Hahn’s car on display

Longtime Oklahoma racer and Chili Bowl promoter Emmett Hahn was reunited with one of his championship rides. The car is on display at the Chili Bowl trade show at River Spirit Expo Center.

TULSA — While walking through the River Spirit Expo Center on Saturday during move-in, Chili Bowl co-promoter and former race car driver Emmett Hahn saw something that made him stop in his tracks.

Sitting in the Tulsa Racing Legends trade show booth was the restored John Zink-owned super modified race car Hahn drove to several local and regional titles in the 1970s.

Hahn had not seen the car since he last climbed out of it nearly 40 years ago.

“It was a total surprise,” said Hahn, who knew nothing about the car being on display. “I drove that thing for nine years. It is part of my racing career. It is like a family car. I can remember all the things on it.”

Hahn was not even sure if the car still existed after all these years.

“I thought that it did, but I was not real sure,” he said.

At the Zink Ranch in Skiatook, the Zink family has many of the race cars Jack Zink owned on display in a museum, including their 1955 Indy 500-winning racer. But the super modified car Hahn drove and won with for most of his career had been sitting under a tarp in storage and forgotten.

As Hahn stood and stared at the car he made history with, memories of his early days behind the wheel racing at the Tulsa Fairgrounds came to mind just like it was yesterday.

Soon, a crowd begin to gather that included family as Hahn climbed in the cockpit.

“When I crawled in it the other day it was like being home again,” Hahn said. “That car was a good race car. It is like an old friend. It has Tulsa Speedway at the fairgrounds written all over it. That is all you think about.”

Driving that car for Jack Zink, Hahn won more races then he can count throughout Oklahoma, Kansas and Texas.

“That race car right there probably won 125 main events,” Hahn recalled. “I won the NCRA in '71 and we were the first out-ofstater to win the Hutchinson (Kansas) Nationals.

“In those 10 years we had about five championships and a couple of seconds. We won at Oklahoma City and Muskogee, Wichita, Amarillo, Wichita Falls. That car just fit me like a glove.”

The car was also controversial for its two speed differential.

“I think a lot of these racers that have been around a long time have never seen one,” Hahn said. “I think only two of them was made, and A.J. Foyt had both of them, and Dennie Moore talked Foyt out of one and we ran it in the car.”

Except for one-third of a season, Hahn was the only driver of the car.

“Dennie Moore was the mechanic on that thing, and there was not a better crew chief around,” said Hahn. “He built the car, and I think Jackie Howerton was part of it. Howerton originally drove that car the first part of the season until he moved to Indy. It was empty about four or five weeks, then I got in it.”

A lot of the credit for finding the car goes to Racing Legends organizer Chief Eaton. He has restored several race cars from the early days of Tulsa Fairgrounds racing and called the Zink ranch to find it.

Ranch personnel were not sure where it was.

“Dennie Moore restored it about 20 years ago, and it’s been in the barn,” Eaton said. “I called Autumn Lancaster, who runs the museum, and told her what we would like to do. I went out there, and the ranch foreman found it.

“We started uncovering cars and the third one we uncovered was it. It had two flats and was pretty dirty. We had to put a new tube in the left rear tire, but we just cleaned it real good.”

Hahn said, “Chief was persistent, and went up there and dug that thing out of the barn and did an awful good job of restoring the thing."

The car will be on display through Saturday at the Legends booth in the trade show then it goes back to the Zink Ranch.