high hp longevity: thanks to off-road and midget racers!

[Jim Ratto]

Racing improves the breed, right? Do we all realize how much we owe to the old USAC midget guys and the sand guys and the Baja guys....when it comes to making the air cooled baby live? Sure the drag race scene has contributed to the health of the big cc street motor too, but thinking about it, don't drag motors run for 10-12 sec and then go cool down? Unless you're really running rounds in eliminations.

what do you guys think?

[Donny B.]

Those midget guys really used to abuse those engines and kicked butt until they got legislated out of existence.  I have a friend that used to help with a VW powered midget and they broke just about everything in search of reliability.  Heads, valves and springs didn't last and were the weak link usually.  Of course the most expensive part was the crank.  I belive they used Moldex (I think that was it).  They did use Berg stuff as well, but a lot of Autocraft.  Interesting subject!

[Jim Ratto]

Tony Mace oughta give us his bits here.... he was into the midget scene and still is into off road... we had a nice talk about this all today, prompting this post. Thanks Don!

Jim

[drgouk]

I think we owe alot to the midget and offroad guys, Without them the vw performance seen would be alot smaller, Companies like pauter, autocraft, kawells, etc were into midgets in a big way. I think midget racing brought alot of new people in contact with the Vw engine, that otherwise would not have bothered with the vw. The Vw engine was popular down here in New zealand with the midget crowd, Still a couple going, Had this pauter on the dyno before christmas, Type 4 with pauter heads.

[Fastbrit]

I learned my engine-building skills back in the 1970s assembling motors for rallycross and road-rally Beetles. They certainly had to last for more than 12 seconds at a time (and most of them did... Ooops!).

[Tony M]

I have been able to be involved with both sides. Built a few off rod engines and midget engines. You have to look back at the guys that realy got the off road engine to live - FAT pref.  With out guys like greg and his partners things would not be the same. Don Hatz racing engines too. Both played a big part in making big hp and living. But there are soo many others too.Any body involved at that time all helped to create what we have today. Plus the sound of a vw powered midget is awsom - working at a vw parts store and we ran a iron duke engine - looking back i wish we did run a big killer air cooled. Still being into the off road side the class 12 cars run no bigger than 1914cc engines - this past baja 1000 one of these cars finished in the top 10 overall - quite impressive against all the big V8's.

[deano]

Nothing finer sounding that an air-cooled VW engine running 12.0:1 on alcohol, without a flywheel. I used to really enjoy seeing them run at Ascot.

[Lil Gasser]

Some of the sand stuff looks pretty interesting, had an interest in some of that stuff for a little while now, I think they had some good ideas for sure.