Prather Racing

[MiniDave]

Last night I went up to Prather Racing's headquarters , just south of Topeka out in the middle of Kansas farm country - the occasion was Kent Prather's birthday (he's the same age as I am - old!) and the first chance I'd had to visit the race shop. The building is a 45X75x21 high metal building that was absolutely filled with cars and car stuff! to the rafters in fact, on some three deep pallet racking that went all the way to the ceiling. I'm sure there is no way for him to catalog everything that's stuffed in every inch of the shop - this was no Penske racing with everything done in white, but rather a shop that had been used for decades to produce some championship winning cars and engines.

Kent built his own engine dyno, but his expertise is not limited to just powertrain - although that's the main business of Prather Racing - he's a great suspension engineer too. He built Scott Schmidt's engine - Scott's a great driver too but this is one fast Sprite - 134 naturally aspirated HP out of 1275cc and dead reliable....not bad.

Here's a page on their history.http://pratherracing.com/history.shtml

It's amazing to think of the performance that has come from this little shop out in the middle of Kansas farmland!

Kent Prather is also one of the nicest fellows you'll ever meet, always ready to help a fellow competitor and always willing to give advice and information. I'm really happy to have met this group of old school racers - it started when I bought a Sprite engine block for Buzz from Clancy Schmidt and I'm pleased to have been accepted into this group of old fart racers - takes me back to my days of racing in the late 60's in my H Production 948 Box Sprite!

I hope to spend more time at the races with these guys this coming season, before we all hang up our driving gloves once and for all.

John Styers and I are going to set up a time this winter to take our Minis to Jesse Prather's shop, he has a chassis dyno and we're going to see just what our munchkin motors are putting out...should be fun, although I don't expect big numbers for my car!

[gr8kornholio]

All cool stuff I'm finding out was in KS the whole time I grew up there and unfortunately didn't know about. 

[MiniDave]

Yeah, Kansas was a car place back in the day - we used to have 2 - count 'em - 2 Ferrari dealerships here in KC. We also had Maserati, Citroen, Rolls/Bentley, Alfa, 3 Fiat dealers, 2 Renaults and all of the British guys......

You used to see all sorts of unusual and exotic cars here...don't know where they all went - I think a lot of them are still here hiding in garages but you never see them on the streets.

KC had it's own race team too, with their own hauler and mechanics that went to all the big races, Sebring, Daytona - all the big ones.

If you go the Prather Racing's history page, they've been racing locally and nationally since the mid 70's