‘Master’ Clings to Racing Obsession

Ed Pink’s obsession with racing engines dates back to the early ‘40s, when he hung around the San Fernando Valley with other backyard racers.

“The Valley was the place to be,” said Pink. “I had a ’36 Ford Coupe with one of the old Ford flathead engines in it, painted candy-apple red, with a super-duper Tony Nancy upholstery job, all kinds of chrome, everything. I used to drive it over to the Bob’s Big Boy restaurant in Toluca Lake every Friday night. The trick was to get out of the parking lot without attracting police.”

Ed Pink doesn’t worry about the police anymore. In the 40 years since he cruised his first parking lot, this 55-year-old Westlake Village resident has become a legend, legally, on the basis of the work he does inside his Van Nuys engine shop.

Pink builds racing engines. In households with subscriptions to magazines like Road & Track he has long been known as a master of his trade. His nickname, in fact, is “the old master,” according to some of the magazine covers lining the walls of his office.

At the height of his fame--in the ‘60s and ‘70s--Ed Pink was the Dr. Frankenstein of drag racing. His monstrous engines, usually built from scratch, helped make the careers of drivers such as Shirley Muldowney and Don Prudhomme, to name only two of his better-known customers.

The same motors made Pink something of an idol to serious mechanics, devoted grease monkeys, and to everyone else with a passion for extremely fast cars.

Since the mid-’70s, Pink’s stomping ground has been the Indy car circuit, where he works on the custom-built, $50,000 engines that power race cars at tracks like Indianapolis Motor Speedway and Pocono International Raceway.

It is sophisticated work, he says, and not nearly so likely to make cult figures out of mechanics. In the world of Indy cars, drivers and their sponsors get far more attention than engine men.

The relative peace and quiet doesn’t bother him, however. It clearly hasn’t slowed the work at what Pink calls his “laboratory,” a deceptively small-looking building set in a messy industrial neighborhood on Raymer Street, near the Van Nuys GM plant.

The building, which stretches backward into a 6,000-square-foot shop, is something of an engine lovers’ heaven. Inside, Pink says he has installed about $1 million worth of equipment in the garage over the years, ranging from state-of-the-art engine-testing machinery to surgical flashlights to a computerized “dynamometer” room used to simulate racing conditions.

Over the years, equipment in this shop has been connected to nearly every engine on the automotive evolutionary chart. Since his days as a street racer, Pink says, he has worked on them all, from Model Ts to Godzilla-like funny car engines.

He has built engines for racing boats, a few stock cars, several salt-flat racers, a lot of Indy cars, and more drag racers than he cares to remember.

He once rebuilt the motors of 17 cars purchased by the late William Harrah, the restaurant owner, who gave them away as gifts.

“I’ve probably spent half my life working on these things,” Pink said. “I worked on my share of weird projects, but most of it has been a question of speed and reliability. The idea is to fix the engines so they go as fast as possible without dying. That’s basically all there is to it.”

Pink himself bears little resemblance to the stereotypical motor freak. He has gray hair, and shows no traces of the paunch he carried through most of his drag racing days. He talks like a businessman, choosing his words carefully, sidestepping chances to talk big or make a lot of jokes.

“The technology is what keeps you involved,” he explained. “Engines keep getting more and more sophisticated, so there’s always something new to work on.”

For the past several years the technology in Pink’s shop has taken the form of modified Cosworth engines used widely on the Indy Car circuit. The engines, produced in England, belong to three Indy Racing teams, each supported by a maze of drivers and sponsors.

Pink’s shop can be a pressure cooker during weeks preceding Indy Car races, as he and his staff “improve” the engines flown in from England. The engines are tested repeatedly, often disassembled and reassembled several times in the days before a race. The staff at the shop includes Pink’s 28-year-old son, Bill, already a 10-year veteran.

It has never crossed his mind to slow down, Pink says. Lately, when he isn’t working at the shop, Pink has been looking for investors to support an Indy car motor he co-designed and hopes to produce.

Pink says he doesn’t expect to move his business from the Valley, even though he is no longer closely tied to the drag racing world. In California, he says, the Valley remains the hub of high-performance racing because of the concentration of drivers, mechanics and suppliers of engine parts. “I came here on purpose,” is the way he puts it.

For the record, Pink hadn’t been over to the Bob’s Big Boy for decades, until he stopped by for a hamburger a few Fridays back.

“I sat there eating for a long time before it dawned on me where I was,” he said. “I looked around the parking lot. I thought, gee, am I the only one left?”