Even at 18 HP, the 1948 Crosley Hotshot SHOCKED EVERYONE by Beating Jaguars in SCCA Racing
Picture this.
It’s 1951 at Watkins Glenn and a bright yellow doors stop on wheels called the Cley Hot Shot pulls up to the starting grid alongside Jaguar X Moy Foys making60 horsepower.
The Hot Shot makes 18 from a 724 cm engine you could literally carry under one arm.
The Jaguar drivers are laughing so hard they can barely buckle their helmets.
20 minutes later, they’re watching that yellow doors stop’s tail lights disappear around turn seven.
And this actually happened multiple times.
The setup.
Postwar America and Crosley’s crazy idea.
This is the story of how a refrigerator tycoon from Cincinnati built what everyone called a riding lawnmower with delusions of grand work and proceeded to embarrass every established sports car manufacturer in America.
It’s about an engine so small that motorcycle enthusiasts called it cute, powering a car so light that strong winds were a legitimate handling concern.
Absolutely destroying purpose-built European race cars that cost five times as much.
And it’s about why Detroit pretended none of this ever happened.
Let’s rewind to 1945. World War II just ended.
America is drunk on victory and prosperity.
Everyone wants a new car because nobody’s been able to buy one for four years.
Detroit is gearing up to build the biggest, heaviest, most chrome encrusted land yachts in history.
Bigger is better.
More is more.
Excess is excellence.
And then there’s Powell Crosley Jr.
This guy made his fortune selling refrigerators and radios.
Crosley appliances were in millions of American homes.
He owned the Cincinnati Reds.
He was rich, successful, and absolutely fascinated by the idea that American cars were stupid.
Too big, too heavy, too thirsty, too expensive.
While Detroit was designing cars the size of small yachts, Crossley was sketching something closer to a motorized bathtub.
Here’s what made Crosley different from every other industrialist who thought they could build cars.
He actually understood manufacturing at scale.
He knew how to mass-produce complex products cheaply, and he’d been thinking about small cars since the 30s, even building a few before the war interrupted everything.
When peaceime manufacturing resumed, Crosley was ready.
The 1946 Crosley sedan, if you can call it that, was spectacularly terrible in all the expected ways.
Tiny, underpowered, uncomfortable.
It looked like someone had put a car body on a roller skate.
The engine made 26 horsepower, which sounds bad until you realize that was actually pretty good for what amounted to an enlarged motorcycle engine.
The whole car weighed,00 lb.
Detroit ignored it.
They were busy building Buick Road Masters and Cadillac Series 62s.
Real cars for real Americans.
The Crosley was a curiosity.
Maybe a second car for running errands.
Nobody took it seriously.
Ford executives probably used photos of it for target practice.
But Crosley wasn’t stupid.
He knew the sedan wouldn’t change the automotive landscape.
It was too compromised, too obviously a penalty box.
What he needed was something that would prove small cars weren’t just cheap, they could be fun.
He needed a sports car.
In 1949, Crossley introduced the Hot Shot.
And this is where the story gets interesting.
While the sedan was designed for economy, the Hot Shot was designed for one thing only, going fast with 18 horsepower.
Let that sink in for a second.
18 horsepower.
A modern riding lawn mower makes more power.
The Hot Shot was trying to be a sports car with less power than the electric garage door opener you hit this morning.
The laughable specifications.
The specifications were, and I’m being generous here, hilarious.
The engine was a 724 cm inline four with overhead cams.
Overhead cams in 1949 was actually pretty advanced.
The problem was displacement, 724 cm.
For context, a modern motorcycle has bigger engines.
Harley-Davidson was selling bikes with more displacement in 1949. The engine was called the CIBA, which stood for cast iron block assembly.
Crossley’s first engines used a block made from stamped sheet metal braced together, which was innovative in the same way that building a house from aluminum foil is innovative.
Technically possible, but maybe not wise.
The CIBA engine used actual cast iron, which added maybe 15 lb, but prevented the whole thing from shaking itself to pieces.
18 horsepower at 5,400 RPM.
That was it.
That was what Cley thought could compete with sports cars.
For comparison, the MGTC, Britain’s idea of a small sports car, made 54 horsepower.
