Gipsy was born of malfeasance and negligent ambition. She was the direct product of an intentional disregard for the rule of normalcy and decency.
What started as a good-intentioned desire to share in motorsports activities with my offspring quickly devolved into a Rainier-fueled descent into debauchery and stupidity of a magnitude rarely resulting in anything other than financial ruin and medical debt.
It was the spring of 2016. Justin and I had both relatively recently extricated ourselves from a life of military servitude and found each other living on Whidbey Island through mere happenstance. Through the wonders of Facebook messenger and the Internet, we communicated daily about our shared interest in things that burned gasoline and went fast. I owned a Polini pocketbike that had thrown me off a few times, and I was searching for a way to turn two wheels of suicidal fun into four. While asking Justin what lightweight material would be suitable from which to craft a gokart, I happened upon a photo of what appeared to be someone’s interpretation of what vintage cars looked like in oversized gokarts. Within ten minutes of sending the photo to Justin, he responded by informing me that he was reviewing build instructions and guidelines for something called a Cyclekart, had sent an email to none other than Johnny Dumfries himself, and had already purchased wheels and parts off eBAY. After a quick response from Johnny, we now had a build deadline and an event to attend in a magical land endearingly known as Tieton.
Hours were spent reviewing websites on the original Stevenson formula, Dennis Thomas youtube build videos, and taking strolls up and down the aisles of the local Home Depot. Within a couple of days, we had a rough rendering of what the chassis would look like, and I had cobbled together a wooden cockpit on the back porch of my Oak Harbor home. While out on a drive, I had come across a utility trailer left on the side of the road with a “free” sign attached, and we immediately started scavenging the springs off it to use as the suspension on our eventual death rocket. Mind you, dear reader, that we had yet to choose an inspiration car. We were wildly working on a concept without any real direction. Justin repeatedly reminded me that choosing an inspiration vehicle was compulsory, and one night while searching historical documents and Google Images, I suddenly found myself beholding what I could only describe as the most beautiful metallic derriere I had ever seen on four wheels. I was of course ogling Frank Cuttell’s majestic Australian creation known only as the 1929 Fiat Gipsy. We had a muse!
The original Gipsy was so known due to the 6.2 liter 130hp 4-cylinder de Havilland Gipsy Moth WWI aircraft engine Frank used to power his chassis. The chassis was an inverted 1929 Fiat 501 frame with a 1927 Buick gearbox and a 1929 Chrysler differential hung from a set of Fiat springs in the rear. The original car could be seen competing in various key Australian historic race meets, mainly Philip Island, Historic Winton and Sydney’s Eastern Creek before being sold to an American buyer during a Barrett Jackson auction event in 2011.
Our cyclekart was originally fabricated from box tubing, black iron plumbing pipe, eBay spindles and brakes, Home Depot plywood, and some gokart parts sourced from Northern Tool. The original engine was a fresh-out-of-the-box Harbor Freight 212cc non-hemi Predator engine. The brakes were a mechanical concoction actuated by a last-minute bicycle brake cable grabbed off the shelves of Walmart. And the seat was merely a boating cushion purchased from a thrift store that was attached to a slab of plywood by strips of Velcro. There was just no way this was even going to be a decent caricature of Frank’s rolling work of art.
We had an absolute blast building her in the 60 days from the first sighting of that fateful photo to the first yank of the pull cord in the parking lot of Mighty Tieton. With a firm belief that the guidelines specified that our build budget was limited to $1500, our implements of construction consisted of two dilapidated folding plastic saw horses, a handful of Porter Cable battery-powered drills and grinders, a Craigslist flux core Lincoln welder, and an iPhone. We welded the spindles to the black iron pipe, setting the caster and camber using a leveling app Justin downloaded on his iPhone. We ground metal into shape by holding it on top of a city-issued recycling bin, and going full tilt at it with Justin’s battery tools. I shaped plywood by soaking it in water and held it in place with discarded dumbbells, painter’s tape, and a few bungee cords. Justin was forced to weld in Whidbey’s signature wind, while I held his tool room doors around the chassis to prevent the flux core weld from blowing away. When it came to the steering wheel, we wiped away tears while we laughed at having to crudely weld the male sleeve of the quick disconnect incorrectly to the metal shaft of the lawnmower steering wheel Justin had picked up for cheap. We mounted those trailer springs upside down and “hung” the chassis from them to emulate the “underslung” configuration of the inspiration car. Springs work in both directions, right? With each item that we completed in the process, we jokingly ribbed each other about the risk of being accused of having purchased a factory built car rather than a home built one. Often, we found ourselves asking what we thought Dennis would say when he saw this thing we were making. The fun was truly in the problems that each of our solutions created in the next component we needed to build.
She was painted and assembled in the grass of my front yard one day before we left for Tieton. At that point, neither of us had even driven her yet, and it was in the rain of the last evening that Justin took that inaugural run up the street. The wheels wobbled, and the steering was especially sketchy…but she ran and drove. We were going to make it! Right up until Justin passed my driveway on the way back down the road, wild-eyed and shouting that the brakes didn’t work. We’d have to figure that out at the track. I cut her numbers out of white shelving paper I’d purchased at Ace Hardware and loaded her up into the back of my truck. It was Thursday night.
