This is a 1941 Willys Barstool Go Kart Racer, it’s essentially a go kart with a miniature 1941 Willys-style body over the top, an upright riding position, and a 49cc single-cylinder engine with a centrifugal clutch.
The model seen here has obviously been well-used, it’s finished in black with flames on the front, and it’s now being offered for sale out of Morgantown, Pennsylvania with an asking price of $2,900 USD.
Above Video: This YouTube clip gives a great look into what barstool racing is, what it looks like, and why people like it.
History Speedrun: Barstool Racers
A barstool racer is a small single-seat machine that is, perhaps unsurprisingly, built around a barstool. There is no official or standard design that defines the genre, and the name has covered very different machines over the decades, but a common configuration puts the stool high on a kart-style tube frame, with a single-cylinder engine driving the rear axle by chain and motorcycle handlebars holding the throttle and brake levers. The format has no single origin story, or if it does, it’s seemingly lost to history.
The Dallas Barstool Races
One of the best-documented early barstool racing traditions began in Dallas, Texas back in 1978. It actually started out as a bar joke – Bill Jenkins and a group of his friends had been marking St. Patrick’s Day with escalating stunts, including painting the center stripe on Knox Street green, and by that year the police had caught on.
One of the group suggested bolting an engine and wheels to a bar stool and racing in an empty parking lot instead, in the hopes of avoiding a misdemeanor charge. According to the event’s organizers, the original six builders were Jenkins, Thomas Spangler, Johnny Gable, John Pullman, Mike Carr, and Keith Blackwell, and the races moved from outside the Quiet Man Bar on Knox Street to the Highland Park Cafeteria parking lot, then to the Dart Bar on Cedar Springs and Luke’s Outhouse.
The Dallas Farmers Market eventually took the event on with sponsorship from Ben E. Keith and Budweiser. The Dallas run lasted 13 years and ended on lower Greenville in 1991.
Jenkins kept the original machines, he later moved to Ben Wheeler, in East Texas, at the invitation of Brooks Gremmels, a former oilman who had spent years buying up and restoring the town’s derelict downtown before his death in 2014.
This is a 1941 Willys Barstool Go Kart Racer, it’s essentially a go kart with a miniature 1941 Willys-style body over the top, an upright riding position, and a 49cc single-cylinder engine with a centrifugal clutch.
Jenkins mentioned he had a hangar full of motorized bar stools, and the event soon became an annual St. Patrick’s Day tradition in Ben Wheeler beginning in 2015, run down the town’s main street. Jenkins has said that out at the airport they got one of his machines up to 100 mph, and that he wouldn’t do it again, drunk or sober.
The Montana Barstool Races
A separate barstool racing tradition was being developed in northwest Montana around the same time, with no clearly evident connection to the Dallas races. Some written accounts place the original West Glacier challenge around 1978, a downhill run on bar stools bolted to skis, and it grew into the annual Cabin Fever Days races normally held on Sugar Hill in Martin City each February.
Retellings of the origin vary, some describe competitors finishing with a drink in hand, others treat the “drinking position” as simply staying seated on the stool. Classes have included steerable, non-steerable, and anything-goes divisions, with a show class in some editions – the Montana machines use no engines at all and rely solely on gravity, bravery, and perhaps a little inebriation.
Powered barstool racing soon turned into a cottage industry, there are suppliers that now sell complete kits – including the frame, spindles, tie rods, a 1-1/4in rear axle with bearings and hubs, sprocket, brake system, T-bar steering, and slicks, with the engine left to the buyer.
CMS in Southern California says it has more than 30 years in minibike and barstool racer manufacturing. Aussiespeed supplies bare welded chassis and paddle controls over in Australia where these is a similarly characterful barstool racing scene.
The model seen here is obviously well-used, it’s finished in black with flames on the front, and it’s now being offered for sale out of Morgantown, Pennsylvania with an asking price of $2,900 USD.
Many builders opt to cover the frame with a fiberglass hot rod shell, making the contraption look like a miniature custom car. Cromwell Molding of Paynesville, Minnesota (trading as Hot Rod Fiberglass) has offered small fiberglass hot rod bodies suitable for projects of this kind under its Tot Rod ride-on and go-kart line, among them a 1940-1941 Willys coupe aimed at gasser fans, a 1932 Ford three-window coupe, and 1932 and 1936 Ford roadsters.
Affordable Go Karts sells a Willys-bodied version built on a TIG-welded square tube chassis with a 6.5 bhp engine, torque converter, and wheelie bars. That said, most barstool racers do seem to be home-built to wildly varying degrees of polish, fit, and finish.
The 1941 Willys Barstool Go Kart Racer Shown Here
This 1941 Willys Barstool Go Kart Racer is a scaled-down tribute to the Willys coupe, one of the definitive gasser shapes of American drag racing. The fiberglass shell is finished in aged black paint with miniature flames across the hood, and it carries an aluminum grille, simulated headlights fitted with small bulbs, foot pegs sticking out from the front fenders, and a single exhaust tip at the rear.
It has six-inch chrome wheels sitting under the fenders, a black vinyl seat rises behind the rear window, and motorbike-style handlebars and controls emerge up through the hood, in classic barstool racer style.
This 1941 Willys Barstool Go Kart Racer is a scaled-down tribute to the Willys coupe, one of the definitive gasser shapes of American drag racing.
Power comes from a 49cc engine with a single-barrel carburetor, driving the rear axle by chain in direct drive. The exhaust runs through a small muffler that has taken on a coating of surface rust according to the seller. Underneath is a box-section tubular chassis with a single disc brake on the rear axle, described by the seller as being in good overall condition.
It’s now being offered for sale out of Morgantown, Pennsylvania on eBay, and you can visit the listing here if you’d like to read more or make them an offer.
Images courtesy of Classic Auto Mall
Articles that Ben Branch has written have been covered on CNN, Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, Autoweek Magazine, Wired Magazine, Autoblog, Gear Patrol, Jalopnik, The Verge, and many more.
Silodrome was founded by Ben back in 2010, in the years since the site has grown to become a world leader in the alternative and vintage motoring sector, with well over a million monthly readers from around the world and many hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
