The Legends race car is the most successful turnkey competition car in history—more than 5000 of them have been sold for about $15,000 apiece since 1992. The allure of the Legends car is obvious, beginning with the fact that these 1080-pound, 122-hp short-trackers on 73.0-inch wheelbases are more fun than a hat full of ferrets.
Ah, dignity. It’s the one thing that Legends cars lack, shrouded as they are in 518-scale fiberglass replica bodies of old coupes from the ‘30s. It’s like Shriner racing.
Enter the Thunder Roadster, brought to you by Humpy Wheeler, director of Lowe’s Motor Speedway in Charlotte, North Carolina, and his company 600 Racing, maker of the Legends car as well as the Bandoleros used by junior racers. The roadster is a stretched-wheelbase (96.0 inches) version of the Legends cars, wrapped in nostalgia fiberglass that looks for all the world like J.C. Agajanian’s Indy winning “Ole Calhoun,” driven in 1963 by Parnelli Jones.
“Any kids brought up in my time,” says Wheeler, “when they thought of a race car, that’s what a race car looked like.”
In 1997, Wheeler got the itch to build an open-wheel racer. He commissioned a sketch by Detroit designer Randy Wittine, who took his inspiration from an A.J. Watson Indy car. With sketch in hand, Wheeler located a Watson roadster and had a mold pulled from it. Then he located the blueprints from Ole Calhoun, the basic architecture of which—tube frame with a box-chassis “square tube” floorpan— formed the skeleton of what would be the Thunder Roadster.
As the design progressed, with a full cage, steel bumpers, and tube-steel nerf bars on the side pods, the Thunder Roadster moved ever closer to the Wittine design. Not that there was much styling going on—mostly sawing and adding onto the fiberglass buck. “The styling was done on toilet paper’ Wheeler says.

Winnipeg Used Autos
Manitoba Ford Truck Auto Dealers
http://winnipegusedautos.com/

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