Prewar sprint car, built by racing legend Floyd “Pop” Dreyer, comes to ACD Museum

By the late 1930s, those wanting to win sprint car races at Midwest tracks often turned to Indianapolis race car constructor Floyd “Pop” Dreyer, who seemed to have a way with all things mechanical. Despite their popularity, few prewar Dreyer-built cars remain today, as most, like other period racing cars, were cast aside when no longer competitive. Following an extensive restoration, a 1938 Dreyer-built sprint car will temporarily reside at the Auburn Cord Duesenberg Museum in Auburn, Indiana, giving visitors a glimpse into the region’s prewar racing history.

Dreyer’s path to race car constructor was a convoluted one that began on a Chillicothe, Ohio, farm in 1898. From his childhood, he showed uncanny mechanical aptitude, repairing tractors and machinery with a skill that belied his age. When an older brother brought home a motorcycle, a teenage Dreyer quickly took to riding and wrenching on this as well, which soon landed him a job at a Youngstown, Ohio motorcycle dealership.

There, Dreyer began a decade-long career as a motorcycle sidecar racer, and his skill earned him sponsorship from sidecar constructor Flxible, and later, motorcycle manufacturer Indian. In 1921, a high-speed crash claimed the life of Dreyer’s sidecar rider, Jeff Mapes, and within a year Dreyer himself was critically injured in another crash. After recovering from a broken back, Dreyer returned to racing in 1923, but his drive to win was never the same, so at age 25 he walked away from the sport to face an uncertain future.

By 1926, Dreyer had had enough of his native Ohio and set off for new opportunities in Oklahoma. His savings got him as far as Indianapolis before he ran out of money, and there he found work as a welder. Later, he’d join the Duesenberg Motor Company, also as a welder, before moving on to Stutz, another fabled Indianapolis automotive brand.

In his spare time, Dreyer began building gasoline-powered kiddie cars, and when Shirley Temple was filmed in one of his “Dreyerettes,” the resulting exposure led to a temporary boom in business, giving him a small cushion with which to weather the Great Depression.

Dreyer turned to building race cars as well, and in 1931 could claim that he’d crafted the bodies of the three cars on the front row of the Indianapolis 500. Constructing everything from midget cars through sprint cars, Dreyer soon earned a reputation for innovation, adding headrests for driver safety to his sprint car bodies, experimenting with magnesium to produce strong but lightweight wheels and even developing an overhead valve conversion for Ford engines.

Circa 1938, Dreyer built the #22 Sprint car displayed at the Auburn Cord Duesenberg Museum for client Dr. Mark E. Bowles. Initially, power came from a modified Hispano-Suiza aircraft engine, essentially cut in half to modify the V-8 to an inline four. The configuration proved popular and remained competitive into the 1950s, thanks to ongoing development.

Clay Corbitt, the driver tasked with piloting #22 for Bowles, was also mechanically adept. Familiar with the Hispano-Suiza four (called Hissos by the men who built and raced them), Corbitt developed a two-port exhaust system for the engine that increased power at the expense of added heat. His accomplishments behind the wheel of #22 aren’t clear, but the story arc of his life is: on June 22, 1947, at the newly-opened Salem Speedway in Salem, Indiana, Corbitt lost his life in a lap one, turn one crash that sent him over the track’s retaining wall.

The precise competition history of #22 is murky as well, though period photos confirm it was raced into the 1939 season (and possibly later), originally in the light yellow livery it wears today. As acquired by current owner Jim Kruse, the Dreyer car wore red paint and no longer carried the Hisso engine, but instead was powered by a Ford B Block with a HAL conversion.

HAL offered a variety of configurations for the B Block, but this conversion was top-shelf, complete with a new cylinder head carrying dual overhead camshafts, a pair of single-barrel Winfield carburetors atop the engine instead of beside it, and a balanced crankshaft. Despite a displacement of just 200 inches, the engine was said to produce in the neighborhood of 250 horsepower.

During #22’s restoration, a return to Hisso power was considered but rejected for reasons of cost and practicality. Surviving Hisso engines are rare, and the car had been extensively modified to accommodate the later B Block, meaning that a conversion back to its original form would have required extensive re-modification. As the car most likely had a competition history with the existing Ford engine, retaining it was potentially more authentic than replacing it.

As for Pop Dreyer, he’d go on to achieve success in a variety of other endeavors, too. After manufacturing aircraft engine manifolds for Allison during WWII, he’d open a BMW motorcycle dealership in Indianapolis in 1953, adding an upstart Japanese brand, Honda, in 1959 (Dreyer Motorsports remains in business today, and is still family owned). In 1968, the family branched out to selling BMW automobiles, eventually opening a string of Dreyer & Reinbold dealerships covering a variety of automotive brands.

Pop Dreyer died in February of 1989, but his impact on the sport of racing, and racing at Indianapolis, won’t soon be forgotten. An inductee into the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America, the AMA Motorcycle Hall of Fame and the National Sprint Car Hall of Fame, Dreyer was further honored in 1999, when grandson Dennis Reinbold and business partner Eric De Bord founded Dreyer & Reinbold Racing. Since 2000, the team has fielded a car (or in some cases, cars) in every Indianapolis 500, a fitting tribute to a man who contributed so much to the sport of racing in the state of Indiana.

The 1938 Dreyer sprint car will remain on display at the Auburn Cord Duesenberg Museum until mid-2018. For additional details on the museum, visit AutomobileMuseum.org.

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