During hill climbing's golden age from 1957 to 1969, when the discipline rivaled circuit racing in popularity across Europe, Porsche was the brand to beat. Competing in 24 European Championship classes between 1958 and 1968, Porsche won a staggering 20 of them.
The Porsche 910/8 Bergspyder was its weapon of choice during the second half of the 1960s, but rumours of a new car being built by Ferrari led Porsche to develop the extreme
909 Bergspyder. Where the 910/8 Bergspyder was already a lightweight machine at 420 kg, the 909 Bergspyder graciously tipped the scales at only 375 kg.
Some of the features of its predecessor, the 910/8, were retained, including the wheel hubs, the titanium chassis springs and brake calipers, an aluminum space frame, the titanium and magnesium engine components, and the GFRP body, weighing just 10 kilograms, with aluminum frame and titanium coil springs.
The 909 Bergspyder had loom silver wiring in place of copper, and balsa wood ballast resistors for the ignition system. Even the carcinogenic material Beryllium was used for its brake disks - Porsche was only able to make five disks, so they were fitted to the faster of the two cars.
As the ultimate symbol of weight reduction, the spherical tank housed a pressure vessel made from 0.8-millimeter-thick titanium and, inside of that, a rubber bladder. Before the race, the bladder would be filled with gasoline, and nitrogen pumped into the space between the titanium and rubber at a pressure of around 15 bar. A hose connected the tank with the mechanical fuel injection pump. As a result of this experiment, the 909 could operate without a fuel lift pump, resulting in a reduction in weight of up to seven kilograms.
Only two Porsche 909 Bergspyders were built and debuted at the penultimate race of the 1968 championship. Porsche factory driver Gerhard Mitter ran the Porsche 910/8 Bergspyder and won both races. Formula 1 driver Rolf Stommelen drove the 909 in both events. During those last two races, the car would finish second and third, with Stommelen still suffering from a broken arm earned earlier in the year - there's no doubt the car had the raw speed to win a race outright.
Porsche ended its factory hill climb programme after the 1968 season. Although the 909 appeared in only two hill climbs during 1968, its influence extended far beyond its brief competition career. The lessons learned from the 909 Bergspyder helped shape the 908/3, the nimble and featherweight counterpart to Porsche’s mighty flat twelve-powered 917. T
The car's assembly was a frantic, legendary thrash. Looking to stand out in a sea of Mustangs and Firebirds, Pulde partnered with Buick. The chassis builder, Jim Hume of H&H Racecraft, and Pulde literally built the car over a single weekend in the outdoor pits of Thunder Valley Dragway during the 1985 IHRA Spring Nationals.
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With most factory deals sewn up, Dale Pulde was on the outside looking in. It was Pulde's buddy, the veteran drag racing journalist Jon Asher, who made the connection to Buick's Joe Negri, knowing that they had yet to participate in drag racing's ultimate nitro-based factory racing class.
Asher's pitch to Negri was simple: Hey, he figured, if Kenny Bernstein could make a 260-mph-hot rod out of a mundane pukka pukka Ford Tempo, why not do the same thing with a Buick Somerset Regal?
Negri was intrigued but insisted that whatever be done, no matter what, the car absolutely, positively, must be identifiable as a Buick Somerset Regal.
>gulp<
This might take a bit of doing, Pulde thought; after all, the Somerset Regal screamed "hot rod" about as much as an Am General postal van. Fortunately, there was a starting point: Comp Eliminator racer Larry Torres was already running a Somerset in Econo Altered. A plug was quickly pulled from his car and taken to the GM wind tunnel for evaluation.
The radical, lowered body lines were then cleaned up and penned by GM aerodynamicist Gary Eaker, who presented them to Pulde. He declared it looked less like grandma's grocery getter and more akin to a street rod, which was good. In all, two days were spent with the mold in the wind tunnel.
Interestingly, the still raw form of Pulde’s Buick followed the Candies & Hughes Pontiac in the wind tunnel and proved to be every bit as good.