The Jaguar XK1 120, the fastest production car in the world, made 160 horsepower.
The Hot Shot made 18. The transmission was a 3-speed manual.
Three speeds, not because Crosley thought three speeds was optimal, but because adding a fourth gear would have cost money and added weight.
The whole drivetrain philosophy was subtractive.
What can we eliminate?
What can we make smaller?
What can we do without?
The body was aluminum, not for any sophisticated aerodynamic reason, but because aluminum was lighter than steel, and Crosley was obsessed with weight.
The whole car, fully fueled, weighed under 1,200 lb.
Modern motorcycles weigh more.
A Jaguar XK 120 weighed 3,100 lb.
The Hot Shot weighed less than half that.
The wheelbase was 85 in.
The entire car was just over 12 ft long.
It was wider than it was long, which created some interesting handling characteristics we’ll get to later.
The suspension was basically adapted from Crosley’s sedan, which was adapted from technology nobody else wanted.
But here’s the thing, nobody at Crosley really understood yet.
They’d accidentally created something that shouldn’t work, but absolutely did.
The price was $899. For context, an MGTC cost almost $2,000.
A Jaguar XK120 cost nearly 4,000.
You could buy three hot shots for the price of one Jaguar.
This positioned the Hot Shot in a weird market segment of exactly one.
Too expensive for people who just needed transportation.
Way too cheap for people who wanted a real sports car.
Automotive journalists were savage.
Road and Track called it a motorized ironing board.
One review said driving it felt like piloting a go-kart in a hurricane.
Another described the sound as a very angry sewing machine having an argument with a blender.
The performance numbers were predictably terrible.
0 to 60 took somewhere between 20 and 30 seconds depending on wind direction, planetary alignment, and whether you’d prayed recently.
Top speed was claimed to be 85 mph, which was technically true in the same way that technically you can jump off a building and fly for a few seconds.
Getting the hot shot to 85 required a long straight, no headwind, maybe a slight downhill, and the courage of someone with nothing left to lose.
At that speed, the wind noise was so loud that passengers couldn’t communicate without hand signals.
The cockpit was Spartan in a way that made military aircraft look.
Two seats, if you could call them that.
They were more like padded shelves.
A steering wheel, three pedals, a gear lever that required you to basically reach behind yourself to find third gear.
A speedometer that optimistically went to 100.
No radio because who could hear it anyway?
No heater worth mentioning.
No windows, just removable side curtains that leaked air like a promise from a politician.
The hot shot arrives.
Dealerships that had agreed to carry Crosley products displayed the hot shot like a curiosity at a county fair.
Look at this adorable little thing.
Isn’t it cute?
Want to buy a real car?
The hot shot would sit in the corner of the showroom, usually with a handwritten price tag, sometimes with balloons tied to it like it was a kids toy.
Salesmen would use it as an icebreaker.
They’d get customers laughing at the tiny sports car, then walk them over to something with an actual engine.
The Hot Shot was basically a prop in someone else’s sales pitch.
Some dealers just refused to stock it entirely.
They’d tell Crosley representatives that their customers wanted real automobiles, not motorized roller skates.
One dealer in Connecticut reportedly told Crosley to send the Hot Shots to a toy store instead.
The few dealers who did stock them couldn’t give them away at first.
They’d sit on the lot for months getting dusty, occasionally drawing crowds of curious onlookers who’d poke at them, sit in them, laugh, then walk away.
The handful that actually sold went to a very specific type of buyer.
Eccentrics who enjoyed being different.
College professors who did complex mathematical calculations about fuel economy.
Engineers who appreciated the minimalist design philosophy.
People who thought owning an MG or a Jaguar was too obvious, too conformist.
These were buyers who wanted to make a statement.
And that statement was apparently, “I have made interesting life choices.”
But then something completely unexpected started happening.
These oddball Hot Shot owners started showing up at amateur sports car races with their tiny machines in tow.
This was the early days of the Sports Car Club of America.
Road racing was just getting organized in America.
The SECA had been founded in 1944 by a bunch of wealthy enthusiasts who’d fallen in love with European sports cars during the war and wanted somewhere to drive them fast without getting arrested.
By 1950, they had established a loose network of events at airports, closed roads, and the occasional proper circuit.
