. Go high enough, 10 to 11 inches, and the air will just pass through and won’t affect the car.’ So that’s what we did. We were the only car at Bonneville sitting high, and it worked.
“For cooling, we used German Jerry Cans, no radiator, which was Art’s idea. No pumping losses through the car, we would just fill the cans with ice water. The color of the ‘Missile’ was black, which was also Art’s idea.
“Art was working on the Air Cobra project at the time. It had to attain a speed of 300 mph to win the government contract. It missed the speed by 30 mph. They had done all they could think of to pick up the speed needed. Finally, Art said, ‘Change the color and paint the thing black. It picked up the 30 mph. The black color heats the body up and gives it cleaner air. So, the ‘Miller Missile’ was painted black. We set three records in three hours at Bonneville, one with the V-8 60 flathead that held for eight years, 136 ci doing 142 mph.”
Ak says, “In 1952, the local Whittier Olds dealer, Clint Harris, wanted to sponsor me a brand-new Oldsmobile sedan to run in the Mexican Road Race. However, the stipulation was that Mr. Harris wanted a Mexican driver, Salvador Barrigan to be the co-driver/navigator. He apparently knew the 2000-mile course quite well.” Ak decided before he was going to trust his life to a stranger, he was going to see what this guy was made of. He put him in the Olds and headed to his favorite track, Turnbull Canyon Road, in Whittier. This stretch of twisting mountain road connected Whittier to Hacienda Heights.
“I went around a corner, oh, about 90 to 95 mph, and I thought the guy was going to climb out of the car. He got up on the dashboard and called me every name in the book. I said, ‘Hell, you’re no race driver, that wasn’t fast.’ I then went back to the dealership and said, ‘no way am I taking that guy to Mexico with me. I want Doug Harrison.’”
Doug Harrison, Ak’s friend of 50 years, took the time out to reminisce about their many experiences together. “I knew of Ak before the war. He was known in racing circles,” states Doug. “The first time I met Ak was at his garage right after I got out of the Navy. In 1946 my dad owned a small ranch in Whittier and needed service on some of his vehicles. When we met, we both had identical ’32 roadsters, mine was maroon and Ak’s was black, except mine was faster,” laughed Doug.
Ak’s former wife Marilyn recounted how they all got together. “I worked as a carhop at a drive-in called ‘The Hula Hut’ in Whittier. That was in 1946. Ak and Doug would come in and only have enough money to buy a Coke, so I’d end up giving them a free burger. The owner didn’t want guys hanging around that didn’t order food.”
Ak learned a lot that first year in the Olds sedan. Starting out in 26th place they moved up to 17th before losing the trans. “Driving back to Whittier, Doug and I began to put together a plan to build our own race car for next year’s race.” Miller continued, “I had a ’27-T body given to me. The frame was a ’50 Ford shortened to a 100-inch wheelbase, an overdrive out of a ’35 Nash, and a ’51 Olds V-8. We created the Caballo 1, kind of like Frankenstein, except it was uglier,” Ak roared.
The following year, Ak and Doug headed for Mexico in their new race car. “Unfortunately, in the process, we went through a sandstorm and got sand in the engine. We had to call home and order new pistons and rings. We did the work at a local Chevy dealer’s garage. Everyone was amazed when we had the engine out of the car in 35 minutes, but we never completely solved the problem of using oil, once we got everything back together,” said Doug.
“I had a half case of oil on my laps, a hose to the pan, with a funnel clamped to the hose. We got on an 80-mile stretch of straight-away with a lot of dips in it. The oil would crest and go up and down in the pan. Ak yelled, ‘Doug, we need another quart!’ I had to get the funnel above the windshield so gravity would work for me, and just about that time, we crested a hill and I saw a big glob of oil heading right for me.” Ak chimed in laughing, “It went right in Doug’s face!”
Bill Stropp’s factory Lincoln team helped out the two struggling hot rodders. At the end of every race day, Bill gave Ak his used tires. Stropp had the might of Ford Motor Company behind him and could afford fresh tires and wheels each of the five days. Fresh brakes and drums also found their way to Ak because of Stropp. “In addition, he gave us a roller-type of map that advised of danger areas, blind corners and bridges were all outlined. Doug handled the map. It was on a big roll. One day he lost it when it blew out of the car and rolled down the road like a roll of toilet paper, gone forever,” Ak roared with laughter.
“The Italian team had been down there a month, practicing. They used a system of painted rocks and signs posted with arrows, XX’s, and zeros. I figured when we saw a painted rock, it meant something. We couldn’t decipher any of it, though.
“Coming out of the mountains and jungles near the Guatemalan border, there were plank bridges you had to cross. We spent about three days on these bridges practicing. We’d go from Tuxtla Gutierrez to Oaxaca, a distance of 330 miles, practicing. We were down there two months ahead of time, so when the time came to cross that bridge, we blew through it at about 115 mph! The Italians were stunned.”
