The decade of the 1960s was one of dramatic experimentation and transformation for the classic 500-mile race at Indianapolis. It witnessed the changeover to rear-engined cars, the surge of turbine power, spectacular tire improvements, and the triumph of turbocharging. Four-wheel drive was another feature of new cars both successful and less so. None was more adventurous than Albert H. Stein’s Porsche-powered 1966 entry.
In fact Stein’s creation had both Porsche and Indy credentials. Its drive principle was the same as that exploited by Lou Fageol at the Speedway 20 years earlier and subsequently in his twin-engined sports cars. Al Stein powered his racer with two air-cooled Porsche sixes, each driving the pair of wheels at its end of the car.
Mechanically precocious Californian machinist Al Stein grounded his motorsports experience in the new and exciting sport of midget racing on the quarter-mile oval tracks of his native state. He and his home-built midget were on track and racing in the first-ever event of the Midget Racing Association at Sacramento on June 4th, 1933. Then just 20, Stein found his metier as both builder and driver of midgets, winning the Northern California Championship three years running from 1935. Crewing his racer were fellow East Bay residents Richie Lukes and Harry Shorman.
Speed-demon Stein inevitably came into the orbit of a like-minded Oakland-area enthusiast, Lou Fageol. “Al and Lou were very close friends,” recalled Al’s wife Patricia, “always talking to each other.” Wielding vastly greater resources, Lou was first of the pair to make it to the 500-mile race at Indianapolis with his twin-engined car of 1946. Stein would later date the beginning of his Indy obsession to the early 1950s, an indication that it was Fageol’s twin-Porsche sports cars that started him thinking about a similar configuration for the Speedway.
When Stein began mulling his mission to Indiana, his thoughts were concentrated on a pair of Porsche’s air-cooled fours like those used by Fageol in his sports cars. Two of these at 1.5 liters would fit like a glove in the Speedway’s 3.0-liter class for supercharged cars. Using Fageol’s supercharging techniques would generate the kind of horsepower that would thrust Stein’s special into the select 33-car starting field.
As Stein’s scheme progressed Indy’s rulers moved the goalposts. For the 1957 race they reduced allowable engine sizes to 2.8 liters supercharged and 4.2 liters naturally aspirated. At 1.4 liters the pushrod Porsche engines could still do the job with forced induction. The outlook would be even better if a pair of four-cam Type 547 fours could be sourced and suitably downsized, but this would challenge Stein’s modest budget.
New perspectives opened in the autumn of 1963 with the revelation that Porsche would soon produce a new model with a 2.0-liter six-cylinder engine. This could be made bigger, not smaller, for two of these air-cooled engines to compete in the unsupercharged 4.2-liter class. Although Porsche’s declared output of 130 horsepower at 6,100 rpm was far from competitive—around 400 horses would be needed—the overhead-cam six was obviously capable of higher power.
Al Stein, on the right, and his team were all smiles at the completion of the car.
Thanks to the intervention of Fred Ernst, shop foreman at San Rafael’s Johnson Pacific VW dealership, Stein could check out the latest Porsche power unit. The two men measured the engine in a factory-fresh 911. Deciding that this was the way to go, Stein acquired three of the early 911 sixes and their transaxles through Ernst’s brother in Germany. Fred Ernst would provide useful advice and assistance to the project.
Stein had just the allies he needed to wring more power from a pair of Porsches. Finding that they had both gravitated toward Zuffenhausen machinery, Richie Lukes and Harry Shorman teamed up at the end of the 1950s to form Lukes and Shorman to prepare the popular Porsche Speedsters for racing. L&S modifications included lowering front ends, modifying carburetors, camshafts, valves and other engine components, altering gearbox ratios, improving brakes, and stiffening anti-roll bars and shocks. Two L&S-sponsored drivers, Walt Maas and Walt Benson, won numerous races and championships.
In fact only Harry Shorman was running L&S because Richie Lukes left the company after a year or so, albeit still keeping in touch as an advisor to Harry and later his son Bill. Harry had the same task that Porsche was addressing in 1965, bringing the 911 engine up to more than 200 horses for racing. Heinz Hamster and Tom Manning were among those at L&S who assisted with preparation of the engines.
Stein and Shorman planned an increase in cylinder bore to get the 2.0-liter sixes closer to the 2.1 liters allowed by the 4.2-liter limit, but accounts are unclear as to whether this exacting task was actually carried out. One testament says that the cylinders were “overbored” to suit forged pistons that brought the compression ratio to 11.5:1 to suit the use of methanol fuel.
Ignition was converted to Mallory Mini-Mag systems while carburetion was by 48 mm (1.9 in.) twin-throat Webers like those used on big Maseratis and early racing Cobras—a total of eight for the car. This left one throat at liberty on each bank, unavoidable because Porsche’s bespoke triple-throat Webers were unavailable to Stein. Simple boxes were fitted above them to give ram-air pressure at speed. In case of emergency the front engine could be shut down by a solenoid valve triggered from a steering-wheel kill button.
