Those boys should’ve had a...
Those boys should’ve had a sign on the door that read: “Closed, gone racing.” If Eisert and Bill weren’t wrenchin’ they were racin’. That’s Burke LeSage’s reversed wide-white-shod ’34 about to slog to El Mirage behind the shop’s ’41 Ford.
If you’re a collector and find a Ferrari Mille Miglia with Stromberg 97s instead of Webers bolted to the V-12, don’t pull them off because here’s how that happened: “That’s how I got started with Frank Arciero. He had a little 1.9L Mille Miglia Ferrari. His mechanic didn’t know anything about the Weber carburetors, so he put Stromberg 97s on it. That’s when Arciero brought the Ferrari over to us to see if we could get it to run right.”
You can’t fault the mechanic for throwing the Italian jugs in the trash because the Ferrari won 9 out of 11 races with the 97s after Bill fine-tuned them.
“Arciero came to the United States when he was 18. Arciero and his two brothers started digging ditches that were footings for the slab concrete floors in homes. Eventually he was able to buy his own trenching machine and became a big general contractor.
“That tank belonged to Kay...
“That tank belonged to Kay Kimes; he replaced the Ford Flathead with a Nailhead; I drove it almost all the time.” Repainted a shiny red with Automotive Specialities on the nose, Bill in glorious fashion scattered the 342-inch Buick just as he went past the speed trap at Bonneville at 193 mph in 1957. “I was trying to get into the 2-Club,” Bill laments, “and I had a pretty good shot at doing it.”
“The more Arciero worked with us the more he wanted Eisert and I to go to the races with him. Eventually, Arciero made me an offer in 1958 to work for him full time.
“Eisert bought me out and when I left he hired Jerry Kugel. Kugel would hang out outside, so Eisert finally told him, ‘If you’re going to hang out here, grab a broom and do something”, and boy did he ever. You know the rest of the story—he later formed Kugel Komponents.
Visualize a two-seat fuelie with a small-block Chevy shoehorned in it, with four on the floor. Could be your roadster, right? This one went straight big-time-fast but could turn left and right and stopped pretty well (with cerametallic brakes). What you had back in 1957-58 was a few Corvettes that GM modified for road racing and used ones were fairly cheap. Hot rodders raced them on the local California road courses in the ’50s and some went on to bigger and better things.
“I raced a Vette that belonged to Willie Kristie that I got down to the lap record, which was two minutes flat on the road course at Willow Springs. The owner of another Corvette, Cal Bailey, was at Willow and asked me if I’d drive his car as he (Bailey) was looking for a driver. After I did, Bailey said, ‘I had a guy in that car last week and he was 3 seconds under the lap record.’ I said, you’d better hire him. That guy was Dan Gurney.” (Stranger than fiction: Bailey later tried to kidnap Firestone company president Leonard Firestone and was killed trying.)
Bill knew his way around the...
Bill knew his way around the Willow Springs road course in any type of race car, including a customer’s old Sprint Car. “It had a Ford Flathead V-8 with a two-speed trans,” Bill recalls. Yes, that’s the Porsche that Bill ran at El Mirage parked next to the sprinter.
Gurney was a Riverside, California, hot rodder with a ’37 Ford two-door headed to Bonneville in 1950. He drove his buddy Skip Hudson’s ’29 Ford roadster with its ’41 Ford 267-inch Flathead V-8 down the salt to 130.43 mph. Gurney later raced a Triumph TR2 at Torrey Pines (near San Diego) in 1955 and won his first race in 1956 at Montgomery Field in San Diego driving a Porsche Speedster.
“The driver who drove Arciero’s 1.9 Ferrari decided he didn’t want to drive Arciero’s newly acquired 4.9 Ferrari [from Tony Parravano], which was a lot faster, so we thought of Gurney.” (Parravano was a wealthy building contractor who had some of the finest drivers in amateur racing at the time, like Bob Drake, Richie Ginther, Phil Hill, and Carroll Shelby, drive for him.)
Great choice because Gurney started racking up wins in the Ferrari on the airport courses of Santa Barbara and Palm Springs, plus Pomona and at Paramount Ranch in the Santa Monica Mountains above Malibu. Bill kept the Ferrari in top racing trim for the talented young driver.
Rod Riders Racing Team member...
Rod Riders Racing Team member Jim Travis campaigned the hammered ’34 for 27 years at Bonneville. “Richard Stricker bought the coupe from the late John Moxley,” Jim Travis says. “Moxley ran the coupe at Bonneville in 1955 as ‘Miss 400’. Chuck Griffith drove the car at Bonneville with an injected Chrysler. Griffith got it as high as 192 mph before parking it. Stricker wasn’t ready to pay Bill and Eisert to pull the Cadillac out of his pickup to put into the coupe at the time, so they borrowed it. In fact, it still had ‘Miss 400’ on the door when Bill and Eisert built an injected Flathead V-8 for it. Then they painted it red and put Automotive Specialties on the hood. Stricker, Bill, and Eisert went to Bonneville in 1957 with the blown Cadillac in it. When I went into the Army in 1957, I saw the coupe sitting in front of the Automotive Specialty shop and fell in love with it. The coupe sat in Stricker’s garage for years and I asked him to bring it to a SCTA booth at the Great Western Exhibit Hall in South Gate i
Rod Riders Racing Team member...
Rod Riders Racing Team member Jim Travis campaigned the hammered ’34 for 27 years at Bonneville. “Richard Stricker bought the coupe from the late John Moxley,” Jim Travis says. “Moxley ran the coupe at Bonneville in 1955 as ‘Miss 400’. Chuck Griffith drove the car at Bonneville with an injected Chrysler. Griffith got it as high as 192 mph before parking it. Stricker wasn’t ready to pay Bill and Eisert to pull the Cadillac out of his pickup to put into the coupe at the time, so they borrowed it. In fact, it still had ‘Miss 400’ on the door when Bill and Eisert built an injected Flathead V-8 for it. Then they painted it red and put Automotive Specialties on the hood. Stricker, Bill, and Eisert went to Bonneville in 1957 with the blown Cadillac in it. When I went into the Army in 1957, I saw the coupe sitting in front of the Automotive Specialty shop and fell in love with it. The coupe sat in Stricker’s garage for years and I asked him to bring it to a SCTA booth at the Great Western Exhibit Hall in South Gate i
You never knew/know about...
You never knew/know about the elements at El Mirage till you’re there. Bill couldn’t remember his speed in the Porsche or the date he was there. But can you tell it was blustery that day? Hopefully it was a tailwind!