Richard Heseltine
Kugel in car, Eames outside.
From
here to
obscurity
Autolite Lead Wedge
Richard Heseltine excavates another amazing piece of automotive exotica from the vaults, this time one that made use of electrical power to produce some very impressive land speed record results at the end of the Sixties…
I
t was built by a roll-call of hot rodding legends, styled by a design deity and bankrolled by Ford at the height of its Total Performance programme. The otherworldly-looking creation pictured here also established a land speed record. So why isn’t it recalled with awe? The reason could be because it wasn’t powered by an internal combustion engine. There were no V8s here, nor jet propulsion for that matter. In their place was a decidedly unsexy bank of batteries.
Kugel ‘wedged’ into the Lead Wedge!
14 classic-american.com
The appropriately-named Lead on driving the car on Wedge was a promotional exercise, the hallowed salt flats. one that was dreamed up in 1968 However, his paymasters to showcase the Blue Oval’s Autolite thought otherwise. They division, which it had recently vetoed this so Jerry Kugel acquired. Responsibility for creating was installed in his place. this improbable device fell to the He was the perfect department’s head, Danny Eames, a substitute. A serial car man steeped in high-performance builder, and friend and cars having been involved in former employee of record-breaking attempts since the speed king Ak Miller, mid-Thirties when he was still a Kugel was also a ballsy teenager. Together with Jerry Eisert driver. He steered the car Racing Enterprises, he fashioned a to 141mph overall, and single-seater with a wedge-shaped recorded a two-way average Motor Trend January 1969. glassfibre body which was penned of 138.862mph. As for by Larry Shinoda. payment, he didn’t receive Power came from 20 Autolite high-performance a cent from Ford. Instead, he was given – at his batteries and a modified General Electric industrial request – a demon SOHC big-block Ford V8 which motor, similar to those found in forklift trucks. The had been built for an aborted land speed record car had a wheelbase of 1674mm (66in), while project involving Mario Andretti. the body was barely 1117mm (44in) wide. At its After the Autolite team’s success, Eames said highest point, it sat just 813mm (32in) off the with typical understatement: “We could go a lot deck and there was barely 51mm (2in) of ground faster if we used some of the new exotic batteries clearance. The Autolite streamliner weighed in at being developed today, but Autolite has this new 925kg (2040lb), minus driver. automobile battery that we think is pretty good. So often on this page, cars are obscure for good We wanted some publicity that would let everyone reason: they’re duds, failures and flops. The Lead know about it, so we built this streamliner. It’s as Wedge was anything but, as it realised its singular simple as that.” The car even made it on to the mission. In November ’68, the Autolite crew cover of Motor Trend magazine’s January 1969 headed to Bonneville with only one thing in mind – edition, but it never turned a wheel in anger again. bagging a record. The Lead Wedge still exists, and most recently Eames, a driver with umpteen speed records was on display in the fabulous Indianapolis Motor under his belt in addition to wins in stock car Speedway Museum. ★ racing, had initially planned Richard Heseltine’s weird and wonderful American cars from the past.