Special camshafts were essential to extending the Porsche’s rev range to gain power. This proved a major challenge. Possibly apocryphal was the report that racing cams ordered from Ed Iskenderian had to be put aside because he had overlooked that the Porsche’s cams rotated in opposite directions. In fact they don’t, but as viewed from the anti-clutch end, the “front” in a normal car, the crankshaft and cams do turn counter-clockwise instead of the usual clockwise. This could have disoriented Isky.
Departing from the layouts used by Porsche and Fageol, Al Stein elected to place both engines forward of the wheels they drove. To achieve this he turned their transaxles upside-down, which had the effect of placing the ring gear on the other side of the pinion to restore forward drive. Although Lukes and Shorman suggested using lighter Halibrand transaxles, Stein remained loyal to Porsche original equipment, which in its upended state set the engines lower in the chassis. Fred Ernst worked out the knotty shift linkage between the transmissions.
The engines sat ahead of their wheels with transaxles inverted to provide correct wheel rotation.
Knitting the Twin Special together was a tubular-steel space frame built by San Rafael’s experienced Joe Huffaker. Stein arrived at his shop, Joe told David Colman, “with everything laid out in line form. We just did the final drawings and worked from those.” “Huffaker had worked for Stein when Joe first came to California from Indiana in 1949,” Colman explained. “He respected Stein’s savvy as a tool and die maker, race driver, and car preparer.”
“It was sort of a work in progress,” Huffaker said of Stein’s project. “I was preparing our own MG Liquid Suspension Specials for Indy and had to squeeze in working on Al’s project at the same time. I was a bit puzzled by the logic of his project but there is no question that his design was certainly different.” Taking the chassis back to his workshop in Orinda, Stein set about making it into a car.
Suspension at all four corners was traditional racing-car parallel-wishbone style with concentric dampers and coil springs plus adjustable anti-roll bars. Drive to the front wheels was carried through uprights and hubs from a Lancia-built 4×4 vehicle, as recommended by Fred Ernst instead of the DKW parts originally envisioned by Stein. Fuel tankage was athwart the driver, both inside and outside the longitudinal frame trusses. Huffaker’s Genie four-spoke aluminum wheels carried 11.90 × 15 Firestone Indy tires, narrower than the usual Speedway rubber in view of the car’s more balanced drive loadings.
“We have an advantage,” Stein explained, “that the Fords have to put 250 horsepower through each rear tire while we can spread our 440 into four tires, all working. With narrower tires, less wind resistance and four-wheel drive, we should be the fastest car through the turns.” His engine builders told Stein that each six should develop at least 210 hp.
As for “less wind resistance”, Stein’s concept envisioned a low profile for his racer thanks to the flat-opposed Porsche sixes. In essence this was achieved in the body built for him by Albany, California’s Leo Titone and Bob Feehan, although an anomaly was its front-end air scoop, surely an augmenter of drag. As well the layout left little room for the driver, whose erect position behind a tall windscreen contrasted with the ultra-low seating of the latest mid-engined cars as pioneered by Lotus. A general lumpiness of the result hinted at many drag inducers degrading the benefit of the car’s low profile.
First impressions were positive when the unpainted Stein creation was taken to Vaca Valley Raceway, near Vacaville, for a shakedown on its 1.25-mile oval track early in April 1966. Contracted by Stein to pilot his creation was Bill Cheesbourg, an Indy veteran who first competed at the Speedway in 1957. Previously the Tucson, Arizona resident piloted both generic Offy-powered roadsters and such exotics as the supercharged Novis. He achieved only erratic results in the 500-mile race.
Reaching 140 mph on the Vaca Valley track, Cheesebourg was satisfied with the car’s handling. However he and Stein both felt that more horsepower was required. The answer, Stein felt, lay in better camshafts—with only a couple of weeks remaining before practice began at Indianapolis at the beginning of May.
A rear view of the Twin Special showed the design and construction talents of Joe Huffaker. Its carburetors were not yet fitted with air-ramming forward-facing scoops.
Camshaft creation, which Stein outsourced to Lukes and Shorman, became nightmarish. Having urged his pattern maker to abandon plans for a holiday to create patterns for new camshaft castings, Harry Shorman suffered a report from the foundry that a shift in the molds meant that the castings were unusable. In a rush, Shorman asked specialists Weber Engineering to add metal to the original Porsche camshafts and give them a more radical grind.
Air-freighted from California, the Stein machine arrived at the Speedway on Sunday, May 8th, a week after the early birds had made their appearance. This left only four days of running before Friday, the first day of qualifying. With Tuesday rained out, the twin-Porsche’s first day on the track was Wednesday.