The typical ST CCA race in 1950 looked like someone had transported a British motor show to America.
MGs everywhere.
Their drivers wearing leather helmets and goggles like they were crossing the Sahara.
Jaguars with their sleek bodies and massive engines.
A few Porsches if you were at a fancy East Coast event.
Maybe some Allards or Healy’s if serious money showed up.
These were proper sports cars driven by proper gentlemen wearing proper driving gear.
Pressed shirts, silk scarves, the whole performance.
It was organized, civilized, and very, very British in character.
And then the Cley hot shot started appearing like gremlins at a royal wedding.
The first hot shot to show up at an SECA event caused genuine confusion among race officials.
They literally didn’t know what to do with it.
It wasn’t a sports car in the traditional sense.
Those had proper engines and looked purposeful.
It definitely wasn’t a sedan.
Was it even a car?
Eventually, after much headscratching and rulebook consulting, they created a class specifically for cars under 750 cm.
The Crosley was the only American car that qualified.
Everything else in that class was weird European micro cars that occasionally showed up, usually driven by expatriots who couldn’t afford anything larger.
The first few races followed a predictable pattern.
The hot shots would start at the back of the grid because their tiny engines meant slow qualifying times.
The starting flag would drop and the JJars and Allards would roar off making glorious mechanical symphonies.
The hot shots would buzz away making sounds like very angry insects trapped in metal boxes.
Spectators would chuckle.
This will be over quick.
But then something strange would happen.
By lap three, those yellow and red doors stops would be in the middle of the pack, threading through traffic.
By lap five, they’d be dicing with MGs, passing them in corners while the MG drivers looked confused.
By lap 10, people in the stands were starting to pay attention.
By lap 15, the smart money was getting nervous.
The impossible victories.
Here’s where things got absolutely insane.
In 1950 and 1951, Crosley Hot Shots started winning races overall, not just their tiny displacement class, overall wins against cars with eight and n times their horsepower, against purpose-built European race cars, against machinery that cost enough to buy a house.
The 1951 race at Watkins Glenn was legendary.
Bill Milikin, an accomplished racer who’d driven everything, took a hot shot and qualified midpack.
The race started with the usual suspects leading.
Jaguar XK120S and Aller J2S were fighting for the lead.
The Hot Shot was doing its buzzing thing somewhere in the middle.
By lap five, Milikin was in third.
The crowd was confused.
By lap 10, he was second.
The Jaguar driver was visibly frustrated, unable to shake this yellow doors stop that sounded like a sewing machine.
On lap 15, Milikin passed for the lead.
Not because the Jaguar broke, not because of a mistake.
He just drove around it on the outside of a corner and buzzed off into the distance.
The Jaguar driver, who’d been racing in Europe and thought he understood sports cars, finished second and immediately demanded to inspect the Cley.
He was convinced it had been modified.
Engine swapped.
Maybe something wasn’t legal.
The tech inspection revealed a completely stock hot shot.
18 horsepower, 724 cm.
Everything factory except the racing number painted on the door.
This wasn’t a one-time fluke.
Hot Shots won the under.75 liter class at the inaugural Sebring race in 1950.
They took class wins at Pebble Beach.
They dominated at regional SCCA events across the country.
In 1952, a hot shot won its class at the 24 hours of Lama index of performance, which measured efficiency rather than outright speed.
A,200-lb American car with 18 horsepower won at Lemons.
The racing community was having an existential crisis.
How was this possible?
These were serious racers and serious machinery being beaten by what looked like a child’s pedal car with an engine.
The physics didn’t make sense.
Horsepower is everything in racing.
More polar equals faster lap times.
Except apparently not.
The Sports Car Club of America officials started investigating.
There had to be something wrong.
The hot shots must be cheating somehow.
They pulled multiple hot shots for technical inspection after races.
Every time the cars were legal, stock engines making 18 horsepower, stock transmissions, stock rear ends.
The only modifications were safety equipment like roll bars and racing numbers.
One Jaguar owner, after being beaten by a hot shot for the third time, bought one just to figure out what was happening.
He took it to his shop and started analyzing it like it was alien technology.
What he found changed his understanding of vehicle dynamics forever.
The engineering truth.
