Parker Air Racer History, Facts and Specs as related by its original crew chief: Bill Rogers.
The “Wild Turkey” (the Parker’s original race name) was designed by a Brit, John Cook, who was designing and building a four-place Cherokee replacement at the Torrance Airport, home of the DeLuca, Wagner, and Parker race teams. John Cook had never seen a race and just read the rules where the 66 square-foot wing area (excluding fillets) included area within the fuselage. We felt that no one could conclude that a multi-taper wing like that was a skinny wing with huge fillets. It was legal by the old F1 rules as far as I am concerned, but did not race until 1977 under IXL with Bob Drew as pilot. It is still legal and was never banned for that reason. John Parker won with it in 1979 and 1980, but by then, the rules were being changed again to embrace the Europeans and the remnants of USARA.
John was interested in a freer world and decided to go cross-country racing with it by adding a long belly tank behind the oil tank. There were also some compromises made with the control system that caused wear. Flying over the mountains in a temperamental F1 turned out to be not much fun, and John donated the plane to the EAA Museum, which later would go on to transfer the ownership to the Western North Carolina Air Museum.
The airplane had several innovative features apart from the wing. It was all aluminum with cowling and wheel pants hand-beaten by Mickey Mahoney, Lee Mahoney’s dad, and builder of Sorceress. The fuselage was a pure monocoque made of two pieces of curved aluminum riveted to formers; the longeron was the return flange on the lower fuselage skin. I know this well since being the smallest members of the team, my son and I had to crawl in and hold the bucking bars while John shot the rivets. The fuselage was very small, with the mid wing lined up with the engine cylinders. The carburetor and oil tank were flared outside the basic mold line. The width was such that normal pilots had to fly side-saddle with small longeron extrusions digging into their shoulders. It flew very well but was difficult to land because the huge center section blanketed the tail once it came down on the runway.
A couple of other #3 items of interest. The wing planform was determined in part not by aerodynamics but by the California trailer laws. We needed to trailer the plane, and the outer wings were screwed on through the spars and skins with #10 bolts; the plane sat on its wheels, so the overall width, less outer wings, had to be less than 96 in. It would still be legal today, but needs a few engine changes, a Steve Hill prop, and smaller wheels and wheel pants to be competitive. Another reason that it was successful is that it was only a little over 500 lbs empty without paint or wheel pants.
Weight is absolutely critical with standing start races, something that the home-made composite builders seem to have forgotten or are unable to match compared with aluminum or even the best wood/tube/fabric Cassutts. Industry-built aircraft using autoclaves and vacuum bagging techniques to squeeze out excess resin from the graphite are better than the older designs. Composites allow more complex shapes and should provide better aerodynamics, but you won’t win from 3-4 seconds back.
