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Fred Rosner first got involved in racing
in 1949 at the age of 14 working on Charlie Blair’s Stafford
Speedway dirt car. Over the next fifty years he worked on cars for
many legends of the sport including Ed Flemke, Red Foote, Bill
Wimble, Bugs Stevens, Gene Bergin, Pete Hamilton, and Kenny
Shoemaker. He was a mechanic on the early flathead powered cars that
won championships at Millers Falls driven be Bernard Gee (52) and
Ray Brown (53). He 57 he wrenched the Mike Maguire owned, Ray Brown
driven, OHV 312 that raced at Riverside Park.
A highlight of his career was
building and maintaining the #3 that Rene Charland ran in the 1962
and 63 seasons, when Charland won the first two of his four
consecutive national sportsmen championships. “One season that I
worked with Rene,” Rosner remembers, “we ran 109 different races and
won 37 of them.”
Rosner
was the first of the vagabond mechanics to travel up and down the
East Coast with the famed “Eastern Bandits.” In 1964 he was the
first northerner to be inducted into the Mechanics Hall of Fame. In
the same year he won one of his most treasured awards; the Master of
Mechanics award from the P.A. Sturtevant Co., a large unusual trophy
that proudly sits in his office today.
In addition to building cars that
competed all over New England, Rosner has had some experience on the
Southern superspeedways. In the late 50’s and early 60’s he made
trips to Daytona preparing cars for fellow Hall of Famers: Gene
Bergin Red Foote, Denny Zimmerman, and Rene Charland. |