Here’s the secret that Cley had stumbled onto, possibly by accident.
Power toweight ratio matters infinitely more than absolute power.
The Hot Shot weighed 1,200 lb and made 18 horsepower.
That’s 15 lb per horsepower.
The Jaguar XK 120 weighed 3,000 lb and made 160 horsepower.
That’s 19 lb per horsepower.
The Hot Shot was actually more powerful relative to its weight.
But it gets better.
The Hot Shot’s tiny engine and minimal drivetrain losses meant more of its 18 horsepower actually made it to the rear wheels.
The Jaguar’s massive inline 6 and heavy drivetrain ate up power just moving their own mass.
The Hot Shot’s mechanical efficiency was probably 75 to 80%.
The Jaguars was maybe 60%.
The real magic was in the corners.
Road racing in the ‘ 50s wasn’t about top speed.
Courses were tight and twisty.
The Hot Shot short wheelbase and low weight meant it could change direction instantly.
While Jaguar drivers were wrestling 3,000 lbs through corners, scrubbing off speed with their brakes, Hot Shot drivers were basically flicking the car from apex to apex with fingertip steering inputs.
The brakes tell the whole story.
The Jaguar needed massive drum brakes to slow down 3,000 lb from high speeds.
These brakes would fade after hard use, which happened in every race.
The Hot Shot tiny drum brakes barely worked, but they didn’t need to.
1,200 lb doesn’t take much to slow down.
Hot shot drivers could break later and harder without fade.
The CIBA engine, while pathetic in absolute terms, was actually perfectly suited for road racing.
It revved willingly to 6,000 RPM with no drama.
The overhead cam design meant good breathing for its size.
The tiny displacement meant it barely made heat, so it never overheated even in long races.
Jaguars were constantly pulling into pits with cooling issues.
Hot shots just kept buzzing along.
The 3-speed transmission that seemed like a handicap was actually ideal.
The gear ratios were spaced perfectly for tight courses.
First gear was strong enough to pull you out of slow corners.
Third gear was tall enough for any straight you’d encounter.
The simplicity meant less to break, less weight, less mechanical loss.
The handling was bizarre but effective.
The Hot Shot’s widthto-length ratio meant it was incredibly stable in a straight line, but could rotate on a dime.
The suspension, adapted from Crosley’s economy sedan, was actually pretty sophisticated for its weight.
It kept the tiny tires loaded properly through corners.
And those tiny tires, they had less rotational mass than big sports car tires, so they accelerated and decelerated faster.
Drivers who raced hot shot reported something unexpected.
The car talked to you.
With so little weight and so little power, you could feel everything the car was doing.
Where a Jaguar driver might overdrive into a corner and plow, a hot shot driver knew instantly when they were at the limit.
The learning curve was short.
The margin for error was larger than expected.
The fuel economy was absurd.
Hot shots could run entire races without refueling while bigger cars had to pit.
At endurance races, this advantage was enormous.
At Sebring, hot shots were lapping consistently while Jaguars and Allards were spending five minutes in the pits getting fuel.
Those pit stops added up over 12 hours.
But here’s what really drove the establishment crazy.
The hot shot proved that the entire premise of sports car design was wrong.
Sports cars didn’t need to be powerful.
They needed to be light.
They didn’t need complex engines.
They needed efficient engines.
They didn’t need luxury appointments.
They needed low weight.
Everything the British and European manufacturers had been doing for decades was suboptimal.
And it wasn’t just amateurs noticing.
Professional racing observers were watching.
Phil Hill, who go on to become America’s first Formula 1 world champion, raced the Hot Shot early in his career.
He later said it taught him more about vehicle dynamics than any other car.
The Hot Shot limitations forced you to be smooth, to carry momentum, to think three corners ahead.
Master a hot shot and you could drive anything.
Briggs Cunningham, who ran America’s most serious sports car racing effort, tested a hot shot and was stunned.
He couldn’t believe something so small and weak could be so fast on a road course.
He started incorporating lightweight philosophy into his own race car designs.
The Cunningham C4R built to win Le showed clear hot shot influence in its obsessive weight reduction.
Detroit’s denial and the Cley’s fall.
