Die hard Indianapolis 500 fans will recognize the name of Harry Miller. Sad to say but when he died in 1943, his creativity and mechanical genius in creating an engine that dominated championship racing for more than fifty years had been forgotten. The Miller engine over the years became known as the Offenhauser (Offy), the Meyer-Drake, and the Drake engine.

Harry Miller, the son of German immigrants, left home as a teenager and worked at the Yale automobile company in Toledo and then as a mechanic on Ransom Old’s entry in the 1906 Vanderbilt Cup team. He then moved to California where he established a small engineering shop that initially specialized in carburetors. He soon branched out to also manufacture automobile pistons and fuel pumps. 

In 1913, Miller hired Fred Offenhauser, a talented machinist, and the shop rebuilt the engines of Southern California racers including Barney Oldfield and Bob Burman. When the United States entered World War I, August and Fred Duesenberg hired Miller to work on the fuel pumps and carburetors for the Bugatti U-17 engine.

What made Miller’s reputation were the Indianapolis race cars during the 1920s. The success of the company was Miller, the visionary, Offenhauser, the machinist, and Leo Goossen. the draftsman whom Miller hired in 1919. The engines and the cars they designed and built moved American auto racing from the square, upright era of the 1910s into a low rakish look.

It was Miller’s team who designed a 183 cubic inch eight-cylinder racing engine for Tommy Milton who won the Indianapolis 500 in 1921. This was the basic design for Miller’s engines until the early 1930s and for the entire history of the Offenhauser engine. Jimmy Murphy won the 1922 Indianapolis 500 with a Miller 183 cubic inch engine in a Duesenberg chassis. When the AAA Contest Board reduced the power of the cars to 122 cubic inches, Miller’s car took six of the top ten places in the 1924 and 1925 Indianapolis 500s. He was competing with the Duesenbergs who had introduced a supercharged engine which won the race in both years.

In an effort to reduce the power of the automobiles, the AAA Contest Board again reduced the engine displacement to 91 inches. Miller responded with his own supercharged engine which produced more power than the 122 cubic inch engine.

Setting world speed records in the early 20^th century could be lucrative and not terribly risky. After World War I, people would hook up two or three surplus aircraft engines and see how fast they could go. Frank Lockhart, who won the Indianapolis 500 as a rookie in 1926, convinced Indianapolis manufacturer Stutz to sponsor a speed attempt. The Stutz Blackhawk car was powered by two Miller 91 cubic inch engines. The car’s construction was flawed as the worm-gear axle drive would lock up when the driver lifted his foot off the accelerator at speed. They also installed a 40-gallon fuel tank in the tail of the car which weighed 300 pounds when full of fuel even though they only needed enough fuel to go ten miles. Lockhart made three attempts. The first was against the wind where he achieved a speed of 193.1 mph. On the second attempt with the wind at his back, he achieved a speed of 203.5 mph. On his third attempt, he got the car up to 225 at Ormond Beach when the car went into a series of flips killing Lockhart. The cause of the accident could have been the wind as the car’s center of gravity made it unstable in heavy wind.

Miller’s shop also designed marine engines. He sold both 122 and 91 for race boats and developed a 310 cubic inch engine for boat racing in larger classes. His 310 cubic inch engine powered Arron de Roys’ hydroplane Lady Helen II to victories in the Gold Cup and the President’s Cup races in 1926. IMS cofounder Carl Fisher had Miller convert one of the 91 cubic inch engines to marine use in 1926 and raced it on the Thames for the Duke of York Cup. Floating driftwood disabled Fisher’s Little Shadow, an 18-foot hydroplane.

He also tried to make passenger cars without success. He made the engine for the Leach automobile. In 1922, Leach announced a Power Plus model equipped with a 348 cubic inch six-cylinder engine. Unfortunately, vibrations from the six-cylinder engine broke the crankshafts within several months. The cost of replacing them drove the company towards insolvency.

Miller sold his company to the Schofield consortium in early 1929. Within two years, Schofield collapsed leaving Miller unpaid for a large portion of what was owed to him. Miller returned to Los Angeles and resumed construction of racing engines. Unfortunately, with the Great Depression and the Indianapolis 500 adopting what is called the “junk formula” in an attempt to attract automobile manufacturers back to the Speedway, the company could not survive and Miller filed for bankruptcy in 1933.

It was then that Miller left the business and Fred Offenhauser, who had not been paid for two years, took what equipment he could and began to build the Offenhauser racing engine which was basically a Miller engine with a different nameplate.

Miller left Los Angeles after his bankruptcy and picked up a variety of design jobs for various automobiles. The most intriguing was an engine design for Preston Tucker who wanted to enter ten cars in the Indianapolis 500. Beginning in March, they hurriedly assembled the racers and got them to the Speedway in time for the race. Four started the race but an issue with the steering boxes being close to the exhausts resulted in three of the four exiting by the 70^th lap. Ted Horn was able to nurse the fourth car until the 145^th lap where the steering froze when he had to pit.

One of his last successes was on the Bonneville Salt flats in 1940 where George Barringer set an international Class D record of 153.237 mph for 10 kilometers and 142.799 mph for 500 miles. The two cars were modified for the 1941 Indianapolis 500. George Barringer’s car was destroyed by fire on race day in the IMS garage. The other, driven by Al Miller, finished 28^th after his car experienced a broken transmission linkage.

With WW II approaching, Miller went to Detroit where he worked on small wartime subcontracts. It was there that Miller died. After having achieved great success in the 1920s, his final years were financially difficult.

This book is a quick overview of Miller’s life which is told through a two-page summation of a particular period which is then supplemented by multiple pictures and drawings with captions. The author, Gordon Eliot White, has been nominated twice for the Pulitzer Award in investigative reporting. He has written multiple books relating to auto racing and enjoys driving in vintage car events.