1968 Edmunds Midget

As a young man in 1957, Don Edmunds began his climb to automotive fame as Indy 500 Rookie of the Year. A crash the next year influenced his change to designing and fabricating race cars. During 1963, his work as a chief fabricator for Bill Thomas building the blindingly fast Chevrolet V8-powered Cheetah sports car earned wide acclaim. His experience led to innovative chassis concepts incorporated into some 600 Edmunds-built cars over the following years, including his revolutionary all-independent suspension off-set car that was banned by USAC after setting a track record on its first outing.

Sprint and Midget cars had been and remain solid axle cars, front and rear, and rather than embrace the new technology as modernization, competitors complained that it would make the cars obsolete. Throughout his varied career, Edmunds designed and built championship cars, V8 Sprint cars, and 4-cylinder Midgets, many of the latter with his innovative 4-bar chassis as shown in this car built in 1968 at his firm Autoresearch.

Originally powered by a fuel-injected small displacement, dual overhead cam Offenhauser inline 4-cylinder, the engine was changed in favor of a Sesco powerplant and was then raced by a number of top drivers, including winning the American Racing Drivers Club championship of 1971 driven by 4-time Midget champion Johnny Coy, Sr. After retirement, this car was restored to 1971 configuration and displays Edmunds' design concepts within the pre-independent suspension configurations permitted by Midget racing organizations.