Pre-war ELTO midget

 

 

While Offenhauser, Chevy II, Volkswagen, Esslinger and Toyota engines spring to mind as the dominant midget auto racing engines of their respective eras, the sport has always featured a wide variety of powerplants, as evidenced by this beautiful example of an early pre-war midget powered by a Elto 4-60 engine displayed at the  2017 Calistoga Speedway Hall of Fame induction ceremony.   

 

 

 

Outboard motor pioneer Ole Evinrude sold his eponymous company in 1913 to care for his ill wife with one of the terms of the sale that he could not enter the outboard motor business for five years. Ole kept experimenting and developed a lighter more powerful two-cylinder outboard motor and in 1921 he founded a new company to sell his invention. Ole couldn’t use his name for the new company so he called it ELTO, which stood for “Evinrude Light Twin Outboard."

 

 

In 1928 ELTO an immediate leader in the market introduced the ground-breaking four-cylinder two-cycle outboard motor which used horizontally opposed cylinders. The following year, ELTO, Evinrude Motor Company and Lockwood a Michigan outboard motor manufacturer merged to form the Outboard Motor Company (OMC).

 

 

During the early nineteen thirties Elto marketed two two-cycle engines to the midget auto racing community; the Elto 4-60 (as in this car) comprised of four cylinders with a single rotary valve that displaced 59.4 cubic inches that produced 60 horsepower and the “class X” also a four cylinder engine that displaced 61 cubic inches fed by dual rotary valves and was advertised at 67 horsepower. For a lubricant racers added castor oil to a mix of methanol (wood alcohol), benzene which created the signature trail of smoke associated with Elto engines.

 

 

A brand-new  “complete Class A” Elto-powered midget car powered by an Elto 4-60 engine with two extra wheels was advertised nationwide for a list price of $1425 while a midget with a more powerful “class X” motor sold for $200 more.   

 

    

During the latter part of the 1933 season Southern Californian Billy Betteridge widely regarded as midget auto racing’s first superstar replaced the original converted Kaley outboard engine in his “little red racer” the #7 “Power-Lube Special” with an Elto 4-60 and in 1934 rocketed to  the 1934 Midget Auto Racing Association (MARA) with a reputed fifty feature wins during 1934. Other midget racing stars who won in Elto-powered machines included Jack “Curly” Mills, Pat Warren, Frank Brisko and Ronny Householder.  

The introduction of the Offenhauser midget engine during 1934 marked the beginning of the decline of the Elto as a top-flight competitive engine, although the loud smoky ELTO engines continued to appear in “Class B” races across the country until the outbreak of World War 2 around the same time period that the ELTO nameplate vanished from the outboard motor marketplace.  

The example shown at Calistoga was restored by Marvin Silva and is owned by the Schmid family collection from Stockton California.   

All photographs by the author