The "Mechanical Rabbit" Sprint Car

This year, we’re celebrating the 70th anniversary of Speedway Motors by looking back at some great cars and stories from our long history. Here’s the story of “Little Joe” Saldana’s “Mechanical Rabbit” sprint car.

We left off our chronology of race cars that were either built or sponsored by “Speedy” Bill Smith with the 4x Roadster. It marked a huge step forward from the old 4x Sedan, but by the mid 60’s, there were new ideas cropping up in the racing world, and a few of them were coming from a talented builder and driver named Don Brown.

Brown was known as “The Prince of Darkness” because of the extremely late hours he kept in the shop. He would usually start his workday in the afternoon and finally hang up his hammer and torch when the sun was rising. Brown was also a driver, and in 1965 “Speedy” Bill tapped him in to drive the 4x roadster at the Nebraska State Fair. The car had already proven itself with Lloyd Beckman and a few others behind the wheel, and Brown was impressed. He started his run way back in the pack and eventually picked off all but two cars to finish third. This got him thinking about building an updated version of the car.

To help bring his ideas to life, Brown enlisted the help of Greg Weld, who had designed and built the 4x Roadster several years before. There was a third player in this story, and it’s his car that we’re looking at here. When Don Brown came from California to work in the Midwest over the summer, he stayed with “Little Joe” Saldana’s family in Lincoln. When Saldana caught wind of what Brown and Weld were up to, he decided that he wanted one of the new cars as well.

Over the winter of ’65-’66, the trio got to work implementing some new designs that they thought would put them at the front of the pack, and there’s some clever stuff going on here. The front torsion bars are only half as wide as the chassis, with the stops hidden under the nose. There’s a fifth link on the rear suspension, similar to what you might see on a late model. Perhaps most notable is the power steering setup. Though common sprint car practice now, this had rarely (if ever) been done in the mid 60’s. Weld and Brown robbed a pump and other components from an OE application and adapted it to their cars.

Eventually all three cars were built, with Weld’s car finished first. He spent the ’66 season dialing it in and right out of the box it hooked hard and showed tremendous potential. Brown and Saldana’s cars were finished up in time for the ’67 season. They were all winning cars, but Saldana’s was by far the most successful. He won races and set records all over the Midwest, including several at Knoxville during that ’67 season. In fact, he was painfully close to winning the Knoxville Nationals that year when a broken wheel took him out of the race.

You’ll notice that Saldana’s car was restored with the Speedway motors logo on it. That’s where “Speedy” Bill enters the story. In 1968, Little Joe was having great success in the car, and Bill Smith was waiting for his big block Chevy powered sprint car to be finished up by Don Edmunds. Never one to watch the races without being involved, Bill sponsored Saldana for the season and “Little Joe’s” Mechanical Rabbit raced its way into Speedway Motors history.

You’re surely asking yourself by now, “Why is this thing called a Mechanical Rabbit?” Strange name for a racecar, right? Well, the answer is simple. Around the time he was noodling on his new design, Brown went to the dog track and noticed that the mechanical rabbit that paced the hounds was completely stuck to the track as it went around. It was also always out front and all the dogs were perpetually chasing it. He wanted his new car to do both of these things, and so a legendary name was born. At first, only Brown’s car was so named, but over time all three cars became known as “Mechanical Rabbits.”

You’ll also notice that we’re calling this car a “sprint car,” but we called the offset roadster a “supermodified.” At this moment in history, sprint cars were beginning to evolve into the sophisticated creatures that we know today. In fact, the Mechanical Rabbit ran as both, with a removable four-post roll cage that allowed it to run as a supermodified on Saturday night and a sprint car on Sunday afternoon.

Following the ’69 season, Saldana sold the car to Lincoln’s Jim Mahoney, who had a few drivers including Don Droud Sr., Steve Schulz, Jon Backlund, and Roger Rager (whose wildly successful racing career is often overshadowed by the fact that he ran the Indy 500 with a school bus engine). It then shuffled from owner to owner and at one point was modified to house a big block Chevy. “Speedy” Bill Smith found it in Chicago in the 90’s and brought it back home to Lincoln.

Not only did Museum of American Speed historian Bob Mays provide most of the information for this article, he actually remembers seeing Little Joe run his Mechanical Rabbit in the 60’s and it was one of his favorites. “That car looked like a spaceship out on the track, and it made all the other cars look like covered wagons. It was just that far ahead of its time,” he says. Bob was also instrumental in getting the Rabbit restored by Mark Randol and John Layne after Bill purchased it for the museum.

Stay tuned here for more Speedway Motors racing history. But for now, enjoy these photos of one seriously revolutionary race car in its forever home at the Museum of American Speed.