Winners Tested Their Metal in Classic Car Race

A parade of classic automobiles chugged, roared and rumbled across the finish line of the 3,660-mile Great American Race in Anaheim on Friday with drivers from Texas and Indiana in the lead.

The 12-day race, which started June 26 in Norfolk, Va., ended in the turn-of-the-century atmosphere of Disneyland’s Town Square as a Navy band feted the winners.

A field of 120 autos built before 1936 competed in the coast-to-coast contest. Drivers came from the United States, Japan, Canada, India, Switzerland and Great Britain.

Well-known makes such as Jaguars, Model Ts and Rolls-Royces competed with such obscure cars as a 1902 Mors and a Locomobile along a circuitous route that took them through Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, the Southwest and on to California.

Corporate sponsors put up $250,000 in prize money for the seventh annual race.

The big winner was Dick Burdick, 60, of Rosanky, Tex., who took home $50,000 for coming in first overall in his 1924 Bentley. The touring car was one of three he entered and one of more than 50 classics he and his family display in a museum near Austin.

“I love the competition and we just got really, really lucky this year,” Burdick said.

Burdick’s team also raced a 1905 De Detrich, an open-wheeled racing car that he said was once buried in a French barn to avoid confiscation by the German army during World War II.

Burdick, a manufacturer of electric heating cable, said the $50,000 would come “pretty close” to covering the cost of running the race.

Top honors in the “brass badge” division for racing cars went to David Kleptz, 33, of Terre Haute, Ind., who drove a 1912 Haynes.

“I didn’t have to do a thing to the car except add about a quart and a half of oil a day,” said Kleptz, who works in his family’s building-supply business. “Our support van was the one that kept breaking down.”

Kleptz scoffed at the idea that the cars, some of them nearly 90 years old, were better off in a museum than on the road.

“If old man Ford were to come back, he’d be appalled that these cars are kept locked up,” Kleptz said. “They were made to be driven.”