Thread: Some days are just golden!!!

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Some days just turn out great!

I’ve got a neighbor who’s got a really great gig. He’s an expat Kiwi who runs a sports racer fabrication/repair shop out of his home garage. As such, he’s well connected with the more well to do crowd that tends to frequent vintage road racing circles. His name is Tony.

So yesterday I stop by to see how he’s getting along and shoot the bull with him briefly. He’s not much into hot rods per se, but I’ve had him do some machine work and TIG welding for me from time to time so he knows we share a love of fun cars. Our conversations seem to be rapid fire, and bounce around a might. Somehow my mentioning quick change rears led the conversation to Ardun heads (go figure!) I started to tell him that one of my wife’s former clients had a really neat MG TC with a V8-60 engine wearing Ardun heads. Almost simultaneously we say the (now deceased) owner’s name. Pat _____. Turns out Tony used to maintain Pat’s fleet of British and Italian cars.

The first time I met Pat was when he invited us, along with about 100 of his business associates, to the grand opening of his combination business office/auto collection museum. I was probably the only car guy guest there, the rest being into silly things like boats, art, horses, and so on. So I’m standing there absolutely frozen looking at this MG TC and the Ardun when Pat, being the good host, circulates by and asks if I’m enjoying looking at the cars. I blurt out something or other about never having seen V8 60 Ardun heads, only having ever heard stories about their existence. He says “Oh, you know what you’re looking at!”, which is to say he was surprised to find someone at that kind of event who was into old hot rod stuff. He gave me a brief story of how he’d bought and raced the car with a flathead V8 60 in the early ‘50s down in California, and then sold it only to buy it back in the ‘70s and have it rebuilt with the Ardun heads and some other improvements, and he’d had it in his collection since. Then he says, “Come on, I’ve got something else to show you.”. We walk on back to a storage room, and there, down on a bottom shelf, in a wooden crate, is……..yup, another pair of unused V8 60 Arduns! Holy cow, from never seeing any in person to seeing TWO sets in one day! He says, to his knowledge, there were only 21 sets made, and that several vintage engine guys had been after him for years to sell the boxed set……yes, including ol’ Speedy Bill.

So back to my neighbor Tony. I’m lamenting to him that I’d lost track of the car when Pat died a couple years after our first encounter and Tony gets that big grin on his face. He says, “Well, I do work for his son Bill who still has the car, in fact I’ll be working at his garage/museum tomorrow if you want to come by.”. I’m thinking, “IF….IF…?? Hell yes!!!” So off I went this morning with camera in hand.

This car has a fabulous history and has been worked by many of the notables in Southern California hot rod history. It was originally built for a So. Cal. Real estate developer in 1948, with the flathead version V8 60, by a couple guys you may have heard of. Doane Spencer and Alex Xydias. That owner raced the airfield road courses of the day with a hired driver until he sold the car to Pat in 1952. Pat, in turn, did some road racing of his own as well as employing the same driver until he sold the car in 1955 to concentrate on building his business. In 1976 Pat repurchased the car and spent the next 7 years bringing it to its current state with the Ardun heads and many other upgrades. Along with the work he did himself he hired out other aspects of the build to another group of folks you may recognize: Dean Moon, Fred Larsen, Dick Kraft, and Hill & Vaughan. The intake system, along with the front drive on the engine were the direct handy work of Fred Larsen of Larsen & Cummins fame.

The car was last publicly displayed at the Seattle Roadster Show in 2004, and now sits in a warm and comfy garage with a number of racing and street driven cars of British, German, and Italian ancestry. These are not trailered wall flowers. They all get driven from time to time by a loving owner who likes to drive, not just show. They were recently at some historical race in Portland with some of the racing cars in the fleet and used one of the other cars in the collection as what they refer to as a “parts chaser”. That one being a customized AC Aceca coupe with Paxton supercharged SBF. Yeah, these boys know how to have fun!!

Enjoy the pictures.