The 3 to 1 Supermodified

I came across this oddball racecar several years ago in an issue of OPEN WHEEL magazine. Now, I've been a race fan all of my 34 years. In that time I've seen cars with six wheels [link] , cars that used huge fans to suck themselves to the ground [link] , the rise of ground effects cars [link] , and a number of other unusual and innovative machinery. But in all that time, I must say that THIS CAR, a pavement Supermodified short-track car from the late 1970s, takes the cake. When I tell people about it, they think I'm making it up, but it really existed, built in 1979. This is hands down the King of the Oddballs.

Kenny Reece was one of the top builders of Supermodified and Sprint cars of the 1970s. Supermodifieds were by then (and still are) some of the fastest and most powerful oval track cars on the planet-almost as fast as Indy cars on the same tracks. (When the "Supers" were running at the Pheonix mile in the early 1990s, the fastest cars in the Copper World Classic regularly posted times that would have put them in the middle of the Indy car grids at the same track.) There usually aren't many rules for these cars beyond safety requirements and basic construction and engine rules. And given these liberal rules, Kenny Reece was a guy who definitely thought outside the box.

In the late 1970s, as Supermodifieds became faster and more complex, the rulesmakers at the Mecca of Supermodified racing, Oswego Speedway in New York, were faced with a bunch of car builders with big ideas and small budgets....sometime around 1976 or '77, they were seeing the 6-wheeled Tyrrell P34 F1 car [link] in action and decided to head that little innovation off at the pass-specifying that their Supermodified cars HAD TO HAVE ONLY 4 WHEELS.

Problem was....they didn't say WHERE those 4 wheels had to be on the car.

Kenny Reece looked back on his years of experience and took into account the effects of high horsepower, oval tracks, and tire wear....and came to a startling conclusion: You could put the power down easier if your drive wheels sat right on the car's center of gravity; and you could cut down on tire wear by eliminating the left front tire. He thought about some kind of 3-wheeled car, but those pesky rules said you had to have 4....meanwhile, he had a full-race 494 CI, fuel-injected ZL-1 aluminum Chevy big block in the shop, swapped out of an old McLaren CAN AM car and converted to run alcohol-a comparatively light but VERY powerful engine, on the order of 850 HP, waiting for just the right car to ride in....

So was born the car that came to be known as the 3-to-1 Supermodified. In addition to the offset chassis and engine common to these oval-track beasts, the tube-frame 3-to-1 Supermodified addressed Reece's desire to rid his car of that left front tire....by placing 3 wheels on the right side and only one on the left. In the 3-to-1 Supermodified, the two drive wheels (the left wheel and the center right side wheel) were right on the center of gravity when the driver was in the car. The right front and right rear wheels both did the steering, linked to a handmade steering system that was, needless to say, unique to this particular car. The car did not bottom at the left front, but just in case, there was a small metal skid plate there. The big bored-out ZL-1 Rat Motor was offset to the left and laid partially over on its side to help the car around the turns, and the rear end was also offset. (Like many Supers it had no transmission, just what they call an "in-or-out box." It's either in gear or it's not.) In between was the little pod containing the driver and equipment. (The car had bodywork over the front end, which was reportedly sheetmetal with a faceted look sort of like an F-117 stealth fighter, and a little fin in the back, but I couldn't find really good reference pictures of it. I like the look of the car with the sheetmetal off, anyway. I used the photos from the OPEN WHEEL article as a reference.) And the only driver Kenny could find that was brave enough to drive this oddball was future Indy Rookie of the Year and NASCAR star Tim Richmond.

They tested the car with Richmond at the wheel at Sandusky Speedway in Ohio....and beat the track record by over a second OUT OF THE BOX, without any tuning or adjustments. The track management were...well, CONCERNED.

Then they decided to see what the strange machine would REALLY do. So they took it to Goodyear's huge tire test oval. With little more than a gear change, Tim Richmond climbed in and went OVER 200 MPH. This was in 1979. In a "short track car." 200 MPH runs were still pretty rare in 1979. A couple of NASCAR stockers had done it; Jerry Grant broke 200 in an Eagle Indy car at Ontario in '72; and Tom Sneva had only broken 200 in one of Roger Penske's Indy cars at Indy 2 years before. And then, along comes this freaky race car, the 3-to-1 Supermodified....Here was a Supermodified that would basically put the rest of the field at Oswego on the trailer. And they hadn't even BEGUN to tweak the thing yet.

So they outlawed it before it ever turned a wheel in an actual race. The Oswego Supermod rulesmakers, hearing of the Sandusky and Ohio Test Center runs and fearful of dwindling fields as everyone had to scrap their old cars and build their own 3-to-1 Super copies, quickly rewrote the rules to EXPLICITLY STATE that not only did the cars have to have 4 wheels, there had to be two of 'em on the right and two of 'em on the left.

And since the rest of the Supermodified tracks all ran under what were basically Oswego rules, if it was illegal at Oswego (which is to Supermodified racing what Indianapolis Motor Speedway is to Indy cars), it would be illegal EVERYWHERE. So Reece, Richmond, and their friends were stuck with this overpowered, big-tired, preposterously fast, eccentrically-designed, illegal oddball car that they couldn't run anywhere. They never even painted it or slapped on any decals or numbers-the car only ever ran in bare aluminum. Unfortunately, out of frutstration and also out of financial necessity, Reece did what short-trackers all over do with obsolete cars: He cut it up and used the parts in his next race car, a Sprint car for his son. (Tim Richmond went on to race Indy cars for a couple of years, and then became a popular star driver in NASCAR-sadly, he died of AIDS about 10 years after he drove this car.) So today, this ultimate oddball race car, the Kenny Reece/Tim Richmond 3-to-1 Supermodified, exists today only in photos, magazine articles, web pages, and bench-racing legend.