Barring the big-diameter wheels...
Barring the big-diameter wheels and low-profile tires, the '33 Hot Rod's tail isn't a departure from conventional hot rod and street rod styling. The taillights are even '42-48 Ford lenses and rims sunk into the tail pan and lit with supplied LED elements. A full roll cage would be both unsightly and unwieldy in a street-driven car, so Factory Five Racing designed the roll hoops to serve a similar function as the structural windshield frames in modern convertibles.
Finally, Play Hard
More than a car, the Factory Five '33 is a system. By the premise of under-promising and over-delivering, Dave said he isn't willing to put a pinpoint performance numbers on the car's capabilities at this point (among other things, he notes that simple tire selection introduces a dizzying array of variables for which the company cannot anticipate). However, he isn't shy about comparing the '33 Hot Rod test car-a car built to very basic standards-to the other cars in the company lineup.
Let's just say its performance boils down to this: "The '33...is going to spank the (Factory Five Racing) Cobra. That was the charter," Dave insisted. "Here are some metrics: (R&D head) Jim (Schenck) took the hot rod up to an SVT club autocross and ran it against his own spec racer."
Now, Jim is more than just head of R&D. "He's a very accomplished driver," Dave said. "He wins Autocrosses and road races with his own spec racer," he continued. Among his accolades: he finished within the top three positions at the Charlie Gibson 300, one of the events in the Factory Five Racing Challenge Series.
The results? When compared to the spec car, "He ran two seconds faster in the Hot Rod in a real high-speed autocross that's more like a road course," Dave said. "The '33...this is our mule, our prototype with a 200,000-mile junkyard 280-horsepower DOHC 4.6 engine. So it's not making a lot of horsepower. It had racing tires on it, but so did his spec racer.
"Keep in mind that I'm comparing (the '33) to our racecar Cobra; the street car Cobras are a tick slower than that." And I think we've adequately made the case that those cars' performance is more than respectable.
The supplied aluminum trunk...
The supplied aluminum trunk panels aren't in place, and without them we get a good idea of the car's structure and packaging. The fuel tank sits immediately behind the passenger compartment to maintain the car's neutral front-to-rear weight bias. Though struts support the rearmost body edge, the chassis ends at the trailing edge of the tires. Rather than arch over the axle as it does here, the production exhaust system pokes out of the quarter panel just behind the doors on the production model. Since the Panhard bar height establishes the rear suspension's roll center, Factory Five designers positioned it very low-so low, in fact, that it's not visible on account of the rear apron. What is visible, though, is the upper member of the three-link suspension and the Koni mono-tube coilovers.
"One advantage-actually one of the biggest advantages-is that even though the frame is stiffer, the car is 250 to 300 pounds lighter than the Cobra. On scales, full of gas and everything it was 2,120 pounds."
But what's a company that builds replica Cobras doing in the hot rod market? "I don't differentiate," Dave admitted. "We've been making chassis, bodies, aluminum panels, and suspensions for 12 years, and we've built 7,000 cars. So why is it a departure for us to build a hot rod? It's a tube frame and fiberglass body-plenty of others like it are out there-so why is it such a departure?
"The bottom line to me is, it ain't a hot rod if it doesn't perform," Dave went on. "And when I say perform, when you pull the trigger it ought to mash your face; when you stand on the brakes it ought to stop like it's on Velcro; when you turn into a corner, it ought to turn in like a racecar; and when you trail-brake in a turn it ought to tell you what it's doing. And if you end up in the weeds and you don't know what happened, it's not a racecar.
"And if you look at it," he continued, "from the very beginning, a hot rod has been nothing more than a racecar that gets driven on the street."
On The Shoulders Of Giants
Why the '33 Hot Rod has more tradition than the garden-variety "traditional" carDave and Mark Smith weren't the first guys to get bored going fast in a straight line. In fact, the first quarter-mile tracks weren't straight at all; they were round or oval. Though midgets and "Big Cars" (sprint cars for the time) prevailed, there were legions of racecars fashioned from old Ford bodies. An important distinction about these cars is that they weren't necessarily Ford-powered...or sat on a Ford frame.
Just as lakes racers tired of going fast in a straight line, a select few got bored turning left. It's from this group that a special breed of racecar emerged: the sports rod. And with it evolved a special breed of racer.
But it wouldn't have happened if a more European form of motorsports hadn't established itself in the States in the early 1950s: road racing. Dominating this series were lightweight European cars with advanced independent suspension systems and highly tuned engines. They were fast.
So too were they expensive-at least to anyone with a family to feed.
But just because they couldn't afford the machines didn't mean an inspired hot rodder couldn't compete with them. Guys like Max Balchowsky did what lakes racers had been doing for years: by using the resources available to them, they created seemingly improbable combinations of production car parts. Then they too went fast. Real fast.
The stories are legendary. Among them, Ak Miller cobbled together a ragtag batch of parts like an Olds engine, a '50 Ford chassis, and a Model T body, and created El Caballo de Hierro, or the Iron Horse. With it he ran four of the famed La Carrera Panamericana races in Mexico. About that time, Doane Spencer reconfigured his famed lakes roadster to go racing south of the border, only to have the series fold before he finished.
Soon after, three guys, Duffy Livingstone-father of the Go-Kart, among other things-Roy Desbrow, and Paul Barker slapped together a hot rod and joined the ranks. With a Flathead, the Eliminator was an also-ran; however, when reborn with a 265 Chevy and dubbed Tihsepa Mark II (read the first word backwards for a chuckle), it gave the sporty-car Teabaggers hell. Oh, yeah, that's the car in the photo, in case you're wondering.
Of all the contributions, Balchowsky's was probably the most significant-at least for our purposes. After finding modest success with a Deuce roadster powered first by a flathead Caddy and eventually a Buick Nailhead (his signature henceforth), he scratch-built a series of cars. Like dogs, they weren't necessarily handsome; however, they were dependable-hence the Ol' Yaller name they all bore. And for the record, the car humbled many a European thoroughbred on the track.
So what's a road racer built with a production-car drivetrain and clad in a hand-made body have to do with Factory Five's '33 Hot Rod? Well, as their similar construction indicates, everything. But it goes deeper; without Balchowsky's cars, Factory Five wouldn't exist.
That's a bold statement, but it holds water. It's because one of Ol' Yaller's pilots was none other than Carroll Shelby. And if you need us to explain what he did, we still don't think you'd understand.