“The chassis seemed good,” recalled crewman Tom Manning. “The hydraulic throttle worked well and Cheesbourg liked the way the car handled. The complicated shift linkage wasn’t very good so it would jump out of gear—and we had constant problems with the engines.”
At the Speedway the Weberized camshafts were installed under the direction of crew chief Welton “Skeets” Jones. “The lobes began to break up almost immediately,” Manning recalled. “They were a disaster.” To add to the injury the resulting debris circulated through both engines because Stein, against some advice, had installed a single reservoir serving the dry-sump lubrication systems of both engines.
The net effect was that the sixes achieved no more than 7,500 useful revolutions at the Speedway. Output was boosted by the addition of 60 percent nitromethane to the methanol fuel. Although the engines were dynamometer-tested by Tom Manning and reportedly by Champion Spark Plug at their Long Beach facility, their actual output at Indy is open to speculation.
Although much was later made of the effect of the Twin Special’s putative high drag on its performance at the Speedway, where it showed little in the way of speed on the straights, odds are high that lack of power from the Porsche sixes was more to blame. In fact only the Eagles, Brabhams, Lotuses and their imitators of that era achieved much in the way of low-drag design.
Cheesbourg and the Valvoline Twin Special made few runs during the week before the second qualifying weekend. The disintegrating camshafts robbed the team of vital time on the track. The driver switched to another radical mount, Norm Demler’s with a GE turbine in a roadster chassis. Although its speed of a reported 260 mph on the straights contrasted with at least 100 mph less for Al Stein’s creation, that car too failed to make the starting lineup.
A low, ground-hugging profile was the goal, but the big front air scoop contributed to drag.
The twin-Porsche was wizard in the four turns, said Cheesbourg: “We had the fastest cornering speed of the meet. I could run through the turns flat-footed.” This fully validated Stein’s concept, which combined the high polar moment of inertia given by its widely disposed engines with a low center of gravity and four-wheel drive, a harbinger of things to come in the turbine-powered cars of 1967.
The weight aspect of the unique car’s power/weight ratio was also disadvantageous. One citation of “a bit over 2,000 pounds” would mean that the Stein car was carrying several hundred pounds more than the usual Speedway racers. The Twin Special “was unnecessarily heavy in lots of places” according to Tom Manning. The duplicated production-car transaxles were just one example.
Contrary to reports that the Valvoline-sponsored Twin Special “didn’t qualify” in 1966, no attempt to qualify it was made. Its best time just broke the one-minute barrier at 59.3 seconds. This would have been a big deal in 1962, when Parnelli Jones made history by being the first to qualify with four laps at less than a minute apiece for an average better than 150 mph, but by 1966 the field’s slowest qualifier averaged 56.6 seconds per lap for 159.01 mph. The average speed for 1966’s 33-car field was 160.251 mph.
In Al Stein’s favor is that this result was no embarrassment for a radical new concept at the Speedway. Some 22 entries failed to make the race that year, including one of two new cars built expressly for Indy along the latest lines by Joe Huffaker. Stein’s car foreshadowed
interest in four-wheel drive that flourished in 1967 through 1969. Indeed, Bill Cheesbourg tried to interest Al Stein and Norm Demler in joining forces to field a 4×4 turbine in 1967 but both declined, citing exhausted resources after their unrewarding 1966.
Stein was a year or two early. Had his dream machine been targeted at 1967 he could have obtained a brace of fuel-injected 901/21 Carrera 6 engines. These would have given him a total of 440 hp at 8,100 rpm on gasoline. Recalibrated to run on methanol and with a tip of the nitro can it would have had much more power for qualifying at some expense of fuel economy. The sixes would have run reliably throughout the month of May, giving Stein and his team the time they needed to lighten the vehicle and improve its aerodynamics—time that was stolen from them in 1966 by their last-minute struggles over camshafts.
The Valvoline Twin Special made one more appearance in 1966 on the weekend of November 19-20. This was the final USAC race of the year, the Bobby Ball Memorial 200 Miles on the one-mile oval at Phoenix, Arizona. Don Meacham and Bill Cheesbourg are listed as its pilots during practice but—contrary to some reports—there is no indication that it competed in the race.
“Al didn’t put much work into it before Phoenix,” said crewman Byron Feldhaker. “He did it mainly as a tax write-off.” Contrasting with this is the report that Al Stein took the car back to Vaca Valley for pre-Phoenix testing, taking the wheel himself.
The sordid aftermath of the 1966 Indy effort was a welter of suits among Stein and Lukes and Shorman over the camshaft-regrind fiasco and the reluctance of Stein to pay for same. Some evidence shows that Al Stein had recognized the shortcomings of his car’s body and had fashioned a less-windcatching nosepiece. This was never to be tried for Stein let his twin-Porsche brainchild languish in his Orinda, California garage. He died in 1980. The car was eventually dismantled and sold for parts. Pieces of the aluminum bodywork can still be found in race shops across Southern California.
