At the dawn of motor sport, it was one of the most famous racing cars in the world. From 1909 to 1916, iconoclastic American inventor J Walter Christie’s one-off, 20-litre, front-wheel-drive Christie set and reset national and world lap-distance records all across the United States. It did this with an early racing superstar, ‘Master Driver of the World’ Barney Oldfield, at the controls. So advanced was the Christie that in 1916, seven years after its creation, it recorded the first 100mph lap of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, the result of a drunken wager at a local bar between Oldfield and his friend, Speedway impresario and Miami Beach developer Carl Fisher.

The car’s fame exploded a hundredfold thanks to a nationwide tour criss-crossing America, in which Oldfield and his Christie squared off against equally famous aviator Lincoln Beachey in his Curtiss biplane – the man Orville Wright called “the most wonderful flyer of all”. The events were typically staged at local horse tracks or fairgrounds. Promoted immodestly as the ‘Championship of the Universe’, they consisted of Oldfield’s Christie lapping the oval at breakneck speed with Beachey close overhead. They were seen by hundreds of thousands in person and followed by millions more in newspapers and newsreels.

After Oldfield sold the Christie in 1916, it became part of Ruth Law’s Flying Circus. Law, one of the most renowned early female aviators, also toured the country, incorporating car-versus-plane events similar to Beachey-Oldfield. Among her drivers? Nineteen-twenty Indianapolis 500 winner Gaston Chevrolet and 1916 runner-up Wilbur D’Alene.

The Christie was finally scrapped in 1919. Even that made headlines. “For distances up to two miles,” eulogised the Chicago Daily Tribune, “it was probably the fastest car of its generation. It carried to the graveyard the official world’s speedway records for these distances.”

The Christie’s passing also ensured that no one alive today has seen it. Nobody has laid eyes on its fascinating, almost freakish technology, heard the roar of its 20-litre V4 with its reported 200-300bhp or felt the ground tremble under its spell for over a century. But that extinction event has now been reversed. Oldfield’s Christie is reborn. And you can see it at its world premiere at the Goodwood Festival of Speed on July 9-12. When that happens, a portal will be opened to the earliest days of motor sport.

The Christie’s resurrection began with two men for whom it became an obsession: Lee Stohr and Jim Bartel. Bartel, 81, a University of Wisconsin-trained mechanical engineer, has long experience with historic race cars. His Shadows have been featured at Goodwood and Amelia Island, where his 1974 Can-Am champion DN4 won the 2021 grand prize in the Concours de Sport. He started at Ford and later founded ARBOC Specialty Vehicles, which manufactures small-to-medium low-floor ramp buses. Based on his patents, they provide quick, convenient access for passengers of all mobilities.

After going for a spin in a friend’s 1911 National, Bartel became curious about the early days of motor sport: “I ran across an article about the Christie written by Lee Stohr. In it, he noted that he was in the process of recreating it. I called to see if the project had been completed and found his customer had decided against it. I was so intrigued that I decided to step in if Lee would support it.”

Stohr, 69, is also a mechanical engineer whose first job was working on NASA spacesuits. In the 1990s he started Stohr Racing Cars, whose products won more than 25 sports car championships in the United States and Australia. About 15 years ago he began reproducing historically significant pre-World War II car components using CAD and 3D printing technology, including engine parts for Bugattis, Millers and Pierce-Arrows.

“Back around 1995,” says Stohr, “I read a story about Walter Christie in Automobile Quarterly. I began tracking down everything I could find about Christie’s automobile years. I visited the Henry Ford collection and the National Automotive History Collection at the Detroit Public Library. Along the way I was able to acquire probably all the archives of Christie information that exist.”

Why were they both so fascinated? “The 1909 Christie was one of the last racing cars built for what Laurence Pomeroy called ‘the Age of Monsters’ in his classic 1954 book The Grand Prix Car,” answers Stohr. “The era of racing cars with huge displacement motors was coming to an end in Europe [think Blitzen Benz and Beast of Turin] but Christie decided to build one more. I think it was the most technically fascinating racing car of that era.”

Its creator was equally fascinating. Born on May 6, 1865, in Milford, New Jersey, a month after the end of the American Civil War, J Walter Christie produced a handful of cars incorporating unique and advanced features for the time. None of them ever entered volume production. They had one common design element: they were all based upon his 1904 patent for a front-wheel-drive vehicle.

Like many of his rivals, Christie went racing to promote his progeny. He qualified for and competed in the 1905 and 1906 Vanderbilt Cup races in a car of his own design, where he challenged the world’s greatest automobile manufacturers. In 1907, he took his latest creation to France, where he competed in the second French Grand Prix, impressing all with its speed but retiring after four of the 10 laps – 10 laps was 478 miles.

