The Blastolene Indy Special is one of those motor vehicles that makes me wish I knew where to find M47 Patton tank engines. The car was built by the team at Blastolene, the same talented group of madmen who built a turbo tank powered racing car for Jay Leno a few years ago.
With the Indy Special they wanted to go in a new design direction and evoke the spirit of the Indy 500 racers from the 1950’s, with perhaps a little Ferrari influence in the nose. Interestingly, that 1,790 Cubic Inch V-12 (29.3 Liter) tank engine is actually air-cooled, hence the vented bonnet, although how on earth they keep an engine that size cool using nothing but ambient air is beyond me.
When it comes to getting the 910 horsepower and 1500 ft lbs of torque to the rear wheels, the guys at Blastolene decided to use an Allison 4-Speed Greyhound bus transmission, this paired with the exceptionally long M47 engine means that the Indy Special is rather lengthy at 21.5 Feet from tip to tail.
The body is all painstakingly handmade from aluminium, a feat that must have taken months in itself. The builders went for a classic, almost Bentley like interior and dashboard with a steering wheel that looks like it would have had no trouble getting the Titanic out of the way of that pesky iceberg.
If you’d like to see more from the Team at Blastolene, click here to visit their website.
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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.
