Today is a special day, so let’s celebrate with a special car.
This is the Watson Roadster, an early 60’s Indy 500 race car with rather old fashioned tech compare to other competitors on the grid. The chassis was originally a dirt track race car powered by a 16 valve 4 cylinder engine with a race built 2 speed transmission from the Ford Model A. Still, the Watson Roadster was able to give the rest of the grid a run for their money producing an impressive 400hp with plenty of room left for further power enhancement thanks to high compression ratio and the usage of methanol to propel the Watson Roadster to a top speed of around 180mph.
The engine also produced a healthy amount of torque which had an advantage from the competitors at lower speeds. The car had relatively good success winning the Indy 500 in 1963 held a record of average speed of 143.137 mph and the fastest pole speed of 151.153 mph and 64 piloted by none other than motorsport hall of famer Parnelli Jones.
This No. 98 example was the car that led to one of the greatest victories in Jones’ racing career in 1963.
Some may have remembered I posted a teaser of a package of a recent purchase a couple of days ago. This is one of the cars from the Hot Wheels Legends Vintage Record Holders set part of the exquisite and now discontinued Hot Wheels 100% series. The set consist of 4 cars and I’ll be sharing them individually in the coming week as well as showing the package and the display case that came with it. These were exceptionally well made, for a moment; you won’t believe it was made by Hot Wheels. There are a lot of individual pieces like the engine and roll hoop are all separate and includes opening parts. These are definitely for collectors based on its attention to details as well as exclusivity, these sets were limited productions with individual serial numbers and certificate of authenticity. I’ve seen this set for sale at a local mall several years ago (when I was 9) and loved it since. But due to its high price my parents would never consider buying it, I finally found a seller on IG that was selling the set and was able to negotiate a price with him and now added it to my collection and fulfilled a pass memory from my youth.
That’s all for this post, hope everyone have a happy and safe 4th of July and stay tuned for the next installment of this series. Cheers.