Photos courtesy Worldwide Auctioneers.
Until the 1930s, the international racing community hardly considered the Bonneville Salt Flats a suitable location for high-speed record setting. Montlhery in France, the Pendine Sands in Wales, and Daytona Beach in the United States tended to host most speed-seekers. Largely through the efforts of one man, Ab Jenkins, did Bonneville become the Mecca of speed it is today, and a replica of the 1934 Pierce-Arrow that Jenkins used to convince the world to head to Bonneville will soon head to auction.
Of course, others had recognized Bonneville’s capacity for speed long before Utah native Jenkins began racing there. Others had scouted it out for bicycle races in the early years of the century, and the Blitzen Benz – along with a troupe of other circuit racers – famously ran there in 1914, but World War I brought a halt to any racing activities over the next few years, and besides, most racers and race promoters found the salt flats too remote for racing. Jenkins, who began racing cross-country in 1923, had run motorcycles on the salt previously, but didn’t campaign an automobile there until 1932, the first timed speed trials at Bonneville since 1914, according to Gordon Eliot White’s Ab and Marvin Jenkins: The Studebaker Connection and the Mormon Meteors.
The opportunity came about when Pierce-Arrow, which had hired Jenkins to squeeze some more power out of the company’s new flathead V-12 engine, gave him a 1932 Pierce-Arrow V-12 for some high-speed runs to promote the engine, but Jenkins apparently had it in mind to bring auto racing to Bonneville for some time. According to Louise Ann Noeth’s Bonneville: The Fastest Place on Earth, Jenkins tried to convince the AAA to move racing to Bonneville as early as 1928, noting how incidents like Frank Lockhart’s fatal accident at Daytona could be avoided on the wide-open plain of the salt flats. Regardless, racing continued at Daytona.
Jenkins’s run in 1932, a 24-hour effort over a 10-mile circular course smoothed out of the salt, resulted in an average speed of 112.91 MPH, which Pierce-Arrow trumpeted as a new record, but which the AAA refused to recognize. With increased sponsorship – and after clearing up a dispute with the AAA that contributed to the sanctioning body’s refusal to recognize the 1932 speed run – Jenkins returned to the salt flats in 1933 with a new Pierce-Arrow V-12 convertible and made another 24-hour run. Not only did he average 117.77 MPH over that time, which the AAA recognized as a new world record, he also filmed that year’s run and famously emerged clean-shaven from the convertible after smuggling a safety razor and tube of shaving cream on board.
According to White, Jenkins intended to follow up that run by raising the 24-hour endurance record “so high that if the British wanted to challenge it they would have to run at Bonneville.” Atop a stock Pierce-Arrow chassis he placed a custom aluminum boattail speedster body, and he powered the new Ab Jenkins Special with a Pierce-Arrow V-12 modified with higher compression heads and a custom intake manifold with six carburetors – good for about 235 horsepower versus the stock V-12′s 130. On August 17, 1934, Jenkins made good on his promise, increasing the record to 127.229 MPH. More than that, according to White, the 1934 run “finally persuaded the international racing community that the Bonneville Salt Flats might be the prime place in the world to make speed record attempts.” While other manufacturers soon started to conduct their own speed and endurance runs on the salt, Bonneville did eventually become the site of numerous world speed record runs after World War II.
Jenkins, of course, would go on to become synonymous with Bonneville and with land speed racing, particularly at the wheel of the Mormon Meteor and its successor, the Mormon Meteor III. While both of those cars still exist and have benefited from top-shelf restorations, White noted that all three Pierce-Arrows that Jenkins drove at Bonneville have disappeared. John Hollansworth of Hot Springs, Arkansas, said that in the early 2000s he took an interest in the Jenkins Pierce-Arrows, enough to contact Jenkins’s son, Marvin, who told him that Pierce-Arrow took the cars around the country to its dealerships to promote its V-12 engine, but that, indeed, somewhere along the line they just disappeared. So Hollansworth decided to build a replica of the Ab Jenkins Special.
With Marvin Jenkins’s blessing – and with whatever pictures, records, notes and drawings Marvin Jenkins could provide – Hollansworth started with a 1932 Pierce-Arrow frame that he bought out of California, a 1933 Pierce-Arrow V-12 engine that came out of Arizona, and period Rudge-Whitworth wheels that came out of Nebraska. He entrusted the period modifications of the latter to engine builder Armour Titus while he had Pierce-Arrow restorer Ron Blissitt build a custom six-carb intake manifold. To replicate the aluminum body, he had Jamie Hart, an instructor for the automotive restoration program at McPherson College in McPherson, Kansas, take to his English wheel.
Hollansworth finished the project in 2003 and drove the replica Ab Jenkins Special at Bonneville that year, topping 110 MPH in an effort to match Ab Jenkins’ record 127 MPH speed. He sold it shortly after, and the Ab Jenkins Special has remained in a Salt Lake City collection since then, occasionally emerging to go on display with the Mormon Meteors or at regional shows. Later this month, it will head to the Worldwide Auctioneers sale in Auburn, Indiana, with a pre-auction estimate of $350,000 to $450,000.
The auction will take place Saturday, August 31, at the National Automotive and Truck Museum. For more information, visit Worldwide-Auctioneers.com.
UPDATE (14.August 2013): Two scans of photos of the Ab Jenkins Special from the aforementioned Gordon Eliot White book:
