Lash Hot Rod Bares It All
By noderel:
"Lash" can be a verb or a noun. As a verb, it means to strike, whip, flog, beat, thrash, strap, hit, whallop, or whack. As a noun it is a strike, a blow, or a hit. A friend of John Lawson picked Lash as the name for his racy, street legal hot rod and it makes sense, because John's car will strike you right between your eyes when you see it in the flesh . . . or, should I say, in the bare metal.
John, a former racer from the Indianapolis area, was working on Joel Throne's La Carrera Panamericana road racing car for a friend. One of Thorne's cars, the Art Sparks-built Thorne Engineering Special, won the Indianapolis 500 in 1946. He was a full-time California playboy and sometime milionaire who had himself driven at Indy, finishing ninth in 1938, seventh in 1939, and fifth in 1940. Competing in the Mexican Road races was right up his alley.
George Mongon contacted me to help him do the car. "He said he'd pay me back by furnishing the materials I needed to do my own car," Lawson recalled. "At that time, George was working as a fund raiser for the U.S. Air Fore Museum. He had what was really half a frame of a car that had been all chopped up really bad; he wanted me to design and build a frame for it." Eventually, Mongon left his museum job to pursue his own business and the project's finances dried up.
Lawson used whatever parts he could from the old frame and turned unusable parts into gussets and brackets for Thorne's Mexican road race car. "I decided I liked the concept for the other car, but I didn't like the length of the body," Lawson told Hot Rod Hotline. "So, I decided to build it a lot different." This project took him seven long years to complete and the car made its debut at the recent Performance Racing Industry (PRI) Show.
"I went ahead and bent up the frame, but I didn't want it to look just like the other one," Lawson pointed out. "I ordered 2-in. mandrel tubing and had it bent. All the bends were done at one time. I started the car, leaving specific spaces for the cockpit and other sections. The wheelbase was determined by a feeling of design balance."
Lawson's friend Dave McDaniels, who was a patternmaker, taught Lawson how to make casting patterns for some parts he could then have cast up in aluminum. McDaniels also helped Lawson make some of the parts himself. "Dave showed me what I was doing right and what I was doing wrong and I liked making patterns," Lawson explained. "I made patterns for the wheels, front rotors, gear drive, valley cover, front drive and fuel pump."
Lawson loved the size and look of the big roadsters that ran at Indy years ago. He remembered those cars because his father was an Indy Car mechanic who worked for Mickey Thompson when he ran there in 1963. "I was shooting for a design that had a lot of the older Indy car look and flair, but I wanted something a little bigger than the real Indy cars," said Lawson. "I liked the look of a cross torsion arm suspension that Frank Kurtis used on his 1953 Indy car, so I sort of copied that, but all the rest was my own design."
According to Lawson, "One thing led to another. I saw a gas cap I liked, but I wanted mine to be bigger, so I turned it into something personal." He decided to leave the car unpainted to really show the craftsmanship that went into it. "Of course, whoever wants it more than me someday, can buy it and paint it," Lawson admitted. "But I did the things I wanted to do like making the all-chrome grilles. Basically, the car is all hand-built, except for the spindles, the master cylinder and the rear end. It has a fuel-injected '56 Buick 'nailhead' V-8 that's all gear drive (no belts) and makes about 450 hp."
When he was building the car, Lawson said that he "caught a lot of smoke" from Indy legend A.J. Watson, who was following the project. "I'd like to see you finish the car before I die," Watson told him. "We didn't quite get there," Lawson admitted. "But A.J. did see it when it was about 80 percent done."
Lawson also has about 90 percent of the Joel Thorne Mexican Road Car, but he's not rushing into that one. "I had a stroke and I'm tired and worn out," he said. "I'm just trying to get as many projects off my plate as I can, but I was happy to be able to take a whack at The Lash and get it done."