Famous Indy Racer to be Auctioned at Hershey

Here's something you don't see every day: A 1950s vintage Indy roadster up for sale, and not only that, it's one that was raced by one of the great drivers from that era and that genre of racing. It's coming up for auction at this year's swap meet/car show/out-sized extravaganza that is known as the AACA Hershey Fall Meet, or more simply as Hershey.

For the collector car set, not necessarily the exotic car collectors or those into racing cars, but those of you out there that are into Detroit iron, stuff with brass radiators, car companies that went out of business before the Kennedy administration, Hershey is it.

For starters, it is unbelievable huge. It started out as just a swap meet, where you cold get things like front uprights for you 1926 Dodge, but it grew into this monster the size of a small country. I remember reading a few years back that if you were to walk up and down each individual aisle of the swap meet portion of Hershey at a normal walking pace, it would take you something like 6 days to cover.

With this kind of popularity, you know that sooner or later the big time collector car auctioneers (the remoras of the car world) would have to get in on the action. Normally, they deal in old time American stuff. Packards and Chevs and FoMoCo this and that. But this time around, they're offing up something that really caught my eye.

The car in question is the famous 1949 Belanger Special Indy Roadster. It is presented in its blue and gold livery, the way it was raced in the Indy 500 by Duane Carter. And for those of you that don't know, his name is pronounced DOO-ain, not duh-WAIN. He could be kind of touchy about that, from what I gathered.

The Belanger Special, which did indeed race at Indy, is pretty much a prefect example of what that type of racing car was like, from 1945 until Colin Chapman and Jimmy Clark showed up.

The seating position is bolt upright, the safety features are notional, and the engine is a straight four Offy. That would be an Offenhauser engine, but you know that already, don't you. Derived from the shops of the amazing Harry Miller, the Offy was one of the most successful engines of all time, and also one of the longest lived. They were running Offys into late 80s.

The Belanger Special has the added feature of being used in the motion picture "To Please A Lady", starring Clark Gable, Barbara Stanwyck and Adolphe Menjou. No, it wasn't a very good movie, but if you can make it through the soap opera "plot" you get a pretty good idea about what American circle track racing was like at that time.

With such a lengthy racing history and having the Hollywood cache thing on top of all that, this unique Indy roadster is estimated to go for between $150,000-$200,000 US

Source: ClassicalDrives. Photos from RM Auctions.