Detroit’s reaction to the hot shot racing success was predictable, inevitable, and absolutely infuriating.
They ignored it completely.
General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler didn’t acknowledge that an 18 horsepower Crossley was embarrassing sports cars from their overseas competitors.
It was like watching someone pretend they didn’t just get dunked on by a middle schooler.
The hot shot winning races didn’t fit the narrative Detroit had been selling for decades.
American cars were supposed to be big, powerful, impressive with engines that made sounds like angry gods.
The Hot Shot was none of those things.
It was an embarrassment to everything Detroit believed about automobiles.
Internal memos from Ford in 1951, released years later through some corporate archive, show engineers actually discussing the Hot Shot racing results.
You can practically feel their cognitive dissonance through the typewritten pages.
They concluded that road racing was a niche activity not relevant to real world driving.
The fact that a tiny engine could win races didn’t matter because Americans wanted powerful cars for highway driving.
Never mind that most Americans never drove faster than 60 mph.
Never mind that the hot shot was proving fundamental principles about vehicle dynamics.
If Ford’s engineers decided that winning races wasn’t important if you won them the wrong way.
This completely missed the point, but it kept them comfortable.
It let them sleep at night.
Chevrolet’s response was slightly more sophisticated, which is like saying one dinosaur was smarter than the others right before the meteor hit.
They actually studied the hot shot quietly.
Engineers bought them, tore them apart, ran calculations.
They started thinking seriously about powertoweight ratios, about what it meant that something so small could be so quick.
This thinking eventually contributed to the Corvette’s development, which in its first 1953 iteration was actually fairly light by bloated American standards at just 2,800 lb.
But even the Corvette made 150 horsepower from its straight six.
The real lesson from the hot shot, the minimalist philosophy that less could be more was studied, acknowledged, then promptly ignored because selling Americans on minimalism was like selling ice to Eskimos.
Meanwhile, Crossley himself absolutely loved the racing success.
He plastered it everywhere.
Advertisements showed photos of hot shots beating Jaguars with headlines screaming about giant killers and David versus Goliath.
He took out full page ads and enthusiast magazines.
He sent press releases to every newspaper that would listen.
Look what we did.
Look at what’s possible.
But the American car buying public didn’t care.
They really truly didn’t give a damn.
They didn’t want an 18 horsepower sports car, even if it won races every single weekend.
They wanted something that felt substantial when you slammed the door.
Something that had a proper engine sound that made neighbors look up from their lawns.
Something that impressed people at the country club.
The Hot Shot racing victories, as numerous and legitimate as they were, didn’t translate to sales, not even a little.
Production of the Hot Shot ended in 1952 after just 3 years.
Total production was about 2,000 units.
For a car that revolutionized thinking about sports car design, that’s pathetic.
For a car that proved lightweight philosophy worked, that’s heartbreaking.
Crosley Motors itself folded in 1952. the whole company disappearing like it never existed.
The American public had spoken and they didn’t want small cars.
They wanted big cars that made them feel important.
The Hot Shot racing success continued briefly after production ended.
The cars were cheap to buy, used, sometimes given away by dealers who couldn’t move them new.
Amateur racers kept campaigning them through the mid50s.
They kept winning in their displacement class.
They kept frustrating owners of expensive European machinery who couldn’t understand the physics.
And then slowly, inevitably, they disappeared.
Most got crashed into trees by overenthusiastic drivers.
Some were parted out when engines finally gave up.
Many were just scrapped as worthless oddities nobody wanted.
Survivors are incredibly rare today, hidden in barns or tucked away in collections.
The legacy.
But the legacy is profound.
The hot shot proves something that Detroit spent 40 years denying.
Lightweight beats horsepower in anything except drag racing.
The British got the message faster than Americans.
Colin Chapman at Lotus made lightweight philosophy is religion.
Directly inspired by watching hot shots embarrass proper sports cars.
The Lotus 7, one of the purest sports cars ever built, is a spiritual descendant of the Hot Shot.
The Japanese learned the lesson, too.
When Honda and Mazda started building sports cars in the 60s and 70s, they studied the hot shots philosophy.
The original Mazda Miata, which revived the lightweight sports car genre in 1989, could trace its lineage back to a rusty yellow Cley buzzing around Watkins Glenn in 1951. Even modern performance cars with all their power and technology are rediscovering what the hot shot proved.
