GMP 1:18 Dragster Tommy Ivo Four Engine Dragster- Ltd Ed of 2500

If you had to describe “TV Tommy” Ivo with one word, that word would be SHOWMAN pure and simple! When his family relocated to Los Angeles from Denver, Tommy had the opportunity to get into show business. And boy, did he! Over the duration of his acting career he appeared in more than 100 movies and 200 TV episodes. His credits included “Hopalong Cassidy”, “Rin Tin Tin”, “The Donna Reed Show”, “Margie”, “Leave It to Beaver”, “The Lone Ranger”, “The Gene Autry Show”, and “Petticoat Junction”. This put him, at the age of 16, getting his driver’s license with a bank account and pockets full of cash just at the time when the post-war boom in hot rodding took-off in Southern California. What’s a guy to do? He started with a Cadillac, but soon switched to building a T-bucket with an injected Buick nailhead for power. Between acting gigs, Tommy hung out at Max Balchowsky’s shop in Hollywood and Max, father of the “Ol’ Yeller” series of BYS (back yard special) sports cars, taught him how to do the heads on a nailhead Buick to make them really run. He soon was racing his T-bucket at the drags and taking Top Eliminator. Years later “Ivo’s T” with its unique crescent moon back window and his buddy, Norm Grabowski’s “Kookie’s T” (which had a major presence in the TV series “77 Sunset Strip”) would be considered the seminal cars that started the “Fad T” revolution in hot rodding. But Tommy was hungry for more speed so he went to Kent Fuller and had Fuller build him a single engine “slingshot” rail, again with Hilborn-injected Buick power. Tommy raced this car around the Southern California strips such as San Fernando, Lion’s, and Pomona.

As time passed, Tommy figured if one engine was good, two engines would be great and he proposed building a twin-engined dragster to Fuller. Fuller was skeptical and felt that putting a GMC 6-71 blower on his existing single-engine car would give him the additional power he needed without the weight penalty of another complete engine. Tommy put a blower on his car but secretly de-tuned it so that it would barely run, to convince Fuller he needed the second engine. After abysmal results at the strip, Fuller agreed to help Ivo build the twin-engined car. (See my review in Lists & Reviews> GMP> Vintage Dragsters on GMP’s wonderful rendition of this beautiful car.) The twin-engined car was an amazing success….. beautifully constructed and very fast on gas, the car set records at every strip it ran. Ever the showman, in 1960 Tommy and his sidekick Don Prudhomme took off on a national tour beating the best local talent each strip had to offer as they traveled around the US, making Ivo the first “touring pro”. When he returned from his national tour, he went to Fuller and proposed building a four-engined car with the thought that if “one is good, two is better, then four fire-breathing nailheads outta be terrific!” He had good reason to feel this way: On his US tour, the crowds had loved his unique twin-engined car. To return the next season with the same car wouldn’t generate the same excitement, so he and Fuller started designing the four-engined car. This was not a totally new concept as Mickey Thompson had run four Pontiacs in his slingshot-configured Challenger 1 Land Speed Record (LSR) car although the way the engines were linked to the wheels was totally different.

The car that Ivo and Fuller designed retained many of the design cues from the single and twin-engined cars: Orange Red sculpted aluminum body, black tube twin hoop chassis and Buick nailhead power. The car was built with the main structural tubes being 3” cross section with .156” wall thickness chrome moly tubing. The big difference from the twin-engined car was the way the engines were hooked together. In the twin-engined car, the engines were joined at the flywheels, transferring power through double wide starter ring gears on the flywheels. On the four-engined car, the engines were paired in tandem (front to rear) forming essentially two V-16 power units with the left unit powering the front wheels through a Halibrand Quickchange/Dodge 4-Wheel-Drive front end that was similar to the differential used on the Novi’s at Indy and they used a conventional Halibrand Quickchange at the rear end. The engines were also structurally linked together to add rigidity to the chassis. The car was shod with four M&H Racemaster Dragster 9.00 X 15.00 slicks on Halibrand mags in the rear and fabricated steel wheels in the front. Fellow Road King, Tony Nancy did the beautiful upholstery. Stopping came from Hurst/Airhart disc brakes and a Bill Deist-created 24’ ring-slot drag chute. Each Buick was equipped with a Joe Hunt-Vertex magneto ignition, headers by Barr’s Muffler, an Iskenderian cam, Jahn’s pistons, Grant rings and Hilborn injection. In each two-engine unit, the two engines were joined by sprockets and a double-row chain and shared a Schiefer flywheel and clutch with Velvetouch lining, The two-ton car turned over 170 mph with a 9.14 second e.t. on gas.

Although it has become his signature car, Ivo hated it! The smoke from the four tires meant he didn’t have any visual references for about the first 200 feet of a run, Tommy sat with 14 (yes, 14!) exhaust pipes pointing in his face and blasting him with hot exhaust gasses, and it rode rough because they had to take the springing out of the front end to improve the handling. Some years later, he had the opportunity to drive it again and ended up crushing three vertebrae from its brutal ride which effectively ended his driving career. In that amazingly successful career, he had the first gas dragster to run in the 8’s and the first fuel dragster to run in the 7’s…… he was the first gas dragster to turn 170 and 180 and the first fuel dragster to turn 190. He had gone from a roadster to dragsters, to Funny Cars and on to jets.

GMP’s recreation of this amazing car is equally amazing! The beauty of this model is that you can pick it up and see how Ivo and Fuller got the whole thing to work…...like a 3D engineering drawing! They’ve gone to the absolute extreme in duplicating every tube, wire, hose, line, rod and linkage that made this monstrosity work. All of Ivo’s cars had one thing in common: they were incredibly sanitary….. everything was either bright red/orange, gloss black, chrome, rubber, or naugahyde….. engineered to be functional and beautiful! GMP captures that feeling in the way they’ve put this model together. Even the Deist chute looks like you have to be careful not to “pull the pin” ‘cause you’d never get the chute back into that tiny chute pack! It creates the feeling that all this stuff is real and it looks every bit as beautiful as the real car did the day it was photographed for the cover of Hot Rod Magazine.

The double-box and “clamshell” foam packaging with the GMP diamond lock does a great job of protecting this little jewel from damage and is elegant in its presentation. In addition, there is a nice DVD with Tommy being interviewed by Pete Chapouris of So-Cal Speed Shop fame about his show business and racing careers that adds a terrific amount of depth to the understanding of this car and its driver. All-in-all, this is an incredible bargain (four engines for the price of one!) and a wonderful piece of drag racing history that anyone should be quite proud to add to their collection recalling the days when creativity and ingenuity were prevalent at the drag strip compared to today’s more “cookie-cutter” approach to speed. I hope you’ll add it to your collection and enjoy it every bit as much as I have.

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