Motor Monopoly

Back in 1929, the twelve cars that were running at the finish of Indianapolis' famed 500-mile Memorial Day race were powered by eight-cylinder engines. But the engineering specialists who design racing autos reasoned that with fewer moving parts, fewer things could go wrong with an engine. Last week, the twelve cars that finished the furious grind at Indianapolis--at speeds up to a record-breaking 121 m.p.h.--were all four-cylinder jobs.

Never before had the engines been more expensively simple, the tuning of them more scientific, nor the field more completely dominated by one man. He was taciturn Lou Moore, 44, whose blue cars with red and white trim had come in first and second for two years running. This time one of Moore's four-cylinder, front-wheel-drive beauties won again.

As the car, driven by chunky Bill Holland, roared the usual two extra laps for insurance, its ruddy-faced owner hotfooted it from the pits to the victory cage, dabbing at his eyes with a handkerchief. "I feel wonderful," he said, with the tears still coming. He had narrowly missed seeing his three entries take first, second and fourth place; with only eight laps to go, one of Moore's cars had to drop out with a broken magneto strap. But by taking first and third, Moore won $65,855 in prizes, split (6s%-35%) with his drivers.

The engines that go into Moore's cars are the same (Offenhausers made by the Meyer & Drake Engineering Corp.) that are used in most other racing cars. But Master Mechanic Moore does not use them the way they come from the factory. He pulls down each engine to the last nut & bolt, polishes intake and exhaust valves, magnafluxes each part to see if any hidden defects exist. He buys the chassis, too, adding his own refinements in design.

An old auto racer himself, Moore selects his drivers more carefully than a horse trainer selects a jockey. His pit technique is unbeatable. During Holland's one pit stop last week, two front tires were changed and 15 gallons of fuel blown into the tank from pressurized drums in 52 seconds. That was good enough, but it did not equal Moore's own record of 49 seconds for a major pit stop of a winning car, established eight years ago.

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