I remember reading many of The Earl of Steinhauer’s articles written years ago in The Beam. Indeed, a great video. Closest thing that I have seen to being there! Wow! Turner, LeVier, Whittman! Many thanks to the presenter.

Kinda sorta, Perestroika/Czech Mate was one of my favorite Reno Air Racers because it looked like a National Champion Air Racer style from the 1930's

Yes, a pity he had problems with the magnetos.

Unfortunately 98% of the people currently working for Boeing have no idea what the XB-15 was. For years I want to build an aluminum model of this beautiful machine even in scale 1:48. I hope that biological time will allow me.

Hey CFreed . You seem ancient with your lack of respect for these guys. They weren't playing with toys. This is heavy duty .The planes that you love right now the will be (by your reasoning) "ancient" very shortly. Does that mean that they were ancient piles of crap?

And Tony LeVier.. Now theres a man who went on to make his mark in aviation.. P51 and my favourite the Cosmic Wind.

After I viewed this kzfaq.info/get/bejne/op5ljZWkr7ydhJ8.html I'm taking Tony's advice and buying a couple of boxes of each one ! ( Wonder if Lockheed was ok with this plug?)

I grew up in Cleveland and it's sad to me how few people that live here even know that these races took place here. The Crawford Museum is the only local place that has really captured any of the history of these races.

Yeah, I'm one of those born in 39. My dad was an airplane nut and worked for Packard Motorcar Company in Detroit in those years. He was their chief trouble shooter on the P51 engine. He always talked about going the the Cleveland Nationals but never made it before heart disease took him in 1956. I'm still flying actively and have a 1957 Apache (twin engine) that I fly almost every week. Yes, 99% of those in the pictures are gone but I ain't dead yet, "Contact!".

The year of reference was 1921

Bummer Packard didn't stick with making aircraft engines after WW2 . Bet if they had, Packard turbofans would be flying folks around the world and Packard rocket engines would have taken us to the moon! Patents 672256, 3190554, 3013505 .

They were British engines made under licence. The Merlin was what powered the Spitfire, Hurricane, Lancaster. The P51 was useless until it was fitted with a Merlin as an experiment by Rolls Royce.

The National Air Races drew the largest crowds of any events from 1929 through 1939, according to everything I've read. Lindberg's flight in 1927 was still fresh on the minds of everyone.

The only had to be 36, but that still meant WWI, many incurable diseases, enormous tobacco use, not seat belts, proably means that you are completely right! My father did not die of jaundice, and he survived fighting in WWII, so I expect having a large family is a relatively recent phenomenon.

WDTA UT The early races were on the site that is now Cleveland Hopkins Airport.

Thanks. For some reason, I thought the races were held near, or at, the lake front.

WDTA UT they were in the 60s and 70s, but the earlier races were at hopkins

Cleveland Hopkins Burke didn’t exist then

With the little research I've done, I've learned that many of these planes were either highly modified or home builts, so it's sometimes hard to determine their origin. That was the blessing/curse of these races. Plane manufacturers lost interest in the races because the pilots were building their own planes from all sorts of pieces/parts. Imagine if NASCAR were racing cars that were built by getting parts from the junk yard. The big auto manufacturers wouldn't invest a dime. That's what happened to the air races.

That's half of what makes them so cool, like the old land speed record cars, or to a lesser extent F1 before the money. Do you know of any decent books on the old races?

The French were into simple light weigh fighters in the 1930's with some of their designs showing up at American Air Races. kzfaq.info/get/bejne/qNKCiMuExrWvY6c.html

If your referring to #5 , It was named the Chester "Goon" flown by Art Chester made just for the air races....Started in 1938.....Last heard from in 1991 where The Goon was purchased by the Crawford Auto-Aviation Museum and was awaiting restoration in Macedonia, Ohio

Why? "The military" didn't make or design planes. They paid companies to design them, they gave them the target performance and parameters and let them all try to come up with an effective and practical solution. And that plane would be useless as a racer. It is a tiny little plane with no visibility and an air cooled inverted six engine. I don't see anything about that plane that would surprise anyone in 1939. It is not enough just to make a fast plane, it has to have a useful warload and range, altitude performance, etc. You can do that with a tiny racing I've with a high tuned racing engine.

They are far too busy flying to pay attention.