It was "Healey Time" once again at Road America this past weekend and, as an avid Healey freak and hapless owner (yeah, Carol and I still own that "solid and relatively rust-free" [by Healey standards, anyway!] early, needs-damn-near-everything 100/4 that I have been intending to get around to restoring for, let's see, what is it now...40 years?). See pic below. But the point is:

A) The Healeys and The Healey Faithful descended like a swarm of handsome, brawny, noisy, jutting-lower-jaw locusts on Road America this past weekend and most will be attending the annual Healey Conclave national gathering in nearby Sheboygan. Just try getting a hotel room there! And I've been assurred that all the local resorts, hotels and motels have laid in a hefty supply of Oil-Dri for the occasion...

B) I know for a fact that I was in the frame to be guest speaker at this year's Conclave and that made perfect sense since I was the traveling-wordsmith Scribe of Record for both the 1989 British vs. American Healey Challenge race meetings (it damn near destroyed my liver...NEVER go drink-for-drink with an Englishman!) and the subsequent, America vs. Down Under Healey Challenge that brought Australian and Kiwi Healey racers (more liver damage!) from where the water swirls the OTHER way in the toilet bowl here to battle against America's best Healey Handlers and Hurlers. I moreover got to "track test" some of the top contenders from all three groups, and back in the day, Carol and my shop used to work on a LOT of big and lilliputian Healeys. We even fixed a few of them! Have even raced quite a few. But the Conclave Powers-That-Be instead settled on our good friend and nonpariel racer/raconteur David Hobbs, who is a bit more famous and respected in the motorsports world, but who never owned, raced or worked on an Austin-Healey in his entire life. But he does work cheap (I don't think he needs the money) and I've been told that was a major consideration for the club. Not that I'm bitter or anything...

C) That Healey of ours still needs a good home and someone who actually has the time and coin of the realm to do right by it. Pic below:

AUDIO RADIANCE FOR OUR RADIO AUDIENCE!

Proud to say I was once again invited to be a featured guest on my friend Mark Greene's popular car-guy/gear-head podcast "CARS, YEAH!" which has quite a following among folks with long, fond memories of the golden age of sports motoring (translation: when the car stopped running and you lifted the hood for a looksee, you actually knew what you were looking at! Don't get me started...)

In any case, if you're hard up for entertainment or have grown weary of and/or disgusted by the election-year claims, counter claims and a fullsome fullisade of political ads (although Thank God we live in a country where we can actually vote for our leaderrs!)...anyhow, click on the radio image below to get to Burt's podcast interview and be transported to a simpler time when things made sense. Or seemed to, anyway...

A FASCINATING BIT OF HEALEY HISTORY:

Donald Healey had built up a small but stalwart reputation building low-volume sports cars (Healey Silverstone, Nash-Healey) in the bleak-but-recovering postwar years, and he had to go wherever a door was open to get his motors and drivelines, because that sort of manufacturing was beyond his "garagiste" capabilities. For his brand-new Healey Hundred sports roadster of 1952 (so named because it could do the magic "ton" and moreover looked like it was doing 100 standing still), Healey settled on the sturdy but somewhat anvil-like Austin four-banger that was really something like two-thirds of a Chevy "Stovebolt Six," had been used as a replacement motor for left-behind, WW2-residue American Jeeps and also served well in mail trucks, delivery vans and "Milk Floats" (milk trucks to us here in The Colonies). But the Healey Hundred was a rorty looking little bugger, and it was scheduled to make its debut appearance at the Earls Court Motor Show in late October of 1952. On the "press and industry insiders" night that always preceeds every proper motor show, Leonard Lord, the Chairman of Austin, saw the car and the reaction it was eliciting, met with Donald Healey, shook hands on a deal and the famous, winged Austin-Healey badge was drawn up and executed by a local jeweler by the time the show opened to the public!

Leonard Lord and Donald Healey shown below in the Healey Hundred at Earls Court 1952

MORE HEALEY CONCLAVE CRAPOLA:

Lotsa spargly Healeys on hand at Road America and we did a brisk business in book, logo clothing and decal sales. So did our companion/compatriot/co-conspirator David Hobbs, whose book is truly worth reading (even if he did skate me on the "guest speaker" deal).

Three Highlights:

1) A great friend and club kingpin hosted a quiet little pizza party in a gracious and lovely old victorian home he and his wife rented for the occasion on Elkhart Lake, and here are some pix to make you jealous and wonder, as I did, how come I wound up handsome and gifted instead of rich...

