INDY 500: From Roadster Era to Rocket Era

By Jake Grubb

In the furious decade that elapsed from the mid 1960s to the mid 1970s at the Indianapolis 500, quantum changes in racecar design, engine developments, tire technologies and many other core fundamentals changed at a dizzying pace.

After the incredible feat of the 1962 Forbes Weinberger Homes Special Watson Indy Roadster, which ran all 200 laps of four consecutive Indy 500s (1962, ’63, ’64 and ’65) — and did so competitively — the onslaught of rear engine Indy Car design and aviation-inspired aerodynamic body designs rocketed the cars to uncanny speeds that elevated dramatically each year. In that time period, lap speeds rocketed from 150mph averages to nearly 200 mph averages! A then-unthinkable progression! It is this time period that defined a new trajectory in Indy Car performance, one that ultimately reached a point where boundaries for speeds and innovations in safety began to eclipse the arms race for outright performance. These push-pull dynamics continue to define Indy Cars and Indy 500 track speeds to this day.

By the early 1960s, new rear-engine racecar designs from Europe made our once proud USA Indy roadsters look aged and even slightly inefficient. By contrast, British open wheel racecars such as Lotus models were strikingly small, lightweight, low, modern and fast looking. These represented the leading edge of open-wheel racecar design. Against this new reality, the 1962 A.J. Watson Weinberger Homes Special was a late-in-life Indy roadster that stood tall against the onslaught of the rear-engine newcomers, making them prove themselves until the dog days of 1965.

Chicagoan Bill Forbes, an Indy Car owner since the late 1950s, ordered one of the three new A.J. Watson roasters built for the 1962 racing season. Although his car was never destined to win a championship race, it was to have one of the longest and most colorful careers of any of the famous Watson Indy-style roadsters. This car fought the battles of the transition from front-engine Indy roadsters to rear-engine Indy Cars like no other.

Forbes and his chief mechanic Dave Laycock chose 1956 USAC champion Clark “Shorty” Templeman to drive their new car. Templeman, who qualified for his first Indy 500 in 1955 had three previous starts at the Speedway, all ending in mechanical failure. He qualified the new Forbes roadster as car number 4 in 6th starting position for the 1962 Indy 500. During the race, while running well in the top ten he spun into the wall. Yet despite a seven-minute pit stop to repair a broken sway bar he completed the race with an 11th place finish, completing all 200 laps!

Ten days later Templeman started the Milwaukee 100-miler in 17th position and spun on the 84th lap, finishing a disappointing 16th. Forbes and Templeman parted company after the race and Forbes hired Jim McElreath as the team’s new driver. Shortly thereafter Templeman sadly died in a Midget car crash at the Marion County, Ohio, Fairgrounds in August 1962.

Driver Jim McElreath, an IMCA and USAC sprint car veteran from Arlington Texas took over the Forbes ride in mid-1962 at the August Milwaukee 200-miler. After qualifying 15th McElreath drove a strong race and finished in 5th position, hinting at good things to come.

Returning to Indy in May 1963, McElreath put the Forbes Roadster [as car number 8] on the outside of the second row for the car’s second consecutive year, challenging all comers including the new rear-engine Indy Cars. British racecar builder Colin Chapman brought his Lotus rear-engine design to the Speedway in 1963 in hopes of defeating the dominant Offenhauser-engine roadsters. Battling with Parnelli Jones late in the race, Lotus’ pilot Jimmy Clark was set to end the Offy’s reign. But after a heated battle the Scotsman couldn’t quite prevail and Jones took the victory.

During the race McElreath ran as high as 2nd on several occasions but spun twice, once in the pits while avoiding contact with another car, and then finally finished a strong 6th.

For Indianapolis 1964, now facing a tidal wave of rear-engine racecars from Europe and the USA, the Forbes roadster yet again took-on the Indy 500 (this time as car number 18) with another respected Texas driver, Lloyd Ruby at the wheel. Of the 33 Indy 500 starters, twelve were of rear-engine design, a third of the total field. Jimmy Clark, Dan Gurney and Bob Marshman were fastest in their Lotus Fords but incredibly, Lloyd Ruby started 7th in the Forbes roadster and drove to a steady 3rd-place finish, his career-best at Indy. AJ Foyt took the checkered flag and drank from the traditional milk bottle of victory, but it was to be the final win for a front-engine roadster at the Indy 500.

Bill Forbes sold the car in February 1965 to Sid Weinberger and Frank Wilseck, who campaigned it through the 1965 season as the Weinberger Homes Special, car number 76. They contracted Gordon Johncock, a Super-Modified hot-shot from Hastings Michigan as the driver.

