Here is your answer Pell bought the 2 motor car and It sure suprised me who Ivo had driving the 4 motor (I sure didnt remember that ) taken from here ...
http://www.hotrod.com/thehistoryof/tommy_ivo_profile_part_one/index.htmlIn fact, all the strip owners were astounded by the draw, when we would wheel into a track like U.S. 30 or York, Pennsylvania. I was 24 at the time but looked 16, and Prudhomme was all of 17. People came to see us out of curiosity and couldn’t believe that these kids were the bad ass West Coast guys to beat. And beat them we did. But during my 12-stop tour, I saw that there was going to be a better business opportunity here (in California) and sold my twin to Ron Pellegrini (Speed Craft Automotive) for $5,000 after I completed the tour in September.”
There is an addendum to this story. Ivo borrowed his former twin back when the winter of ’60 overcame the East. “Tony Nancy loaned me his blown Buick, and we nearly broke the 190 mark on gas, but my heart was distracted by another project.” One of the first guys he raced on its return was his crew dude Prudhomme. “It was at LADS, and he was driving my old single-engine car with the Buick in it. I beat him and he got pissed—you know, digging his toe in the ground and biting his bottom lip. So I offered to trade rides—he in my twin and me in my old single-motor car—and we worked it out with Mickey (Thompson). It was a sucker bet. He got excited and smoked the tires, and I beat him again because I knew both cars so well.”
What distracted Ivo was another commercial possibility. “I became aware of the tremendous crowd appeal for the twin, and it got me thinking: ‘If they like a two-motor car, they’ll love one with four motors.’ Fuller built one more car and Pellegrini’s $5,000 paid for my out-of-pocket expenses, less freebies, for the in-progress, $4,000 ‘showboat.’” Problems immediately occurred. Fuller couldn’t handle Ivo’s frenetic work pace and hyper energy. “I would come into his shop while he was reading comic books and yell, ‘Let’s go!’ I was a slave driver, and when I would go out chasing parts, he would stop work and return to reading his comic books. I drove him crazy. This time I built a twin bank, in-tandem, four-wheel-drive car with the front and rear engines chained together. The two lefthand side engines drove the front wheels, and the two righthand side engines drove the rear wheels. This arrangement, pairing what were essentially two V-16 engines, allowed both banks to torque inward and counteract one another. Unfortunately, what I feared would happen did. Weight transfer from the initial launch would unload the front wheels, and they would break loose excessively. The second problem was that it weighed almost 4,000 pounds, so it wouldn’t e.t. And while it would run upstairs, it was no winner. But the NHRA didn’t know that before it was done. They were getting nervous. Their thinking was simple: If my four-motor car ran proportionally as good as my twin, then the other guys were going to build them. And if that happened, they might not be as well built as my cars were, and they could start crashing through that era’s flimsy guardrails. So they said I could only run it as an exhibition car, the first to be so designated, but it broke my heart. In retrospect, it has became my signature car.”
Meanwhile, the editors at HRM got a bright idea. Ivo was co-staring with Cynthia Pepper on a TV sitcom by the name of Margie. In fact, Ivo played Pepper’s bumbling boyfriend Haywood Botts, and the script called for a gambling boat setting for that episode, hence the striped outfit and straw hat. Why not, HRM’s editors reasoned, shoot Ivo’s four-motor car on the Margie set and entitle the piece “Showboat”? There was a problem. Ivo had never fully apprised the studio of his quarter-mile exploits. When Showboat showed up on the Margie set, the fit hit the shan. “The studio bosses got really pissed and banned me from racing. The ban put my other career on hold—kind of. I hired Prudhomme at $25 a pop to run the car locally. In fact, Prudhomme was all set to tour it back east in ’61 when his wife-to-be (Lynn) said no, and Ron Pellegrini got the job of touring the car, since I was grounded. I eventually sold it to Tom McCourry. He put a Buick Riviera-inspired, Tom Hanna-formed body on it and renamed it the Wagon-Master.” But Ivo’s quarter-mile purr-go-tory was short-lived. The Margie series was eventually cancelled, and he was a free man again. Ivo was one happy dude. He quickly ended his 19-year song, dance, and acting career and went drag racing as a professional.
