Recently the Ab Jenkins Memorial Duesenberg Festival of Speed went down in Indiana. The event was a historic gathering of the magnificent American machines and it also featured a Duesenberg drag race on a measured quarter-mile track! This humongous cars were the biggest, fastest, things on the road in their day.
Mechanically, these cars were decades ahead of their time, featuring 420ci, straight engines that sported dual cams, and 32 valves. The SJ models were also supercharged and could swallow anything else on wheels whole.
BangShift member Hemi Joel owns a beautiful 1929 Model J convertible and went to the event to race his car. Lucky for us, he took a bunch of video, both in and out of car. The footage is below and really shows a drag race the likes of which you’ve never seen and probably never will again.
It is beyond neat that the owners of these cars took them out and stretched their legs. As Joel put it, “The usual representaion that most folks ever have a chance to experience is picture in a book of a chrome covered Classic, lifeless and un-real, or of a silent and still giant, slumbering behind the velvet ropes in some climate controlled museum. This is not what these cars were buit for!”
