The Six Hours of Paris: A History Thread

**Lars Strom** · 01-10-2012

Hi again Nerstrom...please tell us more............

Back in the early-mid seventies a Evinrude-Johnson racing jacket was really hot stuff..
OMC did lots of racing developments and was the leader in many ways.
Real fun to be an exclusive Evinrude dealer and racer at that time..

**Rotary John** · 01-10-2012

Jim; if you recall Johnnie Sanders won the '73 Paris race with a V-6. That was the one Clarence put together using old parts and actually had 2 - V-4 cranks welded together. They were150ci engines; basicly a V-4 with 2 more cylinders. I have the press release photo of Sanders winning that Ziggy pasted one of my passport photos over Sanders and labeled it super john. I don't remember what V-6 were run in '74, but the production model that was introduced in 75 was also 150ci. How about you and Clarence get together and write the inside 2-cycle race history before you both get too old to remember. Those of us that were part of the hay day of factory racing are fading away fast and without your insite, that part of boat racing history will be gone forever.

**Rotary John** · 01-10-2012

Jim; do you recall Strang getting the blueprint of the Merc V-6 block by mistake from the casting vendor and sending a picture to Alexander with him standing infront of the blueprint?

**NERSTROM** · 01-10-2012

John. Yes, I gave Charlie that print. Truth is, we received a very very rudimentary drawing of the Merc V6 with a box of castings. One of the Johnson manufacturing engineers thought it interesting and gave it to me to look at. We had heard Mercury was working on a V6 and this confirmed our suspicions. I had one of my designers copy the print and we then filled in a lot of the blanks based on our own design experience. When we finished it could have passed for a detail drawing of the Merc. We sent a copy to Charlie and he passed it along to Charlie Alexander as you stated. A former OMC engineer, Bill Mayer working on the Mercury V6 at the time, told us that when they received the picture many were required to take lie detector tests. We thought it was funny, not sure about our Merc counterparts.

Lars, I enjoy your comments. Yes, good times & lots of fun.

**Master Oil Racing Team** · 01-10-2012

What about the casting vendor?

This is some good stuff John and Jim. This is a fantastic thread, but I hope you guys rembembrences will be lost and buried here. Can either one of you, or a compatriot start a thread with just some talk about how you guys went about your daily business, stark insights, spy results, and outcomes of just hard grinding work to reach some great successes?