1917 Hudson Six Special Racing Car

How many racing cars were actually built in 1917? What I like about this era of racing cars is the simplicity of the design. The Hudson Automobile folks claimed that the Super-Six series of chassis and engines they manufactured made such enormous power that it was unnecessary to build a special racer as a few changes and a special body would adapt their stock car for terrific speed efforts. Thus the advent for numerous years of tuned production engines mounted within conventional mass produced chassis for the dirt tracks, occasional wood board track speedways or even the brick-lined Indianapolis 500.

One normally sees this type of vehicle today based on Model T frames — but it can be done on numerous other manufacturers chassis as well. If one has or found a running (or restorable) chassis for an oddball automobile manufacturer that is missing the coachwork, why not turn it into a fun vehicle that is affordable to build (and one could DIY) that would elicit lots of comments and smiles. I wouldn’t necessarily want to go cross country in one of these but imagine the stories you would tell if you did? It basically is a 4-wheel motorcycle and there is nothing wrong with that aspect!

This concept is just a cleaned up iteration of a special built upon a Hudson Six chassis. Most of these have a “static” look to them when sitting still and I just wanted to envision something that looked like it was almost moving and with the mechanicals a bit more hidden…