Lot 561: 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.

It wasn’t until 1933 that Dreyer had the time, opportunity and money to return to his idea for a dohc Ford 4-cylinder head for the dirt tracks. This was a major project and a departure from Dreyer’s “cut-and-try” techniques. He hired Everett DeLong, an experienced designer and draftsman, to turn his concept into engineered reality. Based on the then brand new and much stronger 1933 Ford Model B 4-cylinder engine block, Dreyer’s dohc system included a 15-gear drive tower to the camshafts, designed so that camshaft timing adjustments as fine as 3° could be accomplished by re-indexing the gears. Improvements were incorporated to the lubrication system and, after a long gestation period finding quality suppliers for patterns, molds, castings, bearings and machining, Dreyer was in a position to offer a complete car – frame, suspension, engine and driveline – for dirt track racers.

Ironically, one of the first orders came not from “Wild Bill” Cummings or Wilbur Shaw but from a St. Louis college man, Gilbert Pirrung. An engineering student at Yale, Pirrung was struck with the racing bug and “wished to have a car that would attract attention on the New Haven campus” according to an Indianapolis newspaper clipping of the period. Pirrung’s father, owner of the Capital City Dairy Company and downtown real estate in Columbus, Ohio, had died in 1912 leaving an estate of $1 million. His mother later married Col. Gifford W. Gaylord, owner of the Gaylord Paper Box Co. in St. Louis. Henry Pirrung’s estate was distributed when the youngest of his children turned 21. That happened on December 24, 1933 [a very Merry Christmas]. The estate had grown to some $2 million, giving Gilbert a stake of 2/3 of a million dollars and Floyd Dreyer a very welcome commission to build the distinctive roadster which today has been restored with a correct Dreyer-built Model B Ford dohc engine.

Based on a 1933 Ford frame and suspension, the Pirrung Dreyer-Ford Roadster was powered by Dreyer’s dohc 4-cylinder Ford engine at the time reportedly making 100hp and giving the lightweight roadster 100mph performance. The body was created by Dreyer and his assistant, Carl Knotts, with the style and flair of his dirt track and Indianapolis cars although the roadster’s tapered tail incorporated a compartment behind the seats for luggage and the battery box for the electric starter. Fitted with a single sidemount spare tire, the Pirrung roadster incorporated bullet-shaped E&J 20 headlights, a hand-built radiator shell and a full windshield. It has cycle fenders on all four wheels, accentuating the racing car roadster form. The front wheel fenders turn with the wheels – like those of Frank Lockhart’s Stutz Blackhawk which had introduced Floyd Dreyer to the craftsmanship of Myron Stevens a few years before. Brakes are the stock Ford drums but are augmented by an outside handbrake lever actuating the rear wheel brakes like racing cars of the day.

Delivered by Dreyer to Gilbert Pirrung [who would later sponsor construction of Wilbur Shaw’s 1935 second-place finishing front drive Indianapolis entry; driven by Babe Stapp in 1936 and sold to Joel Thorne in 1937] in New Haven, the 2-seater was sold shortly thereafter to Lou Guiliano and Al Pari. Guiliano removed the fenders and headlights and Pari raced it in the Northeast as the “White Birch Garage Special” through 1935 with Winfield-equipped Ford power. Later it was owned by Bill and Len Poe of Sudbury, Massachusetts who sold it to Tommy Caruso. Bob Valpey bought Pirrung’s Dreyer-Ford from Caruso and restored it with a Miller-head Model B Ford engine. After the Gilbert Pirrung Dreyer-Ford was acquired by the present owner from Bob Valpey, an original Floyd Dreyer dohc Model B Ford block engine was discovered at Hershey in 2001. The Miller-head Model B and not inconsiderable cash changed hands and the correct original type engine now powers this remarkable surviving relic of one of the most prolific, long-lived and creative mechanic/fabricators of the Thirties, Floyd “Pop” Dreyer.

The Gilbert Pirrung Dreyer-Ford Roadster has a VSCCA logbook and has competed in VSCCA events at Lime Rock Park, Loudon’s New Hampshire International Speedway and the Mt. Equinox Hillclimb. It has been certified by the AACA Race Car board.

Constructed to the highest standards of legendary Thirties’ builders, the vista under Gilbert Pirrung’s Dreyer-Ford Roadster’s hood is that of jewelry, recognized immediately by the embossed “Dreyer – Indpls” identification on each cam cover. Intricately designed to achieve the adjustability which journeyman racers of the period needed in their weekly pursuit of starting and prize money on circuits that ranged from bullrings to mile ovals and altitudes from the Midwest’s plains to the mile-high plateaus of Colorado, “Pop” Dreyer’s first engine is as elegant as it is simple. It breathes through two side draft-converted Winfield BB carburetors. The tubular connecting rods come from Harry Miller’s shop. When acquired the Dreyer engine was set up for sprint car use, with 13:1 compression. New forged aluminum flattop pistons were made and their 8:1 compression ratio is compatible with today’s gasoline. The flywheel is aluminum and hooks up with a Ford V8 clutch and 3-speed transmission. Pop Dreyer ground his own camshafts which operate through bucket tappets and coil valve springs; the intake valves happen to match the dimensions of a 390 Ford FE V8. Lubrication is by a 5-quart capacity dry sump system with a full flow oil filter and an oil cooler under the radiator. A Scintilla magneto with remote advance-retard control supplies the sparks.

The engine builder who rebuilt the Dreyer-Ford estimates that it will pull 200hp on an engine dyno even with the 8:1 pistons, power that makes the Gilbert Pirrung Dreyer-Ford an exhilarating vintage racer and gives it performance on tours and events that matches Bugattis and Alfa Romeos, at a fraction of their cost or complexity.

The radiator is the original, carefully restored. The only significant part missing from the Dreyer-Ford engine when it was acquired was the upper radiator pipe and when an original could not be found a replacement was fabricated … by none other than “Junior” Dreyer in Indianapolis.

The Pirrung roadster’s all aluminum bodywork is built to the highest standards – Dreyer’s craftsmanship populated the front row at Indy in the early Thirties – and is mostly original. Only the hood and fenders have been re-made to replace parts lost during its New England racing career.

Creatively designed, intricately detailed and beautifully built, Gilbert Pirrung’s Dreyer-Ford Roadster is a rare survivor of a golden age in American car design and construction. But, unlike its few surviving contemporaries it was designed and built as a 2-seat road car, making it one of the most intriguing, interesting and unusual participants on the open road tours and events which make car collecting so rewarding. Its history is clear and the originality of its components is exceptional, the kind of history and heritage that is welcomed at the most enjoyable and important historic events. It will never, ever, even come close to meeting itself coming around a corner: a one-of-a-kind unique example of American craftsmanship, innovation and creativity.