At the 49th Indy 500 on May 31st, 1965, after logging an estimated 700 miles in practice, “Gordy” Johncock qualified the Weinberger Homes Special at 155.012 mph (20th position), and finished an impressive 5th place in an Indy 500 field dominated by 27 rear-engine cars that year. Johncock and the Weinberger were one of only six Indy roadsters in the event. They held their own but sung their swan song as Britain’s Jimmy Clark won the 1965 Indy 500 in a Lotus 38; the first victory at Indy for a rear-engine car. A front-engine roadster never won again.

Epilogue

In May 1968, Frank “Sunny” Deak of South Bend Indiana bought the roadster from Weinberger and Wilseck and converted it to a pavement Sprint Car. With Ray Wright of Elkhart Indiana driving, the car scored top-five finishes in non-consecutive California events between May and September 1968. Deak then sold the car, but bought it back in 1972. He owned the Weinberger for almost nine more years until he sold it again, this time in 1981 to collector Bob McConnell of Urbanna, Ohio. McConnell and Steve Miller of Mexico, New York elected to restore the car as it appeared in its final year at the Indy 500 in 1965.

In 1993 McConnell elected to sell the partially-restored Weinberger to Jack Layton, who then proceeded to complete its superlative 10-point restoration. In 1994 the car achieved certification as an entrant for judging by the American Association of Classic Automobiles, a rare and special honor.

Incredibly, the Weinberger Homes Special is the only A.J. Watson Offy roadster to have completed four consecutive Indianapolis 500 events — 1962, 1963, 1964 and 1965 — all 800 laps, all 2000 miles!

On April 27, 1997 Jack Layton sold the car to Tom Malloy, who now displays this venerable A.J. Watson classic Indy roadster at vintage racing and concours events throughout the USA.

By 1963, A.J. Watson was itchy. Generally re-garded as the most experienced, most successful designer/builder of Indianapolis-type racecars in the USA, Watson had reluctantly concluded that the reign of his renowned front-engine roadster racecars was in its final chapter. Among his many outstanding accomplishments, Watson’s cars had won five Indianapolis 500s!

The early 1960s presented definitive clarity that rear-engine-configured cars could achieve superior cornering speeds over front-engine cars, yet with less power and far less weight. USA veteran builders of front-engine racecars saw this first-hand. A.J. Watson was watching these developments like a hawk taking aim at a stampede of rabbits. He was studying, and he would act.

In early 1963 Watson went to his drawing board and set out to make a new breed of masterpiece – a rear-engine Indy car that would have a larger displacement, yet slim-line motor to challenge its British counterparts, creating a racecar with superior handling and spectacular power. This promised to be a potent combination.

With the 1964 Indianapolis 500 shaping up to be the defining duel between traditional roadster-style front-engine cars and the dawning era of rear-engine cars, thirteen A.J. Watson-designed cars were to qualify for the event. Of those, eleven were roadsters. Two were Watson rear-engine Indy prototypes. One of those two was the “Leader Card Racers Kaiser Aluminum Special” on these pages. It was powered by an innovative Ford double-overhead-cam V8 engine. (The sister car to the Kaiser Aluminum Special was powered by a traditional Offenhauser engine, so that on-track performance could be compared).

At the Indianapolis 500 for 1964, for the first time in history the front row grid of qualifiers for an Indy 500 was made-up exclusively of rear-engine cars. Scotland’s Jimmy Clark qualified on the pole in a Lotus 34 (158.828 mph); Bobby Marshman qualified 2nd, also in a Lotus (157.867 mph); and Rodger Ward qualified 3rd in the A.J. Watson Leader Card Kaiser Ford (156.406 mph). The race of a new Indy 500 era was on.

After the green flag on race day, nothing went as expected. Although pole-sitter Jim Clark led for fourteen early laps, a Dunlop tire failure violently destroyed his Lotus’ suspension, but he averted contact with the wall. Bobby Marshman in the second Lotus then took over 1st and stretched his lead to a prodigious 90-seconds, but ultimately his “low” driving line through Turn 1 caused the bottom of the car to contact pavement, ending up in a broken gearbox and oil plug. Follow-up leader Parnelli Jones’ retirement (due to an oil fire) left the race to a charging A.J. Foyt and a chasing Rodger Ward in the rear-engine Watson-Ford to challenge for the ’64 Indy 500 win.