Christie retired from driving in 1910, shortly after completing his most successful vehicle, the subject of this story, and which is referred to by latter-day fans as the C7. The Christie C7 offered performance so sensational that the previous August he scored a stunning victory over Oldfield, one of the sport’s first superstars, in a race in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. Referred to by one newspaper as “the most famous speed annihilator in the Western Hemisphere”, Oldfield came away deeply impressed with Christie’s machine.

Christie’s next adventure in the C7 was an assault on the Land Speed Record at Ormond Beach, Florida. Known as ‘The Birthplace of Speed’, the central Florida coastal town is where many attempts took place before the transition to Bonneville in the mid-1930s. Henry Segrave set world bests here in his Sunbeam 1000 HP and Golden Arrow. So did Malcolm Campbell with his Blue Birds.

While Christie got the C7 to 118mph, Oldfield lead-footed the Blitzen Benz to a record 131mph at the same meet. (Simultaneously, on the other side of the Atlantic, Fiat’s Beast of Turin gave it a go but fell short of its Florida rivals.) Thereafter, Christie parked the C7 until Oldfield approached him in 1912 and asked, “Would you sell it to me?”

“No one alive today has seen it. Nobody has laid eyes on its freakish technology for over a century”

It is in Oldfield’s hands that the Christie achieved its greatest speed and fame. Oldfield had a team that toured the US and Canada putting on race exhibitions. Oldfield owned all the cars, and the races were staged to make the best show. However, the Christie had a different role: Oldfield used it to set official track records wherever the caravan appeared. Thus, it set literally scores of national and world lap records for tracks of half, one and two miles in length. “The Christie raced on every type of American track,” notes Stohr, “from the sand at Daytona Beach to the bricks at Indianapolis, dirt ovals and the high-speed board tracks. Very few racing cars can claim to have done all that.”

How it came to record the first 100mph lap at Indy is a story unto itself. In 1916, Oldfield was set to compete in the 500 in a different car. The Christie was seven years old and its 20,333cc motor ineligible for the Memorial Day Classic. But Speedway founder Fisher, distressed that none of the contestants could lap his Brickyard at 100mph, convinced his old friend Oldfield to attempt the feat in the Christie to stir interest in the race – the last to be held before World War I shut down operations. Keep in mind, by 1916 the 500 was dominated by the latest European grand prix cars, which had modern, double-overhead-cam racing motors that could turn three times the rpm of the old Christie.

Equipped as always with sponsor Firestone tyres, Oldfield wrestled the beast around the Brickyard to record the first ever 100+mph lap. He was rewarded for his achievement with a solid gold medal, which will accompany the Christie at its upcoming appearances. The Christie’s success at Indy later inspired Harry Miller to build his front-drive, DOHC Miller 91, a car so dominant it won the 1930 500 and multiple AAA national championships (the Christie had spent time in Miller’s shop).

Bartel and Stohr had the same mindset as the resurrection got under way. “I wanted to only do the project if the car could be recreated as close as possible to the original,” says Bartel. “I have seen other so-called recreations that are patched together from some existing base car and painted to look like the original. I wanted nothing to do with that type of enterprise. What I found in Lee was someone who was extremely knowledgeable about the Christie and, also, only wanted to pursue it if it was done as close to the original as possible.”

That presented enormous challenges. Recreating a Porsche 917 or Lola T70 is simple by comparison. For those cars there are blueprints, records, components from third-party suppliers and sibling vehicles you can look at, photograph and measure. There are people still around who built them who can answer the thousand-and-one questions.

None of that existed for the Christie. Everything about it aside from its tyres and twin Bosch magnetos was unique to the car. “What I did not appreciate is that, unlike other, more modern restorations I had done before, we had to make everything from scratch,” says Bartel.

The front-wheel-drive system? Unique to the Christie. The front wheels are connected to the front axle, which also serves as the crankshaft for the unique 20,333cc SOHC 20-degree V4 engine, with massive 77.5cm long connecting rods and pistons the size of coffee tins. The sliding-pillar front suspension and rack-and-pinion steering system? Unique to the Christie. The transmission, with two forward gears plus reverse, operated by separate clutches and gearing? Unique to the Christie. The differential? There is none.

All of which meant that recreating the car was like a Jurassic Park experiment involving a creature that shared no DNA with any other creature on Earth. The C7 was bespoke from the spokes of its 20in and 23in wheels to its steering wheel. Stohr and Bartel had to do massive research. “One valuable source of information was an article in a 1909 issue of The Automobile,” reveals Stohr. “It includes a multi-page description [and diagrams] of the car with 100 critical dimensions and specific materials used in the construction.”

Collections belonging to Christie’s adopted son Edward and early Christie stockholder Henry Hewlett Treadwell also were useful. And, of course, Christie’s original 1904 front-drive patent helped explain the operation of his three-clutch transmission system. “Christie’s driver controls,” says Stohr, “are unlike anything we are familiar with today.”

