SRM: Let's get down to the main reason on why this car was built in the first place. You had finished the Grand Master and gotten the Impression finished, which many people consider the pinnacle of design and what you can do with a hot rod. So is this the 180-degree opposite of those cars?
FOOSE: It is. If you look at what we tried to do with the Grand Master, especially when you're competing for the Ridler, is finish every square inch because every little part has to be treated like that is the part that win or lose the show, no matter what it is. So I wanted to go back to the roots of hot rodding and, with the rat rods being so popular, I wanted to build my own rat rod. But I wanted to build it with a theme and I wanted to build it safe.
SRM: How long had you thought about this design?
FOOSE: Even when I was back at Boyds I was working on this car. I tried pitching the idea to a few people and no one really grasped it and I'd never really drawn it out thoroughly but the idea was "I love the look of the V12 flathead", and that would look so cool in a '32 roadster. And why not treat it like some WWII fighter pilot back in the late forties, like when Doane Spencer built his car, missed his airplane and themed his roadster around that? That's the whole thought behind this car.
SRM: I'm sure you feel there are some inherent design flaws with the basic '32 Ford roadster shape, and you seem to address them in this car. What do you find the worst problem to work around?
FOOSE: Number one, when you get the car down on the ground where you want it, and you have a decent size tire on the rear, then the wheelwell doesn't work. So I lifted the wheelwells up to get them to work with the tire. And the other thing is that where the stock '32 cowl has such a hard line rolling into the door where, if you look at a '36 roadster--well--Doane Spencer did the same thing by building that '36 cowl--it's beautiful. We built that cowl, though it's hard to see because the windshield takes away from it a bit. But if you look through it you can see that there is a pretty good line there. And the other thing we dealt with was such a short door. Eric, from Scandinavian Street Rods, lengthened the doors on my car two inches and took those two inches out of the quarters, so it has a much better proportion with the way we did it.
SRM: And you left all the stitch marks in the body?
FOOSE: The reason for leaving the stitch marks, hammer marks and all the welding in the body along with where all the lead work was done--if this was built in the war era and you had an airplane that needed repair, being serviced during war time, they weren't worried about making it beautiful, they just wanted to make it work. Things were repaired and put back in the air, so we treated this vehicle as if it wasn't about making it gorgeous; it was about making it functional.
SRM: Besides the nosepiece, the theme is P51, for the most part, right?
FOOSE: More after a P38 or P40--both planes had that same kind of nose and that lower grille opening, which gets fresh air to the motor.
SRM: Did you ever have an idea that it was going to be painted?
FOOSE: Originally I was going to paint the vehicle green, to match the interior, and I've had several ideas, and one day I will paint it. I've thought about painting it silver and brushing the metallic, finishing it and getting all the gaps right. But the more I worked on it and left it raw the more I liked it. I never saw it as a black primer car, but I like the idea of being able to see the craftsmanship. Not well finished, not mudded and gapped, and perfect, it's just about having fun and having a vehicle that is an expression and just kinda a piece of artwork.
SRM: In the design of the nose, you went through a couple of different designs on it, right?
FOOSE: This was actually the first design we started with, so we clayed it up, because we wanted to retain the look of a '32 grille shell, built out of aluminum. Once clayed, we pulled molds off of it and Marcel's and Luc at Marcel's custom shaping did all the shaping of it.
SRM: Where did the mesh in the grille come from?
FOOSE: It's actually the original grille mesh out of a '35 Chevy. The one that we altered to create the one for the Grand Master.
SRM: And the steering is rather unique in this car. Where did that come from?
FOOSE: Once I started putting the car together, I had the motor and the transmission sitting in the car, the grille in there and the axle sitting in there, and trying to figure: how am I going to get a tie rod through here? I didn't want a big hole in the side opening, and when you look at the coil and distributor on the front of the motor there was no room, there was no place I could run a tie rod. So, I thought: what if I did a push and pull steering, and I had just pulled the body off my wife's '54 Corvette, because we were putting the Morrison chassis under it, so I had a '54 Corvette steering box, which has a Pitman arm hanging straight down, and I did a couple of loose sketches to figure out how I could get the steering to work. Then I built a half-scale model with a couple of protractors because we wanted to get the Ackerman to work properly, and by making a foam-core half scale model we were able to figure out how to make it work. And what's interesting is the tie rod is underneath the driveshaft and transmission and the bottom of the chassis and if you adjust that tie rod with the movement of the two bell cranks you can actually adjust the Ackerman in it.
SRM: Other than some cooling problems, what other inherent problems did you find by running the V12 motor?
FOOSE: The only problem I've encountered in running the V12 is that wants to run hot. We built a very small radiator with small tanks, especially the bottom one because its stepped for the axle to clear. I can drive the car about 10 miles before it wants to get hot. It isn't overheating, but it's hot enough that I want to stop because I don't want to crack a block or anything like that. What I want to do is build a larger tank for the radiator and put that back in and see if the cures that cooling problem. The other solution is that I have two bombs that bolt in to the bottom of the floor, ones that look like they are dropped out of the bottom of an airplane, and they're hollow, so I'm thinking I can use those with some lines and get some more water into the system.
SRM: Both carbs work?
FOOSE: Yes they do.
SRM: The transmission is . . . ?
FOOSE: '39 Lincoln Zephyr, side shift,
SRM: Any problem finding the motor?
FOOSE: No, actually, I have four of those motors.
SRM: What a lot of people don't realize is how the engine and transmission actually sit in the chassis, and how it relates to the interior.
FOOSE: Because I wanted this car to sit on the ground, I knew I needed to lift the motor and tranny in the car. And typically when you lift the motor and tranny you get a big hump ion the floor, which I didn't want. When Eric from Scandinavian Street Rods first assembled the chassis, it had all stock kick ups and dimensions, but I thought it wasn't low enough, so when I got it back to my shop I started to cut everything up and push it towards the ground. I looked at the original 32 crossmember, where the motor and tranny bolt through the center of, instead of just lifting the center section; we lifted it at the frame rails. So the whole thing came up, including the pedal assembly, so now it looked like an upside down U, and the entire frame was put back together with all the rivets, because I wanted to make that frame look like it could have been a manufactured frame, maybe something the military would have done. So it isn't like a regular hot rod chassis all boxed and welded and I didn't know how much work that was gong to be until we got into it, trying to make everything look like stampings, there's nothing just cut, plated and welded, everything is recreated like it is a stamping. Everything is radiused and reworked which makes it quite difficult because if you want it to look like a stamping you've got to make it look like the way sheet metal would fold, where if you cut and weld something, it's something that can't be stamped. So it was pretty tricky. So every component in that chassis was treated as if it was a stamped piece.
SRM: And that carries through to a lot of the basketry under the decklid and throughout the car, including the cockpit, too?
FOOSE: Exactly. I wanted it to look like it could have been a manufactured car.