The HWM Stovebolt Special started life as a 1950 HWM Formula 2 car but took on a world-famous and much-loved identity of its own with characterful bodywork modifications and a Chevrolet V8 engine, earning it the “Stovebolt” nickname (see below).
In its first incarnation, this car was an HWM with a four-cylinder Alta engine made for Formula 2 races in Europe. In this configuration it was driven by Stirling Moss at the start of his career, including his first paid drive. It increased in fame with its starring role in the 1954 movie The Racers and with its spirited appearance in the 1956 Pebble Beach Road Races in the hands of Bill Pollack.
Some history… In 1953 it was sold to 20th Century Fox for inclusion into the 1955 Kirk Douglas film The Racers. During filming, the car was crashed as required by the script. The props men just bashed in the grille, broke the headlights and lit a tray of petrol under the hood. Much of the sequence of the Monte Carlo crash in the film was set up with a two-foot wooden model. Tom Carstens agreed to purchase the wreck. When he collected it from 20th Century Fox he was gratified to find the damage was only superficial — which of course didn’t stop him totally rebuilding and much improving the chassis, transmission and bodywork as well as the engine. (Note from Simon Taylor, December 2025).
Tom Carstens bought the wreck and transformed the car into the Stovebolt Special in Tacoma, Washington. He spared no expense to make sure his car was the best it could be. He recognized the merits of all-wheel independent suspension and the low design from the original HWM. In 1955 Chevrolet’s V8 had just been released. Since it produced more power than a tuned Chevy-flathead in stock form, it was natural choice. Carstens sent the engine to Vic Edelbrock’s shop where Bobby Meeks bored and stroked the engine to just under five liters. With JE pistons and a hot cam the engine could freely rev up to 7000 rpm. Once completed the engine was sent to Eddie Kuzma to be fitted in the HWM chassis. He had to push the firewall back and fabricated new rear bodywork with an integrated headrest. It was then sent to Ted Halibrand’s shop for fitting of his quick-change rear axle and experimental disc brakes. After receiving preparation from the top shops in the business, Bill Pollack debuted it at the 1956 Pebble Beach Road Races where he led initially but fell back. Some reports say that the differential failed but that was an incorrect interpretation; Pollack complained about bad handling, which was later put down to the Halibrand diff locking inconsistently in fast corners, although this was never proven. He went on to finish sixth. (Note from Simon Taylor, December 2025).
In 1980 the Stovebolt special was restored by John ‘Bat’ Masterson and appeared at the 2003 Pebble Beach Concours. Today, it is owned by Simon Taylor, a former BBC Formula 1 correspondent (see profile below), who frequently drives it on both road and track.
Simon Taylor writes…
“My HWM is one of the three-car works team run in 1950 by Hersham & Walton Motors, designed by John Heath and built up over the winter of 1949/50 by HWM’s legendary mechanic Alf Francis. My car was raced during that 1950 season by the 20-year-old Stirling Moss – it was his first ‘proper’ race car, and his first-ever works drive – and he had several excellent results, including third in the Bari Grand Prix behind the Alfa Romeos of Farina and Fangio (a remarkable achievement as it was a Formula 1 race, and this was a Formula 2 car). That season it also won the Grand Prix des Frontieres, driven by Johnny Claes, and was also driven by Rudi Fischer and Raymond Sommer.
“In 1954 it went to Hollywood to appear in the 20th Century Fox movie The Racers, starring Kirk Douglas, who drives and crashes the car in the movie. Then it was sold off to Tom Carstens, who radically rebuilt the car and fitted it with the then very new Chevy V8. Press reports at the time gave it the name that has stuck with it ever since: The Stovebolt Special. On its debut on the old Pebble Beach road circuit in the hands of Bill Pollack it became the first road circuit car in the world to use the small-block Chevy – the first of many.
“This car has enough history to fill a large book. It has been raced by all its owners over the past 56 years, and has had many adventures. It has been totally rebuilt for me by Peter Denty Racing into pretty nearly exactly the form it was when Carstens finished it in 1956, in his colours – black with white wheels.“
Simon added in December 2025 “Incidentally, in those pre-Microsoft days, as you’ll know, the Pacific North-West’s main income was from lumber, and its inhabitants were pejoratively known as ‘squirrels’ . So Tom had a brass plate made up and fixed on the car to respond to the rich Californians with their Ferraris who were looking down on the guys from Tacoma. As you can see in the Sports Cars Illustrated piece, it says ‘Made in the Woods by Squirrels”, and it’s still proudly on the car.
“As a matter of interest, I did 13 events in 2025, and the car is always driven on the road to each event – I don’t possess a trailer. In the same year it did 3,000 miles going to and from events. In the 25 years I’ve had the car, I reckon I’ve done over 50,000 road miles, as well as probably over 200 events.”
You can read a period report of the conversion of the HWM by Tom Carstens in the September 1956 edition of Sports Car Illustrated here. My thanks to Ken Gross for alerting me to the article. Simon Taylor confirms this is the definitive description of the car as Carstens built it.
