On Air with Jim Donnelly: The Hudson Hornet
[Editor’s Note: Hemmings Senior Editor Jim Donnelly has over the last several months been discussing collector cars and automotive history with Ron Ananian on Ron’s Saturday afternoon radio show on WOR-AM and contributing related articles to WOR’s website. For the benefit of our readers who aren’t in WOR’s signal range, we thought we’d rerun some of those segments and articles here.]
Before the end of the 1950s, Hudson was gone as a brand of American car, vanished along with Nash into the being of a new automaker called American Motors. The sad truth is that alone, neither Hudson nor Nash had enough financial or marketing power to hang with the Big Three. Things change quickly. When the decade began, Hudson produced one of the most feared performance cars in the United States.
We are talking about the Hornet sedan with its Twin-H power and unibody step-down design. It was a favorite of buyers who liked their cars technically advanced, especially after the long trudge through a Depression and a global holocaust where nothing, really, was new. Hudson fixed that as soon as its 1948 cars hit the streets. They were wild, spacy, with a profile like nothing other. Then, the following year, the new racing organization called NASCAR came up with a Strictly Stock division for unmodified, more or less, passenger cars.
That happenstance made history. From 1951 through 1955, Hudson and its Hornet were the dominant car in stock-bodied American auto racing. It’s not as if Hudson was the only automaker participating in the class. Oldsmobile and Cadillac both had new OHV V-8s, and Chrysler had the first edition of its Hemi. In its own arsenal, Hudson had excellent handling plus a torque-happy 308-cu.in. flathead straight-six. As the early 1950s went on, it would be modified, most notably with a dual-carburetor factory option package called the Twin-H.
A Twin-H Hudson was optioned with dual Carter single-barrel carburetors fed by fresh-air induction atop a dual intake manifold. Hudson offered a full catalog of Severe Service engine and chassis parts through its dealer network, making them legal for NASCAR use. Virtually anyone could acquire the raw materials to build up a racing Hornet. The real stars, however, were drivers such as Marshall Teague and Herb Thomas, the latter working with the mechanical genius Smokey Yunick. Later, Hudson offered a 7-X package that included a flowed aluminum cylinder head, which boosted compression to 9.2:1 and horsepower to around 210 in street trim.
Even at their outset, sadly, Hudson’s glory years were numbered. The cash crunch that forced Hudson and Nash into the merger that created AMC also meant limited money to develop new chassis or engines. The Hornet racing era largely ended when Thomas and Yunick switched to the new small-block Chevrolet in 1955. But by then, Twin-H Hornets had racked up 81 wins in NASCAR and 37 in AAA, the predecessor of today’s USAC. Perhaps the most valuable Twin-H Hornet in existence is the blue number 92, the actual car that Thomas drove to the NASCAR title in 1953, ensuring his selection this year for NASCAR’s Hall of Fame. The owner is Jack Miller, whose family operated the last Hudson dealership to exist, located in Ypsilanti, Michigan. You can learn a lot more on the Hudson Hornet at Jack’s website, YpsiAutoHeritage.org.