Lot 1011: 1933 Dreyer Taper Tail Roadster

Floyd H. “Pop” Dreyer was one of the legendary racing figures of the first half of the 20th Century. A champion motorcycle racer, he became one of the foremost mechanics and fabricators of the Thirties and Forties.
This was an era when self-taught designers, fabricators and engine builders dominated the automobile’s development. They provided the innovation which took the automobile from being a crude toy for the rich to being the transportation tool for the masses. The creations of Floyd Dreyer, Fred and Augie Duesenberg, Harry Miller and a handful of others like them entertained millions with their amazing performance, mesmerized both spectators and racers with their meticulous craftsmanship and opened new avenues for exploitation of their innovative approach to solving problems of handling, power and reliability.

Being primarily racers their original work was cannibalized, modified, re-engined, wrecked and rebuilt. Examples of their craft rarely survives in any form, even less largely intact and as-built by these intuitive masters of form and function. One that does survive is the 1933 Dreyer-Ford Roadster built for Gilbert Pirrung.
Floyd Dreyer was born in 1898 in Chillicothe, Ohio, the fourth of Otto and Katherine Dreyer’s six children. Floyd was more interested in practical things than schoolwork and soon fell for the allure of motorcycles. Something of a daredevil, he followed his fascination to become Indian Motorcycle’s top factory rider in the ‘Teens, excelling at racing with Indians and the difficult tilting Flxible sidecar. Through 1923 he held nine of fourteen national FAM/AMA sidecar motorcycle records including sweeping all four records for 1- through 25-miles on 1-mile tracks, but retired at the end of the 1923 season after a near-accident at Syracuse followed a late 1922 accident in which he broke three vertebra.

The following years were trying as the post-WWI recession and rise of the automobile crushed the motorcycle business. 1925 found Dreyer in Indianapolis where he worked at Duesenberg as a fabricator with Herman Rigling, then in the winter of 1927-28 he found a position alongside fabricator Myron Stevens at Stutz working on Frank Lockhart’s Stutz Blackhawk Land Speed Record machine while working weekends fabricating exhaust manifolds for the Chevrolet brothers’ Frontenac overhead valve 4-cylinder Ford conversions and for Riley Brett.

Dreyer’s burgeoning skill brought recognition among racers. His first complete body was completed in the winter of 1927-28 for Jack Gallivan, later perfecting his signature rounded-front frame design and transferring his skills from steel to lightweight aluminum. But at heart Floyd Dreyer was an engine man. Like so many early motorcycle racers he was attuned to the simplicity of light weight driven by the last scintilla of horsepower. He saw the success of the Chevrolets’ Frontenac heads, the sohc Hispano Suiza fours and the elegant designs of Harry Miller. In 1930 he began working, slowly and frugally, on his own dohc Ford head only to be waylaid by the 1930 AAA “junk formula” which filled his one-man shop with orders for 2-man bodies for stock block-powered Indianapolis racers.