In his book Offenhauser, Gordon Eliot White covers the fifty plus year history of auto racing from the perspective of the engines built by Harry Miller, Offenhauser, Meyer & Drake, and Drake Engineering. It has not only the engines made for Championship racing including the Indianapolis 500 but also for midgets and sprint race cars.
Harry Miller was the genius behind the Miller engine which dominated auto racing in the 1920s. When he went bankrupt in 1933, Fred Offenhauser, who had not been paid in two years, after paying $800 took what he could and brought the business back to life. It was Fred Offenhauser who took the Miller engine to its success. While he could have changed the name of the engine to “Offenhauser” he just kept the “Miller” name until he started to make the engines for the midgets in 1934. The first Offenhauser midget engine was designed as a 97 cubic inch based on half of the 181.8 cubic inch of Harry Hartz’s straight eight 1932 Indianapolis 500 winner.
Offenhauser had two engines in the 1935 Indianapolis 500 and they dominated the field. Kelly Petillo finished first and Wilbur Shaw finished second. The next year, there were nine Offy’s which qualified for the race. The race was won by Lou Meyer with an Offy under the hood. In 1940, Offenhauser started doing military work for Lockheed Corporation. Work on the Offenhauser engine stopped shortly after the 1941 Indianapolis 500. Offenhauser had powered seven out of the fifteen 100-mile championship dirt track races run between 1935 and 1941. At Indianapolis, 94 percent of the cars entered had qualified.
When Offenhauser decided to retire after steering the company through the challenges of WW II when it worked on defense projects, he sold the business to Lou Meyer & Dale Drake who took the engine to its greatest heights. In the 1950s and 1960, entire fields at Indy were powered by Offy engines. On the Championship Trail, 100-mile contests run chiefly on dirt tracks, the 270 and 255 Offys won every race except for two during the 17 years between October 1946 and August 1963.
What is remarkable is the record Meyer & Drake had with the engine. Over the 34 years that Meyer & Drake, and then Drake built Offys, the engine powered the winning car for eighteen consecutive races including the three year stint where Lou Moore’s Blue Crown cars won. With the Offy powering the cars, most of the innovations were to the chassis.
The Meyer & Drake partnership ended after Lou Meyer approached Ford Motor Company to buy them out in 1962. When Ford established their racing program in 1965, they hired Lou Meyer to run it. In 1969, Dale Drake bought out Lou Meyer’s interest in the company and established Drake Engineering & Sales.
After the 1964 Sachs-MacDonald crash on the opening lap of the Indianapolis 500 caused a change in the racing rules, Dale Drake responded by building a turbo engine which appeared at the Speedway in 1966 but it had difficulty competing with the V-8 engines. The company had one more string of victories including Mark Donohue’s 1972 victory. In that race, the Offy engine finished in the top five slots. The Offy streak continued for five victories (1972 until 1976).
The first Cosworth engine arrived at Indianapolis in 1975. While it didn’t make the field that year, the Cosworth engine was competitive by 1977. The Offy couldn’t effectively compete after rules changes required greater fuel efficiency. After the 1976 victory, John Drake, Dale’s son who was managing the company after his father’s untimely death in 1972, focused on developing a V-8 engine which could be competitive. They didn’t have the money to develop the new engine and the company was shuttered in 1979.
This book is a good read. White provides insight into the personalities of various racing characters throughout the fifty plus year reign of the Offy. For those engineers, there are technical discussions about various engines interspersed but for the casual reader, they can be quickly scanned without losing the overarching story of the Miller/Offenhauser engine.
Gordon Eliot White has been twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting and has written multiple auto racing books. In addition, he set the International FIA 2-Liter FIA speed record at 153.445 mph in 1989 and the US midget record of 156.902 mph in 1988 set in his Offenhauser powered Kurtis-Kraft racing car.