Meet the man who hand-built his own Cadillac racing 'Monster'

“My wife and I wanted to race at Le Mans. But looking at all the cars in period, we could never afford a historic Aston or Jaguar racecar. My other half found out that Cadillac raced in 1950, and I’ve always liked American cars. So I decided I wanted to build Le Monstre.”

And the rest is hand-built, fire breathing history. Derek Drinkwater (and his boss/wife Pat) wasn’t going to settle for being priced out of the elitist world of classic motorsport. So he built his own.

And not over the course of years either. Derek set himself the challenge of using authentic tools and techniques to recreate Cadillac’s bizarre streamliner in the space of just five months. And the self-taught mechanic succeeded, using a projector to beam a life-size blueprint onto his wall.

Photography: Tom Barnes & Derek Drinkwater

“The Revs Institute was fantastic. It gave us loads of photos but we had no technical drawings. I thought, ‘if I take the photographs I’ve been given, put ’em on the projector and pull the projector far enough back, the wheelbase on the wall would match the wheelbase of the full scale car’.

“Then I pencilled and marked all the way around the car, even the nuts and bolts on the wheelarches. Then when I turned the lights on, I had a drawing of the car on the wall.”

And nothing’s been bought off the shelf. “Even the windows. I’ve made all the frames, all the nuts and bolts to hold them to match the original.”

The story of the original Series 61 is as bizarre as the way it looks. In the prohibition era, moonshine runners preferred Caddy engines for outrunning the police, which led to early forays into NASCAR. Then in 1950 wealthy entrepreneur Briggs Cunningham was offered a pair of Le Mans entries, so he got hold of two Series 61 coupes to race.

One was left basically standard, while the other was reclothed using primitive wind tunnel testing in an aerodynamic body that made it notably faster on the circuit's long straights. The French press nicknamed it ‘the monster’ in their native tongue, and the moniker stuck.

It led to one of motorsport’s ‘what if?’ moments. Le Monstre finished 11th, one place behind the stock Caddy. But early in the race, Derek tells us, the driver swerved to avoid a dog and got stuck in a sand trap.

“There’s this big thing about ‘the shovel’. The driver was told to take the shovel in the car, but he said ‘Oh, I’ve got no room for that’. So he spent 30 minutes digging the car out with his hands, and also lost second gear. Romantically, if you knock off that delay and allow a little bit of time in for second gear, I think it would’ve come second.”

These days, motorsport is aero obsessed, but in the 1950s it was very new tech. So how does the re-creation drive? “We did a two-minute lap of Laguna Seca, which surprised a lot of people for a car that’s 1.7 tonnes,” laughs Derek. “You need to steer Le Monstre before it gets into the bend.”

Derek’s speaking to me from Idaho, midway through a multistate tour in Le Monstre – which is entirely road legal and towing a trailer of supplies. Next year he wants to take it to Le Mans to celebrate the 75th anniversary of this strange and short-lived chapter in US motorsport – highly appropriate now Cadillac has a thunderous works entry competing in the top class.

But Mr and Mrs Drinkwater aren’t here for the sponsorship. “The racing’s great, but the journey to get here is what rocks our boat.”