Video interview… Marcus Pye gets the lowdown from Simon Taylor on his HWM Stovebolt Special during the VSCC Wiscombe Park Hillclimb 2024.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEFeUVxbvdQ
| Engine | Chevrolet V8 small-block (Cast Iron block and head) by Vic Edelbrock and Bobby Meeks |
| Displacement | 5000 cc (305.1 cu in / 5.0 L) |
| Carburetors | 3 Holley 1-barrel carburetors |
| Compression Ratio | 10.5:1 |
| Redline | 7000 RPM |
| Transmission | 4-speed Manual (Jaguar gearbox) |
| Drive Type | Rear-wheel drive |
| Suspension (Front) | Independent with wishbones (from a 1940s Triumph roadster) and a transverse leaf spring added by Carstens (effectively a double transverse link system) |
| Suspension (Rear) | Live rear axle |
| Chassis | Twin-tube tubular ladder-frame chassis |
| Body | Aluminum one-off body by Eddie Kuzma |
| Steering | Rack and pinion from a Citroën front-wheel-drive saloon |
| Brakes | Disc brakes, Ted Halibrand |
| Approximate Weight | Around 1,230 pounds (approx. 558 kg) |
Why “Stovebolt“? The name “Stovebolt” originated as a nickname for the Chevrolet inline six-cylinder engine, first introduced in 1929. The engines were called this because the fasteners used on the valve cover, lifter cover, and timing cover resembled the common, simple, slotted-head bolts used to assemble wood-burning stoves of the era. The term was not an official Chevrolet name but rather a popular, sometimes derogatory (from rivals like Ford), nickname that became synonymous with the engine’s durability and ubiquity. In the case of the HWM Stovebolt Special, the nickname was attributed wrongly by the press – the car had a V8 Chevy engine not the straight-6 Stovebolt – and the name persisted.
Simon Taylor adds to the notes on specifications; “The steering rack came from a front-drive Citroen saloon; John Heath had one as a road car and liked the steering (and the parts were cheap, which was important to him). Most of the parts on the car came from production vehicles: the front suspension is derived from a 1940s Triumph roadster, although Carstens had a bigger transverse leaf spring made up. When a leaf broke in 2024 we discovered it was bespoke and not off any production car, and we had to have a new one made up.”
Simon Taylor (born 8 August 1944) is a motor sports journalist who writes for several publications. Taylor is a writer, historian, radio and TV commentator and a keen loyal supporter of historic racing. He is editor-at-large of Classic & Sports Car magazine and contributes a monthly column under the title Full Throttle. He is particularly known for the in-depth interviews of motor sports personalities past and present which he contributed to Motor Sport magazine between 2006 and 2016, under the title “Lunch with….“
Taylor joined the weekly motor racing magazine Autosport straight from university in 1966 as an editorial assistant. In 1967, the magazine was taken over by the Haymarket Publishing Group and he was promoted to editor in 1968, still aged only 23. In 1971, he forsook writing for publishing management, and went on to devise and launch several new magazines, including What Car? in 1973 and Classic & Sports Car in 1982. In 1984, Haymarket purchased Autocar (the world’s oldest motoring magazine) from IPC and successfully relaunched it. Taylor’s career progressed to become managing director of Haymarket Magazines.
In 1976, he began doing motor race commentaries on radio, and became BBC Radio’s Formula 1 correspondent until 1997, when he spent a year as part of ITV’s F1 presentation team. He did further motor-racing commentary work for ITV until 2000 including F3000 and FIA GT. For many years he narrated the official Formula One season review videos produced by the Formula One Constructors Association. He retired as chairman of Haymarket Magazines in 2000 and became a freelance writer, mainly about motor sports history.
His two-volume, 528-page history of the HWM team, John, George and the HWMs, was published in 2019. In 2015 he co-wrote Sir Stirling Moss’ autobiography Stirling Moss – My Racing Life. He completed and prepared for publication My View from the Pit Wall, the posthumous autobiography of Lotus F1 team manager Peter Warr. Motor Sport Greats in Conversation is a hardback collection of his “Lunch With…” series of articles from Motor Sport. He is also an after-dinner speaker and interviewer at motor sports functions.
He had a small part, playing himself as the English-language BBC commentator, in the 2013 Ron Howard-directed film Rush about the battle between Niki Lauda and James Hunt in the 1976 F1 season, and also helped with editing the film and scripting some of the dialogue spoken by the broadcast commentators in other languages. According to Fraser Masefield Ranking the Top 10 Formula 1 Commentators he takes the number 9 rank in this list.
Gallery 1: 3 California Road Racers in the UK, fleetingly. Click on an image then scroll through all the images in full size. The HWM Stovebolt Special, UK based, was re-united on 9th July 2016 with two of its Californian comrades-in-arms. The event was the Chateau Impney Hill Climb in the Midlands of the UK. Rob Manson had brought in the 1952 Streets Manning Special for some race meetings and Ernie Nagamatsu was there with Ol’ Yeller. That’s Rob being interviewed by the BBC. Photos by Marcus Bicknell…
Gallery 2: archive of Stovebolt photos. Click on an image then scroll through all the images in full size. We thank and congratulate Andy Rusyn for several of the photos in this gallery, credited in the filename which is displayed. Andy won the International Automotive Awards 2023.
Researched, compiled and written by Marcus Bicknell, December 2025. I’m very grateful to Ken Gross and Simon Taylor for providing corrections and input to this article. Email me with more, please, at MontereySportsCarRoadRacers@gmail.com