Although Ward was turning the fastest lap times, as the race wore on A.J. Foyt’s front-engine Roadster necessitated only two more pit stops for fuel, against Ward’s need for four stops. Why? Veteran 3-time Indy winner Ward, who calculated that his Ford engine would run cooler on alcohol, had converted his engine to run Alcohol (vs gasoline) the night before the 500. Reason: 1) He had apprehensions (as did other drivers) about the danger of gasoline operation in a rear-engine car; 2) Ford’s new V8 4-cam race engines had failures in pre-race testing with gasoline, but ran dependably on alcohol, and with 3-mph faster lap speeds. But a casualty of Wards’ late-night pre-race switch from gasoline to alcohol was Ward’s failure to re-position a fuel metering valve that determined rich vs lean mixture, which led to radically increased fuel use during the 500-mile race, forcing more pit stops than his competitors. Ward would later reflect; “the car was good enough to win but the fault was mine. I set-up the jetting too rich, which caused additional fuel stops.”

Ultimately, only two rear-engine cars finished the ’64 Indy 500, belying their ultimate dominance, as later illustrated by Jim Clark’s runaway win just one year later in the 1965 Indy 500. But the 1964 race was one of tradition, with A.J. Foyt winning his 3rd Indianapolis 500 in a front-engine Sheraton-Thompson A.J. Watson-built roadster.

The actual Rodger Ward-driven A.J. Watson Leader Card Racers Kaiser Aluminum Ford V8 Special on these pages was restored by Ron Ward and A.J. Watson himself, to its 1964 Indy livery, with documentations notarized by Rodger Ward. On August 15th 1998, the car became a part of the Malloy Foundation, Inc. private collection.

In 2014, the year of A.J. Watson’s passing, Malloy Foundation chief fabricator Marc Hart and team completed an exacting restoration of the car to its 1964 Indy 500 racing specification. This work was based on extensive historical research, aided by detailed photographs of the Watson Kaiser Aluminum Special that were taken just one week before its 1964 Indy 500 debut. The authentic photos were kindly made available by the Indianapolis Museum, from their archives.

Few Indianapolis 500 racecars are top-ten competitors. Still fewer are front-of-the-pack runners for more than two seasons, due to technology advances that relentlessly drive Indy Car speeds and efficiencies as time advances. But for a racecar to be “a factor” in Indy Car racing for half a decade is virtually unthinkable.

But the 1973 McLaren M24B broke all conventional norms. Eight years after it was originally introduced, this car placed 3rd in the 1981 Indianapolis 500, a race that featured the most controversial Indy finish in history!

Originally a derivative of McLaren’s highly successful M16 and M23 Formula 1 cars of the early and mid-1970s, the M24B was specifically modified by the McLaren works team for USAC Indy racing. After McLaren’s 1974 Indy 500 win with American driver Johnny Rutherford in a 1973 McLaren M16/D, McLaren added engineering improvements and rebranded its stable of M16D cars to the designation of M24. Rutherford ran chassis #003, shown here, successfully on the USAC Indy Car circut throughout 1977. With further improvements and running as an M24B with Rutherford at the 1978 and 1979 Indy 500s, results were solid but not stellar.

Although McLaren departed Indy Car racing as of the 1980 racing season, Hong Kong real estate magnate Teddy Yip Jr.’s Theodore Racing purchased the McLaren M24B, chassis #003 for entry into the 1981 Indy 500. Young up-and-coming Australian driver Vern Schuppan, known for his racing successes in Asia with the Theodore team, would be the driver, with sponsorship from well known racing and hotel entrepreneur Jim Trueman, founder of Red Roof Inns.

Powered by a freshened Ford DFV engine, Schuppan qualified 18th in a star-studded field of 33 drivers and cars, however surprised veterans, spectators and media alike with his steady climb throughout the race to 3rd place, which he held solidly in the final laps to finish behind Bobby Unser and Mario Andretti, both Indy legends.

Although the famous “who’s the winner” controversy of the 1981 Indianapolis 500 overshadowed Schuppan’s driving feat, his Indianapolis accomplishment in the 8-year-old McLaren M24B was herculean. Some, in fact, would say historic.

In August of 2000, Tom Malloy purchased the McLaren Indy M-24B, chassis #003 from Vernon John Schuppan. The car has been restored to its 1981 Indy 500 3rd-place-finish livery and race trim, and is now part of the Malloy Foundation, Inc. collection. And as Tom Malloy fondly reminds; “regardless of the ’81 Indy winner controversy, I have the winning car.” The Malloy Foundation is the proud owner of the first three finishers!