During the time the Caballo was down waiting for parts, Doug met a young Mexican girl named Ney. He fell in love. She was 15 at the time. Returning to Whittier after the race, Doug couldn’t get her out of his mind. He went to Ak and said, “I want to marry that girl.” Doug returned to Mexico, courted her, and asked for her father’s permission to get married.
Ney’s father wanted proof that Doug was a Catholic (which he wasn’t). Returning to Whittier by Greyhound bus, Doug convinced a priest to sign some documents stating that he was a Catholic. They were married on January 25, 1953, and still are to this day. Ak’s friend and navigator spent 22 years in Mexico.
These two up-starts from California shook up the international racing community with ‘backyard’ Yank ingenuity, seat-of-the-pants’ racing, and wrenching. Hard work and pride earned these guys a place in history.
As Jack Lufkin (Ak’s longtime associate) puts it, “That race put Ak on Broadway.” Lufkin has been with Ak since 1957. According to Ak, “Lufkin came walking in one day. He’s just gotten out of the service. He said, Mr. Miller, I’ve read a lot about you, and I want to work for you. You don’t have to pay me any money until you feel I’m doing a good job.’ He’s been with me ever since. We do everything together, go on vacations together, used to race together.”
The boys would return one more time in 1954 to finish fifth overall. It took 20 hours and 31 minutes to cover the 1900 miles. Factory Ferrari driver Umberto Maglioli finished first. Phil Hill was second, also in a Ferrari. In all, 12 countries competed.
The amazing fact is that Ak and Doug drove from Whittier to Tuxtla Gutierrez, Mexico (a distance of 3300 miles) drove the 1900-mile course in 20 hours and 31 minutes, then drove back home in the Caballo. Nobody, but nobody, does things like that today. Forget “Iron Horse!” How about iron men? Years later those efforts would help launch an association with Ford that would last for years.
Ak and Doug then decided to build an entirely new car for the Mille Miglia called the Caballo II, and road race across the face of Italy. It was 10 to 12 hours of continuous, hard driving. They corresponded with the organizers in Italy, and the Italians were very interested in having Ak compete over there. As Ak related, “We had run the Mexican Road Race three years, then they discontinued it, so we decided we were going to race in Italy. To us, it was just another Mexican Road Race, so Doug and I whipped the car together.
Chrysler got interested and had a new 392 Hemi which they offered us to run in the car. Naturally we put the Hilborn Injector on it, four-speed Jag transmission (there were no other four-speeds available at the time). Frank Kurtis sponsored a chassis, and Jack ‘Willie’ Sutton built the body.”
As Doug tells it, “Just after we finished building the Caballo II, Ak wanted to try it out. ‘Let’s get a burger.’ We headed for Vegas, got there, looked around, had a burger, and headed back home to Whittier.”
“When we got to the fruit inspection station, a CHP officer there said, ‘Hold on, someone wants to talk to you. It seems you almost blew one of our units off the road.’ We were probably doing about 180. We didn’t have license plates on the car, except for Mille Miglia painted on the side. Ak explained to the cops the car was going to be raced in Italy, and they said, ‘OK, but if you get stopped again, we never saw you two.’
“It was getting dark, and our lights weren’t working too well, but we made it back to the garage on Whittier Boulevard. We pulled into the garage, and the car had a leak in the belly pan. Ak said, ‘It’s leaking gas from the tank!’ He jacked up the back end and crawled under it with a creeper. He said, ‘Doug, hand me the drop cord.’ I handed it to him and he dropped it. The bulb broke in the puddle of gas and caught it on fire. I literally grabbed Ak by the heels and flung him in the street. The fire destroyed a customer’s expensive speed boat and the roof of the building as well.”
“We had the car back together in three months,” said Ak. “It burned down in December, and it had to be on the boat to Italy in March! The body was all but completely destroyed. Doug looked at the car and said to me, ‘It’s just a slab piece of aluminum. I’ve got an idea. We’ll take a form, get a piece of aluminum, and get a guy with a big roller and have that thing rolled, just one roll, and put it up and get the wheel wells cut out, and you have a race car. What was left of the original fenders, they cut in a straight line. ‘Let’s just cut what’s left of the fenders and graft them to the aluminum we just fabricated.’ We made it to New York just in the nick of time,” laughed Ak.
“We towed the Caballo using my ’49 Olds from Le Havre, France, where we docked, to Brescia, Italy. You should have seen the looks we got when we pulled into a gas station. Mobil Oil had sponsored us and gave us a credit card. We’d fill the car up. It would take 20-some gallons. You know, the average Frenchman wouldn’t use that much gas in a year. Gas was real expensive in those days; over there, two or three dollars a gallon. We toured all over Europe in the Olds, and pre-ran the course with it, two times.”
“Most of our disasters could be attributed to Mr. Miller,” Doug said, looking across to Ak. “Ak has always wanted to drive over the Alps. He decided he knew the way. We get up on a road that kept getting narrower and narrower. We began picking up snow on the bushes. Pretty soon it dead-ended. There was no place to turn around. We didn’t dare unhook the trailer, so we backed all the way down. We went to Innsbruck, Austria, and back around. We only had so much time to check in.
