Frank Kurtis and the Indianapolis Years

A California race car builder whose roadsters won five Indianapolis 500s while the race counted toward the World Championship.

Kurtis Kraft was the race car company of Frank Kurtis, who started it when he built his own midget car chassis in the late 1930s. Based in Glendale, California, it went on to build midget cars, quarter midgets, sprint cars, sports cars, cars for the Bonneville salt flats and Championship cars for American oval racing. Its midgets, fitted with a small version of the Offenhauser engine, dominated their class for two decades, and Kurtis became the first person who was not a driver to enter the National Midget Auto Racing Hall of Fame.

Kurtis Kraft appears in World Championship records because the Indianapolis 500 counted toward the drivers' championship from 1950 to 1960. Kurtis built around 120 Indianapolis cars, most of them with Offenhauser engines, and they were a fixture of the race throughout those years.

Five of those 500s went to Kurtis cars. Johnnie Parsons won in 1950 and Lee Wallard in 1951. Bill Vukovich then won in 1953 and again in 1954, and Bob Sweikert won in 1955. Those five wins are the company's whole World Championship tally, and every one came at Indianapolis.

Kurtis made a single appearance in a conventional Grand Prix. At the 1959 United States Grand Prix, Rodger Ward started a Kurtis midget car, a machine never meant for road racing, and it ran at the back for 20 laps before its clutch failed. Counting that race, Kurtis cars started 12 championship events between 1950 and 1960. Kurtis later sold its midget business to Johnny Pawl and its quarter midget business to Ralph Potter in 1962.

Drivers