THOSE MARVELOUS MODIFIEDS...
Regardless of which racing series is now your favorite, chances are good that every car in the series looks pretty much like every other car in the series. NASCAR Sprint Cup cars and Nationwide Series cars are virtually indistinguishable without their decals. Not only do IndyCars look alike, they are exactly alike except for the paint. The Outlaw sprints, the E-mods, the DIRT series cars...all cookie cutter machines.
But that is sure not the way it was in the early '50s at Dayton Speedway! That was a time when a guy could wander into his garage and with just a few hand tools, a buzz box welder, and some automotive bits and pieces, (and of course many of the auto-racing-required sleepless nights) emerge weeks later with a well modified race car ready to take on the high-speed high-banks of Dayton Speedway.
The modifieds shown here are not necessarily pleasing to the eye in the same way that the Gurney/Weslake Formula 1 car, the Indy Gurney Eagle, or the Porsche 917 were. And, let's be honest, some of them are downright homely, not to mention scary and dangerous looking.
But they all share a sort of primitive beauty that comes from the dedication and imagination of folks who were just as committed to auto racing as we all are. As you look at the pictures of these marvelous machines, try to imagine the courage and daring that it must have taken to roll out onto a track like Dayton...and mash the throttle to the floor.
You need to know two things about the photos on this page. First, mixed in with the Modifieds are cars from the stock class. There weren't enough pictures of stock cars to warrant their own page so I've mixed them in here with the Modifieds. Second, some of the photos were taken at Kil-Kare Speedway near Xenia, Ohio, and possibly other tracks. I've included those pictures here with the assumption that the cars could reasonably have run at Dayton Speedway, and it is likely they did, since they are of the same type and construction as the Modifieds shown at Dayton.
These remarkable photos were found by Les Eder among some old 35 mm slides that belonged to his dad, Dick Eder. Dick Eder was a well known racing driver who competed for many years at Dayton Speedway and other speedways in the midwest. He was always a crowd favorite and at various times held records in modifieds, sprints, late models, and midwest modified divisions at Dayton. We believe that Dick took most of these pictures himself. Besides Les and Dick, I'm indebted to FODS Lynn Mitchell who first brought the existence of Eder's pictures to our attention. Captions are missing on some of the pictures simply because we don't know who built these machines or who drove them. I'm counting on the rapidly growing army of FODS to help identify these cars so that we can give proper historical credit where credit is due!