2: There was some GREAT racing at Road America last weekend (I even saw some of it!) and surely on the highlight reel was the INCREDIBLE battle between invading and disgustingly young, handsome and talented British Healey Hurler Jack Rawles (see pic below) and the indecently fast local Sprites of Colin Comer (bugeye) and David Brown ("square car"). This was truly an EPIC race, with the two Sprites battling one another even as they tried to close on the hulking Healey 3000 up ahead, then finally managed to catch and pass the British Interloper (last corner/last lap, in fact!) only to be re-passed right at the finish line thanks to the famously muscular torque of the 3-liter "Big Six" in the British entry. Wotta Race!!! Photo finish (almost). Hopefully you can find it on YouTube. Wow.

ps: Jack Rawles graciously and humbly admitted that he'd never seen Sprites that fast in England. Then again, while Brit racers have always wanted to move up from Sprites to MGs, TRs and Big Healeys to Jags and Astons to...you get the idea. HealeBut here in The States, the Sprite has been and remains (at least until the Miata came along) the go-to "starter car" for American road racers. End result is that enough brains, money and technology have been lavished on the lowly Sprite to put a half-dozen satellites into space. They're a ball to drive, too (even if firing one up is like pulling the pin on a blessed hand grenade...)

3) I decided to ressurrect the Buddy Palumbo Award at Road America and found a truly worthy recipient. For those out of the loop, I originally came up with the notion of a Buddy Palumbo Award back in 2007 and presented it to my longtime friend/Amelia Island Concours founder and chairman Bill Warner. He liked the concept and we wound up doing it every year throughout Bill's tenure at Amelia. Better yet, e had a different artist do a painting, sculpture or whatever that represented the ethos and meaning of the Buddy Palumbo award, so they were all totally original and one-of-a-kind. As were the cars that were honored. There were only two criteria for The Buddy Palumbo Award, as follows:

1) You had to have done the bulk of the building and/or restoration work with your own two hands (or four or more if it was a family effort).

2) You had to USE the damn car. I mean really DRIVE and ENJOY it the way its original designers and builders intended. No "professional restorations," glass-case jobs or trailer queens allowed!

Unfortunately, when Hagerty took over the Amelia Island Concours a few years back, they didn't share Bill and my enthusiasm for the concept and it was uncerimoniously dropped. But I've continued to offer Buddy Palumbo Awards on an ad hoc basis at several other events (Jaguar Concours, SCCA Chicago Region display at The Geneva Concours etc), and I both allow and encourage other clubs, events, organizers and sanctioning bodies to do the same, as I think it's a worthwhile and deserving category.

So I personally made, picked and presented a Buddy Palumbo Award to a car from the Healey Bunch at Road America, and it was both an oddball machine and a true Buddy Palumbo-esque story.

See, this guy named Dave Cooper from Redmond, WA. somehow got the Evil Eye put on him by a Jensen-Healey, which was a great car in some respects (one example, properly massaged by Huffaker Engineering and driven by my late pal Lee Mueller, won the D-Prod National Championship back-to-back in 1973-1974) but a bit plain-looking from the front and a dismal failure as an ongoing business proposition. It used a Lotus 907 motor canted over at a steep angle, and I remember they has these stamped steel cam covers with kind of a beveled mating surface and they were prone to leaking oil from the seam. Imagine that...a British car that leaks oil!

At Mellow Motors, we developed a fix that used TWO gaskets, one glued to the head and one glued to the cam cover, so you had a gasket-to-gasket seal. We also learned that it you tried to stop the weeping by applying more torque to the hold-down nuts, it only made things worse...

In any case, Mr. Wikipedia says that 7634 Jensen-Healeys were imported to North America, and most wound up in darkened garages or sitting forlornly on the back corner of HONEST HERB HARLOT'S USED-CAR LOT. But a few people thought they were wonderful, and two of them were Dave and wife Bokhee Cooper. In fact, Dave decided he could improve on both the car's looks and performance. Which he did (see pic below) what with a carefully hotted-up motor wearing fake dual Weber sidedrafts with an electronic fuel injection system hidden inside. It's truly amazing the work he put in. And the thinking. And damn if he doesn't USE the damn thing, too. Hell, he and Bokhee DROVE the car all the way from their home base in the Pac Northwest to attend the Healey Conclave. And they were (I think) the only Jensen-Healey types in attendance.

You like to see the Buddy Palumbo Award go to someone who truly deserves it.

Being a little nutty helps, too...