“Oldfield wrestled the beast around the Brickyard to record the first ever 100+mph lap”

“Nothing on the Christie was normal,” adds Bartel. “It was front-wheel drive, independent suspension, overhead cam when almost every other car in America was a flathead or L-head engine.”

The next step was to turn Stohr’s painstakingly researched 3D models into a car. The two leading the effort were Kirt Bennett and Shane Fagan. Bennett, 56, owns Quantum Manufacturing in Auburn Hills, Michigan. Quantum does high-end work in aerospace, defence, automotive and medicine. But Bennett is also a hardcore racer who has built and taken on track some of the most famous historic Can-Am, IMSA and Formula 1 cars. Whenever he runs at major vintage events, he’s usually at the front of the pack.

Fagan, 37, and his wife Leanne run Speakeasy Speed Shop in Howell, Michigan, an hour west of Quantum. Fagan’s credentials are similarly blue-chip. A first-class welder and fabricator, he joined an elite group of craftsmen straight out of college at Pratt & Miller, a long-time resource for General Motors’ racing programmes across IMSA, NASCAR, IndyCar and FIA World Endurance. It was a tenure, he says, “where inherently I got pretty good at building race cars”.

They knew this would take much longer than a traditional restoration. “We spent the first year converting the available engineering data into a 3D model,” says Bartel. “We worked out the basic mechanical issues with the unique motor and transmission to assure we had a possibility of making the car functional before we released parts for manufacture.”

The two shops co-ordinated and at times commiserated about what would be involved in building something not just to the right specs, but using the materials and processes used on the original car. “The Christie made extensive use of manganese bronze castings,” explains Bartel, “which had much superior mechanical properties to the steel of the early 1900s but today is very expensive and very few casting companies use it. It is also difficult to machine. The crankcase was a 500lb rough casting and it took six months to find a source that would tackle it.”

Make no mistake, though. The Christie’s advanced technology didn’t make it any less of a handful to drive. Imagine getting behind the wheel of a bucking bronco. No seatbelts. No front brakes. No differential. No protection of any kind. The massive, throbbing V4 – Bartel estimates actual horsepower in the low 200s, still impressive for the day – trying to rip the wheel from your hands when you even think of steering. Not to mention the driveline vibration and violent shocks from the primitive suspension, which has no dampers up front. Oldfield drove with an unlit cigar in his mouth to keep his teeth from chipping.

“I’ve raced some pretty crazy things,” says Bennett, including that Can-Am champion Shadow DN4. “Even when I was younger, I wouldn’t even think of driving this car at the speed they did back then.”

So how did the Christie remain so fast for so long? In large part because Christie and/or Oldfield came up with workarounds that turned some of its weaknesses into strengths.

Race and production cars then typically had only rear-wheel brakes. You can imagine how this affected lap times. But the Christie had kill switches on the steering wheel for each magneto, meaning Oldfield could summon two levels of compression braking from the engine which, because the Christie was front-wheel drive, meant he had the equivalent of four-wheel braking that he could proportion from the cockpit. “In that sense,” says Bartel, “the Christie engine was like two motors with a common crank.”

Likewise, the differential-less direct drive to both front wheels meant each was travelling at the same speed, which could have been a handicap in turns. But here, too, they turned that liability into an advantage. There are clutches between the axle/crankshaft and each front hub. According to some accounts, Oldfield could pull back the clutch on the inside wheel entering a turn to simulate a differential effect. As he could control the rate of slippage, the effect was more like a limited-slip, which wouldn’t be invented until ZF and Ferdinand Porsche developed one for the Auto Union grand prix cars in 1935.

All concerned hope that racing fans everywhere appreciate this portal to the past, to a car built three years before the first regularly scheduled radio broadcast, seven years before the invention of stainless steel, and 18 before the first commercial ‘talking’ picture or Lindbergh’s historic flight across the Atlantic. “I hope modern audiences will appreciate seeing this famous racing car reborn,” says Stohr. “I think they will be surprised by the compactness of Christie’s design. It will look tiny next to the Beast of Turin, and yet they have similar-sized motors.”

Christie C7

• Engine 20-litre SOHC transverse 20-degree V4

• Chassis Load-bearing manganese bronze crankcase and rear bulkhead integrated with pressed steel, channel section frame

• Power 200-300bhp

• Transmission Two-speed with three clutches

• Suspension (Front) Independent sliding pillar with coil springs

• Suspension (Rear) Solid axle with leaf springs

• Weight 1250kg

Another interested party is Oldfield’s great-nephew Wayne Carroll Petersen, 73, who has dedicated his life to preserving his legacy and helped introduce Bartel to Stohr. “It’s a dream come true to see the Christie reborn,” he says. “I think Barney would be so proud to know the Christie and his accomplishments are going to be enjoyed again by the public.”

But you don’t have to imagine what this 1909 Christie race car looks and sounds like in action. You just have to go to Goodwood.