“Jerry Unser was the guy that got me up to Pike’s Peak. Jerry had won Pike’s Peak and was kidding me one day about being a chicken straight-away driver. The next thing I know, I said, ‘There’s nothing to driving that hill.’ Jerry said, ‘Why don’t you bring your new car?’ I had just built that car. It had a Devin body and a good 400ci Chevy engine, and didn’t weigh anything, about 2000 pounds.
“When I got up there, I did terrible. The car wouldn’t handle, but Ray Brock (former technical editor of Hot Rod) and I kept working on it. Finally, I said, ‘It’s me. I’m just not a good driver.’ Hell, I’d never driven in the dirt. Finally, I asked Bobby Unser to drive it. I said, ‘Give me your true evaluation.” What do you think?’ After Bobby drove it, he said, “If you drive that car, you’re crazy. It’s squirrely. It’s got a lot of power, but that ass-end just ain’t sticking!’”
Today’s race car builders spend hours asking their computers for permission just to move a shock tower. What Ak and Ray Brock did next to solve their problem would cause Roger Penske to have a stroke! Ray concluded that there was just not enough weight on the rear of the Devin, so they went into town and bought a flywheel off of a tractor. It weighed 400 pounds. “It took both of us to carry it.” They made a bracket and welded it to the cross-member.
“The next day was the race, and I had no chance to try it. I thought, All I can do is drive it and stay on the road, the hell with it.’ The first two corners (I had everything memorized well), I punched it, the thing held. I punched it, it held again. I thought, ‘Hell, I have a race car!’ Then I drove it as hard as I could drive it, got up to the top, and won! That was 1964.”
Ak had just finished his new garage and relocated to Pico Rivera (its current location) when he took the first phone call. “It was Mr. Jack Passano from Ford. ‘Would you be interested in working for us in Detroit?’ I said, “I think so, but I just started my new business, and I don’t want to walk away from it.” “We just want you for one year,’ he explained. “Whatever money you want, we’ll pay it.” I didn’t want to live in Detroit, so I flew back and forth every week. I got involved in Ford’s Custom Car Caravan. We were running five trucks all over the country. It got to the point where I was working for Iacocca on the Mustang.”
Harrison also spent a couple of years with Ford, and goes on to say, “We went back to Detroit. They gave us the first Ford Falcon to test. Nobody had seen it, the car was a prototype which was masked off and painted gray. We were told to take it anywhere we wanted, so we headed to Florida. When we got to South Carolina, the fan blade went through the radiator. We stopped at a local Ford garage and called our office in Dearborn. They told us to close down the garage, run all the mechanics out, and don’t let the public in, they would talk to the owner. Ford management did, and air-freighted us a brand-new engine which we put in that evening and were off again the next day. We did that for a couple of years testing the Falcon and Mustang. All we had to do is drive a certain amount of miles a day.”
“A lot of guys got rich working for Ford in those days, but I wasn’t one of them,” said Miller. “At one time, a Ford official offered me (on the q.t.) 200 Ford Overhead cam engines. They were in a warehouse, and he wanted them out of there. ‘You take them, you don’t need to pay for them. When you sell them, then you pay for them.’ I got to thinking, that’s how good guys become bad guys. I didn’t want to touch them. I’m glad I didn’t , because he had three or four warehouses by the airport just full of cars and engines. Eventually he and other Ford officials wound up losing their jobs and titles. I was with Ford for 10 years.”
When Ak was 71, he joined the 200 Mile Club at Bonneville. What started out to be a fun run for publicity shots ended up with Ak turning 230 mph. “I was an old geek. I could hardly get into the car. I was too fat to bend far. I had to laugh. All those young kids watching, they probably thought, ‘Who’s that old guy kidding?’” Ak laughed, recalling the moment. “But hell, the car felt good, and I just nailed it. I ran 230 mph on a 221 mph record.”
Ak Miller and his generation are treasures. They dropped everything and went off to fight for freedom. The lucky ones who made it back had a passion for living. These were the kids of the ‘40’s, with a work ethic, a sense of duty, honor, country, and pride. The “gangs” they formed were car clubs. “Drive-by” meant cruising by your girlfriend’s house. “Banging” meant helping a friend straighten a fender. A “gun” was something you painted a car with.
They were heroes to their country, to their children, and to their sport. We look up to them and are proud to call them “hot rodders.” Baseball has DiMaggio, we have Miller. Ak Miller’s garage is still going strong. Jack Lufkin runs the day-to-day business, but Ak can still be found there most any day. His time is filled with going out to lunch with his “old racing buddies” and telling tales. Naturally, a trip to El Mirage or Bonneville is always in order and deciding what speaking invitations to attend when they cross his desk.
Jerry Kugel of Kugel Komponents fame put it best: “I worked for Ak for 10 years and never heard the same story twice. I believe every one of them.”