The late Indy car builder Lujie Lesovsky said this about A.J.: “The Watson roadster is the Model T of race cars. No trick stuff, no monkey motion; everything so simple it’s hard for anything to go wrong.”
Why do the legends I write about live such long lives? Because they’re still acting like kids working on stuff and building things—they’re active! Hot rodders like A.J. don’t retire; they just wrench away. And while the days of competitive racing have ended for the roadsters, vintage racing has welcomed the front-engined Indy Cars with open racetracks.
If you want to know what it felt like to be a Foyt, Jones, or Ward behind the wheel, A.J. will build you a Watson roadster for vintage racing and since he—A.J. Watson—is the builder, it can’t be considered a reproduction.
A.J. leaves home every day to drive to his 25-acre farm outside of Indianapolis where he has a shop to spend the morning building a replica of the Pots and Pans Speedway Car or a Watson roadster for a customer. He goes home for lunch and back to the shop for a few more hours in the afternoon to maybe tinker with his ’27 roadster or his wild Harley Trike: “Now that I’m retired, I do all the work on the roadsters myself. Nobody works for me.”
A.J., we know a legion of hot rodders who would work for you and wouldn’t take a dime for the experience.
This photo was taken at A.J.’s...
This photo was taken at A.J.’s shop in Glendale where nothing but winning race cars rolled out that door: “I moved to that shop in 1958 on West Palmer. I finally left Glendale in 1971 and moved to Indy.” A.J. realized the roadster era had come to an end and reluctantly began building rear-engine Champ Cars. Success came early for A.J.’s radical new design with Rodger Ward finishing Second at Indy in 1964 in the car on the left. The No. 2 car on the right with the DOHC Ford that Don Branson drove, finished 12th when the transmission failed. “I built about six or eight rear-engined cars after that but I didn’t do real good with them,” A.J. says.
You can’t take the hot rod...
You can’t take the hot rod out of the hot rodder. A.J. built some of the most-winning Champ Cars in racing, yet he couldn’t resist going back to his roots in retirement. A.J. built this replica of his original track roadster, the “Double Question Mark” with himself at the wheel at Raceway Park in Indianapolis. “The sponsor back then had a body shop and painted my car with the question marks for the No. 99 calling it the ‘Double Question Mark.’ I left it on all year,” A.J. laughs. “We won the race at Gilmore.”
“I built a whole series of...
“I built a whole series of cars going into production starting in 1958,” A.J says, examining one of his chassis.
A.J. in his first shop holding...
A.J. in his first shop holding the famous “shark nose” that made the Watson roadsters so lethal looking. That’s master metal shaper Wayne Ewing in the background.
The split-second that Foyt...
The split-second that Foyt crossed the finish line, winning the 1964 Indy 500 into an A.J. Watson roadster was the beginning of the end for the beautiful front-engined race cars. But not before the Flathead Ford boys like Pat Flaherty in 1956, Rodger Ward in 1959, Jim Rathmann in 1960, Rodger Ward again in 1962, and Parnelli Jones in 1963 all in Watson/Offy-powered roadsters. What a legacy.
Hopefully you haven’t had...
Hopefully you haven’t had a little cooking sherry when you see this in your rearview mirror. That’s not an Indy Car, that’s A.J. on his Harley trike that he built after retiring about to pass you.