Oilpressure

I will apologize in advance for today’s abbreviated post. Usually by this time, the Titans season has long been over and I’ve already made the mental shift from football and the holidays to January race-mode. With the Titans extended run through the NFL playoffs, I haven’t been able to make that full shift into race-mode just yet – so I haven’t been able to come up with many new topics. With the Titans exit from the playoffs last night, I should now be able to re-focus on racing. As of today, I am now back in race mode. If you read Friday’s post, you know that my wardrobe combination ran out of it’s luck yesterday. Will that make me abandon that silly practice? Of course not. I consider my good-luck rituals to be the reason they got this far. But seriously, I would like to congratulate any Kansas City Chiefs fans out there. Andy Reid is a classy coach and Patrick Mahomes is an unbelievable talent at quarterback. I will be pulling for them in the Super Bowl against the 49ers.

You may recall that just a couple of weeks ago I asked in a post if anyone knew the status of the “Car up on the roof”; the Jones and Maley Special. Many of you are much more connected with the racing world than I am, and you inquired among the people you know about this project.

Plenty of people sent me e-mails over the last couple of weeks, either telling me they tried or with a forwarded e-mail from someone with a little bit of information. Some of you e-mailed me and suggested I ask Donald Davidson for an update, since he was present when the car was taken down. I’m a step ahead of you, because in May of 2018; I was chatting with Donald (name-drop alert) in the IMS Media Center and I asked him specifically what he knew and he said he hadn’t heard a thing.

He did, however, chuckle when he said that he had no idea how they were going to restore it because there was hardly anything left to restore. He said that when they loaded the car onto the trailer that it was nothing more than a shell of a body over some of the remaining tube frame. He confessed he had no idea how they were going to restore it.

I’ve seen a few videos of old race cars found in barns, and their restoration projects usually turned out very well. It always baffled me how these things ended up in barns in the first place. Did their owners not realize what they owned and were allowing to deteriorate?

There’s still not a ton of information about the project but due to your efforts, here’s what I do now know.

After the Kurtis Kraft roadster was sold and taken down from the roof of Safety Auto Glass in the fall of 2012, it was shipped off to California for restoration. One of the e-mails I received that was a forward of a forwarded e-mail said that the person in charge of the restoration “…had a bout with cancer and delayed things but is back on it now”.

I don’t know if that person with cancer was one of the two that bought the car or the one they were entrusting the restoration to. It was only one sentence, but I guess that pretty well wrapped it up. Fortunately, the stricken individual has recovered – at least to the point where they are able to resume the project.

Thanks to those that responded with this information. It’s good to know that anytime any of us have a question about something, we can toss it out here and our readers will follow up on it.

George Phillips

This entry was posted on January 20, 2020 at 4:05 am and is filed under IndyCar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.