Sounds like a great project to me! Here in Australia we can race in such cars so long as they use only pre-war parts & technology and represent a car or group of cars that ran in the preiod. It is called Group K and has resulted in the construction/preservation of many prewar 'specials' including the 1927 Amilcar/Willys special that I race and my fathers S/C Willys special.

39Super8,

If you could send me/ PM some details I might be interested - although the cost of arranging pickup and freight to Australia is likely to be prohibitive - especially when this is the sort of work that my family does already...

Thanks very much for the lead though.

I am imagining that in a couple of years you and I will have to get together to compare notes - although my brief is a little different/specific and along the lines of "If Packard had built a car for the 1935 Grand Prix season..."

There is no way I can afford to cast an engine block in alloy or such things, but the supercharged straight 8 was the choice of many European teams at the time so...

I'll second that Eric! I have spent some time on the web and not yet found any engine shots of the 122. I would think that since there is only really the press photos left and the company would not have been giving too much away at the time, there is only a limited chance that we might see any. As you say it is a terrible shame - especially when you consdier that one of the cars qualified on the front row of the grid. What might have happened had Packard had more patience or the team not run out of time?

Well Happy Birthday for whenever it was Eric!

For the record I was 5 1/2 years old and this week of that year I would have been running around the pits at a Historic race car meeting. It was probably 40degC in the shade and I would have been covered in a thin coating of engine oil and dust and nostrils filled with the scent of Shell 'Racing A' methanol fuel as I raced from pit to pit helping who ever I could between watching my old man race. Having a ball!

Funny, but if they hadn't closed down Amaroo Park Raceway I would probably be doing exactly the same thing again now...

"THE OLDER I GET THE BETTER I WAS."

The smaller race car (on the left in the photo of two cars) is, I believe, the Packard 122, built by a Packard engineering team that included Robert De Palmer for the 1923 Indy race. As I recall the team of 3 cars qualified well but then failed early during the race due largely to very limited development and testing time available because of holdups in the project.

I understand that after the race Packard were so disillusioned by the results that they canned the project and destroyed all their records. Now all that remains is a collection of press reports & photos.

There is quite a lot of info on this car available on the web if you do a search and the link below is a good one to start with.

http://www.king-of-the-boards.com/Packard%20International%20DePalma%20and%20Packard.pdf

We will have to stay in touch as I am also planning a 1930s 'speedster' project.

All the best.

Matt.

It's hard to say without more information, but this 'could' be a genuine car. If you accept that it was used in Europe during the 1930's, then ongoing development in that part of the world could have created a car of this style. You have to remember that GP rules of that era varied a great deal and that this was the period that cars such as the Alfa P2s and P3s were at the pointy end of European racing and other cars such as the early Merc W series racers and the legendary rear engined V16 Auto Unions were being developed. In fact the features that I see on this car would have been considered quite 'low tech' even in the mid 1930s.

So no - it is definitly not a car of the mid to late teens, but it could be one that started life in this period and evolved into what we see here.

Having said all this though, I thought that the quote credited to one of the cars restorers that read something like "we knew there was a race car under there somewhere" does make it sound like they were desperate to create something that they already had in mind. That is, of course, something that none of us can know for sure unless someone has the documentation to prove the provenance of this car or otherwise.

I would love to see it's full history, but none of my searches thus far have revealed anything other than the sales pitch we have already seen.

I have seen some of Turbopackmans posts and plan to chat with him when I have some more details together - especially since there is likely to be a supercharger involved.

Thank you for the clarification Rusty, although I did understand what you meant in your original post.

I take it that the 'junk formula' (which I may have mistakenly assumed refered to production or salon type cars) was what Oldfield ran his V16 Marmon engined special under in 1937. I believe this was a car he built himself and was largely inspired by the Auto Unions that had been run by the German team in the US in '35 or '36.

But never mind - I intend to run with this project regardless and hope you will all be around to offer your advice. I am very glad that I have found this forum - the attitude and knowledge I have seen here are amongst the best I have found on the net, and you can all be justifiably proud of your involvment in it.

Cheers

Matt Snape

Thank you Rusty - that does explain a few things, although I have picked up on another post today about a racer built in Argentina -
https://packardinfo.com/xoops/html/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=4233&forum=1

This is the sort of info I was after so I hope it leads somewhere.

Mal, I hope to see you guys at Wades next week - although the work schedule is starting to build up again...

Thanks all,

Matt Snape