Hole-y Automobiles!
Jun. 26th, 2015 07:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tbutler
Back in 1904, there was this race, the Vanderbilt Cup. And Carl Fisher, the (future) founder of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, decided to compete.
He ordered this car, the Premier Special. And it was a monster (just look at the size of that engine!). Unfortunately, someone missed the weight restrictions for the race, and the car came in overweight. By some 300 pounds.
There really wasn't that much that could be removed. So they started drilling holes in the chassis. As many as they could.
And it was still overweight.
So the car never ran in the race it was designed for. But it's still impressive!
(I remember first reading about this car when I was 7 or 8 years old, in one of those Scholastic book club readers. It was very cool to finally see it in person at the Indy 500 museum!)
no subject
Date: 2015-06-27 03:58 am (UTC)I'm somewhat reminded of the rather hair-raising stories of, what is it, handicapping in Thoroughbred racing, where (if I'm remembering it correctly--it's been a long time since I read about this stuff) you want the jockey to be as close to the allowed weight as possible, and as little of the weight put on the horse to be "dead" weights. Now I'm having morbid thoughts of drilling holes in jockeys, yikes.