We were saddened to hear that legendary custom car builder Gene Winfield recently passed away at the age of 97. We spent the day with him in 2011, and in tribute have reproduced the article from Octane issue 94.
When the wind blows it blows hard at El Mirage. Sideways across the dry lakebed it whines, sending huge dust devils spiralling into the sky. Of course, Gene Winfield has seen all this before. He started coming here before many of today’s racers were born, and the breeze isn’t about to stop his fun.
Gene’s just completed his first run of the morning and, all things considered, he’s looking calm and composed. Maybe he should have pedalled his ’32 roadster as hard as some of the other early-bird racers did, but that just isn’t Gene’s style. Never was, never will be…
‘It was very slippery out there,’ he begins, his composure 100% present and correct, ‘and the wind was blowing me sideways from the right. I got off the course and was hitting the cones so I got off the throttle, got back on the course and hit the throttle again. So I only ran 179mph, but I was happy with that considering I had to take my foot off the gas.
‘Usually if you get a little bit sideways in a roadster it will spin, but I have 26º of caster in the front end, and I have almost 600lb of lead in the front too, so it goes very straight. At Bonneville last year I got a little bit sideways and I had to let off, corrected, got back on it and went 203mph.’
El Mirage is a sprawling dry lakebed situated in the Mojave Desert, north-east of Los Angeles. Curiously, nobody knows for sure when the first racers touched tyres with the lunar-like surface, but, whoever those lucky people were, they must have thought all their ships had come in at once. Less surprising is that this wild and surreal place remained a secret no longer and the first organised dry lake time trials began in the 1920s.
Born in Springfield, Missouri, on 16 June 1927, Gene Winfield bought his first car at the age of 15. The car in question was a 1929 Ford Model A coupe and it set the tone for the rest of Winfield’s life. ‘That’s right. I actually started off street racing in a roadster I had built. Then little by little I got into the custom end of things. People would bring over a car and they would want the hood or trunk rolling off, or the emblems removing and the holes welding up. I was also building flathead engines and had a little speed shop. I was doing all this at the back of my mother’s house, in a chicken coop. I put in a cement floor, added on to it and built a spray booth. So little by little I was moving towards customs and away from the street racing.
‘Then I decided to go up town to a bigger shop. I started off as Windy’s Custom Shop, then I changed it to Winfield’s Custom Shop, then later it became Winfield’s Special Projects because I was building more movie and television cars at the time.’
Winfield quickly established a highly recognisable and individual approach that drove not only young hot-rodders to his door but major manufacturers such as Ford too. ‘I think the reason for that is I have always liked clean styling. For example, the Jade Idol was a radical custom but it was done smooth. And I do like to create things that are a little bit different. I will look at something like a grille and I will think about how many ways I can change it. I might come up with seven or eight ways. Then I narrow it down to three, and then to one. Then I build it. I try to be clean, simple and elegant.’
For many years life was good for Gene Winfield and his contemporaries. Cars such as the Jade Idol, King ‘T’ and Solar Scene rolled out of the workshop to be greeted by rapturous media attention and hordes of bewitched show-goers. But all too soon the rule of the custom car and hot rod came to a shuddering halt with the arrival of the muscle car.
‘It was a very disappointing time,’ admits Winfield with a scowl, ‘because the Majors flat aced me out of business. In the late ’60s custom cars went down to the basement… it was all done.’
Or so Winfield thought. Unbeknown to Gene, the Big Three had been keeping a close eye on his work, and that of rivals such as George Barris, Dean Jeffries and Darryl Starbird. And so it was, served with a great side order of irony, that Winfield’s Custom Shop signed up with Ford to perform redesign exercises on cars such as the Comet Cyclone and Galaxie 500.
Gene worked on the Galileo 7 shuttle craft for Star Trek and on the hover cars for Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner
‘It certainly was nice of them to come to me for help with their projects,’ confirms Winfield, an almost imperceptible smile skirting the corners of his mouth, ‘but in the early ’80s hot rods and customs made their comeback and I jumped on it and started building parts for Mercurys. I’ve been in it ever since.’
And not only was Winfield hard at work for Ford, Chrysler and GM, he was also lending his expertise to Hollywood. Most notably, Gene worked on the Galileo 7 shuttle craft for Star Trek and on the hover cars for Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, but it was a rollercoaster ride out in movie land.
‘Mostly it was wonderful,’ beams Winfield. ‘Some of the directors were hard to work with because they wanted everything perfect and then you wouldn’t see the details in the finished cut, but it really was terrific.
‘However, when I moved out of LA and into the desert I decided not to do any more film work. Some of the movie companies kind of screwed me around a little bit. I bid on a big movie and made 21 trips to Hollywood with different artwork and then someone else got the job, so I said to heck with it.’
These days Winfield lives not too far from his beloved El Mirage, which clearly still means as much to him now as it did when he made his first trip out here. ‘The course is the same as it was back in the day, but it was a little smoother then,’ recalls Gene, sipping slowly at a bottle of water. ‘And you didn’t have as many cars running. In the ’50s and ’60s you’d maybe get 75 cars; today it is more like 200 and that chews up the track.
‘Out at Bonneville they call it Salt Fever – land speed record racing gets in your blood. It’s true I was away from it for a number of years in the 1970s, but I always wanted to run again so I built my current ’32 roadster. It’s got a Robert Yates 368ci Ford NASCAR engine with a single 1000cfm Holley carb. There is a Tremec five-speed transmission, Halibrand Championship Quick-Change rear end, and I made the chassis myself using 3/16in steel for the rails.’
At 83 years of age, Winfield has the energy of a man half his age and continues to build cars at his five-acre desert spread. ‘At the moment I’m chopping a bunch of tops. I just did a ’50 Buick fastback and when you chop one of those you have to cut a wedge all the way through to the bottom of the trunk.
‘I’ve also just started a project for myself. Back in 1963 I built an Econoline pick-up for Ford called the Pacifica. Well, I just started building one for myself. Two weeks ago I sectioned the front half just like I did back in the ’60s and I’m going to put in asymmetrical headlights and tail lights. Everything will be identical to the original, including the paint.’
Today hot rods and customs are lauded by collectors, fans and auction houses alike. Prices have been going through the roof for many years and the history of the culture is being writ large in a constant stream of books and publications.
Yet the recognition has been a long time coming. ‘I’m going to continue to build cars,’ Gene asserts robustly. ‘And when people ask me when am I going to retire, I tell them when they put me in the ground.’
Long may it continue.