Porsche’s Boxster and Cayman, Alfa Romeo’s 4C, Lotus’ entire lineup.
These cars emphasize lightweight construction over outright power.
They’re channeling the spirit of a,200lb doors stop with 18 horsepower that embarrassed the world.
The power to weight obsession in modern performance discussions where enthusiasts calculate pounds per horsepower like it’s a religious formula that started with racers trying to figure out how a hot shot was so quick.
Before the hot shot proved it on track, most people thought power to weight was just an academic calculation.
The hot shot made it the most important metric in performance car evaluation.
Think about the broader lesson here.
An appliance manufacturer with no automotive heritage built a sports car with an absurdly small engine that everyone mocked.
Then it went racing against the best sports cars from companies with decades of experience and heritage.
And it won repeatedly.
That shouldn’t be possible in any rational universe.
The hot shot story is about how established wisdom is often just established, not wise.
Detroit and the European manufacturers knew sports cars needed big engines, substantial weight, sophisticated engineering.
The hot shot proved they were wrong.
One refrigerator salesman from Cincinnati with a weird idea about small cars changed automotive thinking forever.
It’s also a reminder that innovation usually comes from outsiders.
Jaguar and MG couldn’t build a hot shot.
They were too invested in their existing approach.
They had heritage to protect, customer expectations to meet, dealer networks to satisfy.
Crosley had none of those constraints.
He could just build what made sense, even if it looked ridiculous.
The hot shot also exposed the difference between marketing and reality.
Sports car manufacturers sold power, prestige, and heritage.
Crosley sold physics.
In advertising, heritage wins on a racetrack.
Physics wins.
The Hot Shot’s racing success was physics proving that everything else was just decoration.
What if Crossley hadn’t gone bankrupt?
What if the Hot Shot had survived to see the 60s sports car boom?
Would we have ended up with American lightweight sports cars instead of importing everything from Britain and Japan?
Would Detroit have learned the lesson about minimalism 30 years earlier?
We’ll never know.
But it’s fun to imagine an alternate timeline where lightweight philosophy dominated American automotive thinking from the 50s onward.
Today, the few surviving hot shots are worth absurd money at auction.
A racing hot shot sold for over $100,000 a few years ago.
For a car you could buy new for $900, for a car that Detroit pretended didn’t exist, that hot shot probably still has 18 horsepower, still weighs 1,200 lb, and could probably still embarrass a few modern sports cars on a tight autocross course.
The ultimate irony is that the Hot Shot failed commercially while succeeding in every way that mattered.
It proved lightweight design worked.
It won races.
It influenced generations of sports car designers.
It changed how enthusiasts think about performance, but Americans didn’t buy it because it didn’t feel substantial enough.
We wanted the illusion of performance through big engines and heavy construction.
The Hot Shot offered actual performance, and we rejected it.
Every time you hear a car enthusiast say, “Weight is the enemy.”
They’re channeling the Hot Shot.
Every time someone chooses a Miata over a more powerful car, they’re following the Hot Shot philosophy.
Every time a manufacturer builds a lightweight sports car, they’re acknowledging what Powell Crosley Jr.
Approved in 1949. Sometimes 18 horsepower in,200 lb beats 160 horsepower in 3,000 lb.
The Crosley Hot Shot shouldn’t have worked a shot.
It was too small, too weak, too cheap, too weird.
It should have been a footnote in automotive history, a curiosity that proved you needed proper power for proper performance.
Instead, it became proof that everything we thought we knew about sports cars was wrong.
And in doing so, it changed automotive history more than most successful cars ever do.
Sometimes the best solutions come from people who don’t know what’s impossible.
Crosley didn’t know you couldn’t build a competitive sports car with 18 horsepower.
So, he built one anyway.
And when it started beating Jaguars, the world had to reconsider everything.
That’s not just automotive history.
That’s a masterclass in innovation through ignorance of conventional wisdom.
The next time you see a Miata, a BRZ, a Lotus, or any lightweight sports car, remember they’re all descendants of a yellow doors stop from Cincinnati that prove buzzbeats roar when physics writes the rule book.