Friday, we started out early in the morning. Justin and his beautiful eight-and-one-half-month-pregnant wife in their car, and my family of five in a 1994 Mazda B4000 with the most precious of cargo in the bed. We had a four and one half hour trip ahead of us, and we set off. Promptly nine hours later, we pulled into Tieton where we were immediately met by Doug who proclaimed, “You guys are obviously Doin’ It Wrong”.
Throughout the weekend, we had an amazing time. We broke in literally every single event in which we competed. Our engine wouldn’t stay running and we had to sawzall the tail off the car to let it breathe. We ate a CVT belt because I installed it backwards. We broke the bicycle brake cable at the driver swap. We threw a chain in the Orchard. We were told that welding exhaust clamps to hold our plumbing pipe front axle securely to our inverted front springs changed the spring rate of our salvaged steel. All the while, we met some of the best people and had the most fun either of us had had in years. We were called “WIldcards”, and we decided to lean into the moniker as much as we possibly could. We never finished a race in that first outing, but we learned a lot about what it meant to be part of Gittreville’s stable of misfits.
On the drive home from that eventful first year, the brakes on the truck locked up in traffic due to overuse, and I found myself emptying my truck’s windshield washer reservoir onto the right front caliper to get it to cool off enough to release. Justin and I laughed and talked over the plans for v2 of our beloved lovechild.
When we got home, of course we didn’t start on the rebuild until sixty days out from the next Tieton event. Where would we be without tradition? Justin found an authentic but rusty Model A grille at a swapmeet, and I pulled apart my Suzuki racebike to source some hydraulic brake parts. We upgraded the steering from the gokart linkage style to a golf cart rack and pinion option, and we exchanged the Predator engine for a hemi version with the governor removed. We replaced the bulky original flywheel with an aluminum 4 degree advanced option, and we added an aftermarket header exhaust. We also rebuilt the tub and body from sheet aluminum in an attempt to lighten the car. We replaced the plywood seat with a plastic one from Amazon that somehow fit perfectly between the chassis rails, and we gave the car a much more aggressive appearance that was closer in profile to the inspiration car.
During that first year in Tieton, we had procured some Bron Yr Aur Brewing Co. stickers from the caterers of our banquet, and we wanted to put them back on the new version of our build. I hit them up via Facebook, and they not only sent replacement stickers, but included some patches for our race uniforms as well. So we went out and found some discarded US Navy flight suits and had our driver names embroidered on them along with our not-quite sponsor’s logo.
This was to be our first year participating in the fabled Gordon Bennett. Justin and I spoke in hushed whispers about the legacy and storied history of this bootleg race. There was nothing we wanted more than for Gipsy to complete the entire thing under her own power. We reviewed cautionary tales of boiling fuel in tanks, of broken components and cars in ditches, and of course of the perils of the hairpin turn and subsequent hillclimb. We spent hours huddled over a white board in our office formulating ridiculous mathematical calculations of sprocket diameters, wheel diameters and overall top speeds only to figure out that mathematicians we were not. What we finally settled on was a 54 tooth sprocket for the streets of Tieton and the Campbell Cup, and a 44 tooth sprocket for the GB. It might just be crazy enough to work.
As was customary for our team, the car was completed in the last few days before the event. And this year, Justin and I rented a Ford F-250 diesel to make the trip together without putting our families through the weekend of car talk and heat. The drive up was wonderfully uneventful, and we arrived in time to assist with setup and tech inspection. We were proud to unload the newest version of our creation, and she seemed to breathe a little easier up in the hills of Tieton. The brakes actually worked, the steering was smooth and reliable, and the engine wasn’t shutting off when we came to a stop. We were nervously optimistic.
Raceday came and we fared well in the Drag Race and the Grand Prix. The Gordon Bennett loomed surreal as the morning approached, and after Cars and Bars was a smashing success, we rolled her into the garage for the sprocket swap from 54 to 44 teeth. Questions arose about why our car was tail-off and on jack stands, but we dismissed them with sheepish grins and an explanation that we were centering the rear axle. In truth, the only thing to fear was forgetting something in the disassembly and reassembly after the Bars portion of Bars and Cars. We wrapped up the conversion and found places to sleep it off.
Sunday came and we drove out to the edge of town. As we lined up on the dirt surface of the service road, Gipsy started in the back of the pack. As the green flag fell, she launched a most vicious attack on her brethren. Weaving and dodging, she made her way up and around all but two final cars as she neared the hairpin. As she climbed the hill, she seemed angry and determined. As we rounded the top of the hill, she set her sights on the remaining two cars, and wished them well on her way by. I can tell you that entering the bends to the right and left of those roads is daunting when realizing that you’re hurtling at breakneck speeds in something cobbled together from spare parts and wheels not designed to support lateral forces. I leaned out of the way of her tail cone to ensure enough air traveled over the engine to prevent fuel-boiling vapor lock. Gipsy settled into a rhythmic sequence of hard acceleration and tail-happy cornering that left this driver grinning like a lobotomized idiot. She was a champion…a feat that even her own inspiration car never achieved. Justin and I are proud that today, if you search the Internet for a 1929 Fiat Gipsy, our unruly creation is often the first photo returned.
GIPSY chronological gallery
by Diablo