This Little Doggie Had the Bark and the Bite
When late-night bench racing gets around to comparing “weight freaks,” there’s never a shortage of nominees. Sorry, no contest: Not content to build the world’s lightest fuel dragster, Bud Morehouse found a 4-foot, 3-inch, 70-pound little person to drive it.
Full of fluids, this flyweight hit the scale at 720 pounds, plus driver. It was hauled to and from Southern California tracks in the bed of a pickup. At a time when drag-racing engines were cast iron, Morehouse went with a 215ci, all-aluminum Olds F-85 because the block weighed 65 pounds. Chassis tubing totals 40 pounds. The body weighs 10. A go-kart master cylinder feeds a tiny disc brake on one axle—only. Superlight spoke wheels are OEM Schwinn Stingray. Bud formed his own bellhousing, seat, and body panels from magnesium—exotic stuff in 1965. He converted five-lug rear axles and wheels to four. He replaced the standard outboard steering link, brackets, and rod ends with a German minicar’s tiny rack-and-pinion, then hacked off half the rack.
Twice at Lions, crosswinds pushed my opponent’s parachute into my lane and sent me flipping and tumbling through the shutdown area. Willie Borsch’s roadster got me once, then Barry Kaplan’s Junior Fueler. Bud and I went home, checked everything, and it was all fine, both times. The car was so light that it didn’t even bend.” — Karl Krohn
No weight freak worth his scales is ever completely satisfied, of course. Having drilled and chopped out every possible pound to get within a few hundredths of the magical 7-second zone, Bud reconsidered the “plus-driver” factor. That would be Karl Krohn, who’d steered since he helped Bud bend and weld the chromemoly chassis one Sunday in their pal Frank Huszar’s slingshot shop, Race Car Specialties. “I weighed all of 130 pounds, just out of the shower, soaking wet,” says Krohn, 77. “Bud said he knew a little guy running a four-banger rail. He wanted to see how quick we could go. I was all for it. Hell, yeah: Weight is horsepower! We’d drop 60 pounds, and all we had to do was move the pedals back.”
Sonny Rossi is 80 now, yet describes his one-day, fuel-dragster career in detail. “Those were the thinnest pedals I’d ever seen,” he recalls. “All there was between me and two spinning axles were little pads for my thighs. The owner was really, really weight-conscious. It was a squirrelly thing, hard to hold straight, because the rearend was locked. When it got even a little crossed up, the car shot sideways. I thought sure I was gonna turn it over on one pass. I think we ran close to 180, the fastest I ever went at the drags or Bonneville.”
The frame is so light, I could throw it over my shoulder and carry it everywhere. Those two guys never needed a trailer; they lifted the whole car into and out of their push truck.” — Ken Gillispie
Krohn adds, “Rossi got out of the car that day and told us, ‘I really don’t want anything to do with this.’ You had to really feel it to drive it because both wheels turned the same. If one tire grabbed and the other didn’t, it got real twitchy. Between runs, Sonny helped me pack the ’chute. I dropped the tie cord on the ground. So I told him to put his hands around the pack and hold in the ’chute. I leaned over, heard this loud ‘pop,’ and he went shooting backward. The pilot ’chute had struck his chest and knocked him on his ass!”
The “Underdog” eventually dipped into the 7s at 195 mph with Krohn back in the magnesium seat. Though his ride was built for Lions Drag Strip’s super-competitive Junior Fuel class and won more than its share against the heavier, more-powerful 301 Chevy rails that filled those 8- or 16-car fields, Karl’s greatest satisfaction came from upsetting supercharged dragsters. Some SoCal strips allowed unblown fuelers of any displacement to attempt qualifying for Top Gas and even Top Fuel, heads up. Any injected Chevy fortunate enough to make those shows without melting down typically became first-round fodder. Not the Underdog, which once went all the way to the Top Fuel final at its home track, then embarrassed a heavy favorite. “Harry Hibler was the San Fernando manager who wrote out the winners’ checks,” Krohn says. “When our turn came, Hibler said, ‘You two guys oughta be ashamed of yourselves, pickin’ on those poor little 480-inch blown Chryslers.'”
