Reasons to be thankful: a fast car and an enthusiastic family

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Today, our American readers will be celebrating Thanksgiving, so we'd like to wish you all a very happy holiday. Certainly, if you're an American car enthusiast, there's much to be thankful for besides the success of the harvest: assembly lines, the first self-starters, the popularisation of the V8 engine, and so on, from early electric runabouts all the way up to the giant Duesenbergs which defied the Depression.

America, of course, has a rich racing history, too. What is probably her most famous race, the International 500-Mile Race at Indianapolis Speedway, was first run in 1911, and in 1908 she hosted the start of what might have been the most gruelling race ever run, the New York to Paris. Prior to that, the Vanderbilt Cup in had been attracting the top cars and drivers from Europe to New York since 1904, and America's finest cars and drivers had likewise been prevalent in European events.

That brings us on to this fascinating photograph, which we feel must be American, although we're always open to correction. The magnificent car, which have not been able to identify, wears a Spartan racing-style body and has an engine of sizeable dimensions and, altogether, it doesn't look a million miles from the sort of mighty machines which were competing in the Vanderbilt Cup during the Heroic Age of the sport.

The family looks slightly irregular, too. We suppose the well-dressed man is the car's owner and the boy and girl are his children - so far, so normal - but on the right-hand side of the picture they appear to be joined by Dick Dastardly and the disembodied hand from The Addams Family. Perhaps Mr. Dastardly was the car's regular driver or riding mechanic when the children weren't commandeering the car. Literally taking advantage of spare hand in a race would probably have been grounds for disqualification, though...

Beyond that, it's a struggle to read too much into this photograph, so we must go over to you. Who can tell us, first of all, what the car is? Once we've established that, did it have any real racing pedigree? If so, whom might this distinctive cast of characters be?

Words: Zack Stiling; photograph: PreWarCar.com archive
 

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