Harry Miller (auto racing)
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Harry Arminius Miller (December 9, 1875 – May 3, 1943) was an influential and famous American race car builder, most active in the 1920s and 1930s. In the opinion of noted American racing history Griffith Borgeson, Miller was "the greatest creative figure in the history of the American racing car".
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[edit] Biography
Cars built by Miller won the Indianapolis 500 nine times; three more instances were won by his engines running in other chassis. Miller cars accounted for no less than 83% of the Indy 500 fields between 1923 and 1928.
If Offenhauser engines, a re-badged Miller derivative, and the dominant engine at the Indy 500 and on the Champ car circuit in the 1950s and 1960s (although it kept winning until the 1970s) are added, the number of wins at Indianapolis alone increases by 28, with over 200 more elsewhere. It was not until 1981 that an Indy 500 start did not feature a single Miller-derived engine.
Miller started off manufacturing carburetors for passenger and race cars. His involvement with the racing side of his carburettor business led to repairing and later building race cars. After repairing the 1913 Peugeot Grand Prix car which was the state of the art at the time, Miller and his employees, Leo Goosen and Fred Offenhauser designed the Miller racing engine from the Peugeot 4 cylinder, double overhead camshaft, 4 valves per cylinder layout. This began a thoroughbred line of race motors that dominated American racing well into the 1970s.
Miller went bankrupt in the 1930s. His shop foreman and chief machinist Fred Offenhauser purchased the shop and continued development of the engine as the Offenhauser or "Offy" engine until the start of World War 2. Fred retired from the business in 1946, selling out to two of his racing friends: three-time Indianapolis 500 winner Louis Meyer and Meyer's one-time riding mechanic and highly skilled engine builder Dale Drake.
Meyer and Drake Engineering, with Leo Goosen as chief engineer, continued to develop the Offy throughout the 40s, 50s, and into the 60s; often filling the engine bays of all 33 Indy 500 starters with Offy engines or their close cousins the V8 Novi engines.
After Lou Meyer sold out of Meyer and Drake in the 1960s to form his own company to sell Ford double overhead-cam V8 racing engines in competition with the Offy, Dale Drake and Leo Goosen persevered and reorganized Meyer and Drake as Drake Engineering. After enduring three years of Ford DOHC dominance at Indy, Drake's company prevailed in 1968 with the first turbocharged engine to win at Indianapolis behind Bobby Unser.
Descendants of the Offys (and thus the Millers) in the form of the turbocharged Drake-Goosen-Sparks (DGS) and Drake-Offy engines battled against descendants of the Ford DOHC until the Cosworth DFV and DFX engines originally developed as Formula 1 engines by Mike Costin and Keith Duckworth finally became too powerful at reduced manifold pressure (turbo boost) limits mandated by the race sanctioning bodies for the Offys to overcome. The last Offy to finish a race at Indianapolis powered Gary Bettenhausen from a starting position of 32nd to a 3rd place finish in 1980.
[edit] Awards
- He was named to the National Sprint Car Hall of Fame in 1990.
- He was inducted into the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America in 1999.
- He was inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame in 2003.
[edit] Further reading
- Mark L. Dees, The Miller Dynasty: A Technical History of the Work of Harry A. Miller, His Associates, and His Successors (Barnes, Scarsdale, 1981; second edition Hippodrome, Moorpark, 1994) This is the definitive work on Miller, but was published in limited editions, and may be hard to find
- Griffith Borgeson, Miller (Motorbooks International, Osceola, 1993)
- Griffith Borgeson, The Last Great Miller: The Four-Wheel-Drive Indy Car (SAE, Warrendale, 2000)
- Griffith Borgeson, The Golden Age of the American Racing Car (Bonanza, New York, 1966; second edition SAE, Warrendale, 1998)
[edit] External links