Still, the design didn't pass muster with fiberglass craftsman Chris Christensen, who was in charge of building the final product. He was blunt and reportedly hated the body style because it conflicted with wind-tunnel data he had just gathered for Miller-teammate Larry Minor's Oldsmobile funny car effort. The data points were not lining up.
"Chris was not a fan," Pulde said. "He said the body style didn't do this, and didn't do that. He had a checklist of fixes that needed to be made."
The team also found out via the wind tunnel that adding a lip to the front end unloaded the rear tires by a couple hundred pounds or so.
One of the naturally designed attributes for the Buick was a large spoiler on the rear.
“We had a pretty good size spoiler on the back of it, but we didn’t have giant spill plates,” Pulde said.
More about that unique spoiler: It was a whopping 58 inches wide, although only 19 inches of those stuck out beyond the back of the race car body, with the first 12 inches being angled 34 degrees, the next 5 inches 44 degrees, and the final 2-inch bend being 65 degrees from horizontal.
Lots of Texas Instrument calculator and slide rule time went into making that thing work as intended.
The original plans called for the spoiler to be manufactured out of spring steel, but the finished product is actually an aluminum/steel alloy. Eaker's team had planned for the spoiler to flex at speed but tire-shake troubles nixed that idea in the bud.
Instead, Pulde noted, "...we had chassis-builder Jim Hume make it to where the spoiler could lay down, and we’d put spring-loaded supports in the back of it so it could get the download without a lot of drag.”
With the aerodynamics of the body sorted (it was thought) but the car still sans tinwork*,* it was trucked to "Thunder Valley," the storied dragstrip in Bristol, Tenn., that played host to the IHRA Spring Nationals, where the thrash would continue. There, Jim Hume's brand-new but still-bare chassis, custom-built for Pulde, would be waiting.
On its very first track passes, the car's flawed aerodynamics were found, as the front end lifted completely off the track near the 150' mark. Hume was quick with the fix: A custom front lip was grafted onto the the front spoiler right at the track. The makeshift repair worked perfectly, resulting in 1,950 pounds of downforce and subsequent record-setting speeds.
No further wind-tunnel time was need to affirm the effectiveness of Hume's aerodynamic intuition, as Pulde rocketed into a series of runs that included a 264 mile per hour blast in qualifying. He also established low E.T. of the race in only the fourth run on the new car.
Pulde gushed in his praise of the car, noting that it handled, well, not as much like a Buick but a Cadillac.
It might have been a Buick, but the new Warrior drove like a Cadillac.
Later, during the high-stakes, high-dollar $30,000 final round matchup at IHRA's flagship event against Prudhomme, Pulde's manual shifter completely broke right after the burnout, leaving his transmission stuck.
"I stopped from the burnout, and I went to push the car back into low gear and all those levers just fell forward," Pulde remarked.
"I thought, ‘Oh, man, all I’ve got is low gear.”
In a freak turn of events, Prudhomme's car suffered troubles at the line, too: An o-ring had come out of the injector on the barrel valve on Prudhomme's mount, and the starter came over to Pulde with the news:
"Prudhomme broke!"
Pulde took his bizarre winning solo pass in low gear in a brand new car that was assembled at the track in a muddy pit spot. To make the win all that much sweeter, it was, Pulde noted, the highest paying race for the year: The Buick’s maiden victory netted Pulde a little over $40,000 when adding in contingencies.
“I paid Hume for the car right there at the racetrack,” Pulde said.
When asked about the results of the weekend, Pulde noted, "it all worked out really good.”
Forever the master of understatement, that guy.
Red Cars at 2026 Fins Wings! A 1950 Pickup and a 1963 Economy car! Really??? Wow this Ford pickup is Clean! A '63 Ford Falcon With a 302! I bet it soars like a Falcon! Really fast! https://youtu.be/mqZN6twWQHM