Tooling around town in an open-air 1917 Ford Model T race car

SPENCER — Did you know there’s a legion of men out there driving around in open-air Ford Model T race cars that can go up to 80 mph?

It’s true. Ronan Young of Spencer is one of them.

You might know him as the man responsible for repairing and maintaining the clocks in the Owen County Courthouse copper dome. Or as the man who drives the aforementioned stripped-down 108-year-old vehicle.

Or maybe his name is familiar from a column I wrote eight years ago.

I wrote about Young and Bloomington resident Carl Cook’s attempt to build a replica of the first motorized car in Bloomington, a clunky machine put together in 1897 by jeweler Joshua O. Howe. The original wasn’t well made and had a top speed of maybe 5 mph.

Building a car Replica of city’s first car loses parts — and no heater

When Cook saw the Howe car at the Monroe County History Center in 2014, he decided to manufacture one just like. With help from Young, who Cook told me “can make just about anything.”

When they needed custom engine parts cast from iron, they paid the artist fee at the Greene County Sculpture Trails site and made their own. “Instead of casting sculptures,” Cook said, “we were casting engine parts.”

Their Howe replica’s engine ran well, but vibrated badly. Which contributed to another problem Cook described to me back then.

“It doesn’t get much farther than 50 feet before something falls off. We could start the engine and run it for a few minutes, but as soon as we make a move, parts break and fall off. Every possible failure mode occurs.”

Oh well.

A Model T racer? Yep.

Back to Young’s 1917 Model T racer, which is the topic of this column. A reader suggested I track it down, and a week later I was in the passenger seat of Young’s Tin Lizzy racer, driving through downtown Spencer and trying not to fall out.

There was nothing to hang onto and no seat belt strapping me in. A 7-gallon gas tank behind my head. Young explained that the car has two speeds, low and high, and no real brake to speak of, just a transmission lever you push that has what he called “a slowing effect.

Not that we were traveling very fast down Washington Street, then Main, but my hat did almost fly off my head twice. Young tells me the car has an auxiliary transmission he can switch to that “goes way fast, up to 80,” but says he’s not gone faster than “in the 50s.”

This is not a vehicle I would want to be in at 50 or 80 mph. There’s no speedometer, and really no dashboard to speak of, and I bet we didn’t top 10 mph on my test drive.

When he started it up, a gust of black smoke poured from the exhaust and the backfire sound that followed sounded as if someone had been shot right there.

Young gets a kick out of driving the century-old racer, once traveling the backroads 20 miles or so to Bloomington.

The car has an original Ford Model T engine and stock Model T tires mounted on wood-spoke wheels. The body sits eight inches closer to the ground than a standard Model T.

This old Ford has been to the Newport Antique Auto Hill Climb several times during the decade Young has owned the racer. It always makes it up the steep 1,800-foot hill, just barely, and slowly.

The event, held in the Indiana town of Newport the first Sunday every October, attracts hundreds of pre-1955 competing cars and thousands of spectators.

Young meets up with about 20 other Model T racer owners who come for the event and a chance to climb the famous hill.

“There’s a group of guys in their 80s from Iowa who come every year with theirs,” he said, anticipating attending if the weather’s nice on Oct. 5. “We make it up the hill, but it’s not fast.”

Have a story to tell about a car or truck? Contact My Favorite Ride reporter Laura Lane at llane@heraldt.com or 812-318-5967.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Times: My Favorite Ride: Tooling around town in a 1917 Ford Model T race car