I think the car was so successful mostly because it didn’t make much torque. Tire technology was crap. The blown cars couldn’t hook up.” — Ken Gillispie
Krohn remembers running three seasons without a major engine failure. Meanwhile, Goodyear was discovering drag racing, and the resulting “tire wars” with M&H helped hook up the overpowered competition. “We were still keeping up without killing parts, but Bud felt we were on the ragged edge of doing that,” he explains. “Just about everything inside those motors was handmade; custom, one-off stuff that you couldn’t go out and buy, like you could Chevy or Chrysler parts. One night, he said it might be time to build a Chevy car, so we did. I never saw the Underdog again, never heard anything about it, for 40 years, until a friend called from Pomona to say my old car was on display at the 50th Winternationals [February 2010].”
Boxes of blown-up and worn-out parts, a blue paint job, and unfamiliar cockpit lettering suggest to restorer Ken Gillispie that someone else had at least attempted to race the old slingshot he saw hanging in rafters in Colton, California. “The owner had had it for at least 10 years, couldn’t remember the seller’s name, and had no idea what it was. Four little F-85 motors, in various stages of build, were pretty good clues. I started asking around. Roger Gates, who also ran dragsters at San Fernando, thought it might be Bud Morehouse’s car. When I came across a four-page article in Drag Racing magazine [Dec. 1966], I knew it was.
“This wasn’t hard to restore,” he adds. “Most of the parts were there. I build complete race cars and hot rods [GetSumRacing in Chino Hills, California], so this one was pretty simple: a motor with a clutch connected to a can to direct drive to a rearend. Figuring out Bud’s engine combination was harder. I had enough pieces to know that he used a welded steel crank and 327 Chevy Mickey Thompson aluminum rods. I had to figure out rings and pistons. Driveshafts for the two oil pumps were missing. Before I made replacements, I had to determine ratios that neither overdrove nor underdrove the pumps. The easiest thing was replacing the worn-out rocker shafts. After I called around and failed to find any old stock, I took a shot and tried Range Rover, which still used the engine in 1999. I told them the model year and, sure enough, they bolted right on! The hardest things to get were brake parts. I finally found an Airheart rebuild kit for go-karts, and paid dearly.”
Not until completing the three-month restoration did Gillispie accept the reality that he had no space and no good use for the Underdog. “My wife and I each had two nostalgia race cars at the time, and I didn’t want to risk cackling that motor. I built it to run on 80-percent and planned to at least push-start her once, but she’d never run a clutch car and wasn’t enthusiastic. We hauled it to a few shows. I wanted people to see it and learn the history, which I think is significant. I considered a long-term loan to a local museum until I heard too many horror stories about people having trouble getting cars back, or getting charged for storing them. We finally decided to put it up on eBay, hoping the car would go to someone who’d share it.”
Enter current caretaker Brian Jaeger, 63, a veteran dirt-track and drag racer who still owns his first car, a 409/409 1962 Biscayne, among other fast toys. “My wife, Tina, and I collect vintage race cars,” he told HRM. “I love driving them, but, boy, I don’t know if I’d go as fast as Karl Krohn did. Guys like that had a little more courage than I did. What really intrigued me was the motor combination. Bud Morehouse didn’t just get on the phone and order this and that; he had to design and build this stuff with his own hands, for wide-open racing. It needs to be saved. We take the car to as many shows as we can. It’s so light that I can pick up the front end and walk it right up onto the trailer. I’d love to hear it run, but Ken warned me that probably half the engine parts could not be replaced. We met in Denver to make the deal. The last thing he said was, ‘Please don’t race it.’ Tell him not to worry. The car has a good, safe home here, with in-floor heat and dehumidifiers.”
So we know the story has a happy ending. As for when, why, and to whom Bud Morehouse sold his tiny terror a half-century ago, and where it’s been, nobody knows. Each person interviewed for this article expressed regret that so many mysteries went to the grave with the builder—or did they? Now that the Underdog has resurfaced in HOT ROD, there’s new hope that someone who knows the rest of the story will share it with fellow readers.
The post Rescued From a Shop’s Rafters, the World’s Lightest Fuel Dragster Is Back! Meet the “Underdog” appeared first on Hot Rod Network.