The 2020 edition of the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance will feature Indianapolis 500-winning Miller race cars and other noteworthy competition vehicles in its recently announced class dedicated to the cars of Harry A. Miller. However, it likely won’t include Miller’s one attempt at building the ne plus ultra of passenger cars, the four-wheel-drive V-16 Miller-Burden of 1932.
Miller, a former race mechanic for Oldsmobile, made a sizeable fortune a hundred years ago in Los Angeles with his carburetor business – a fortune that he leveraged to build some of the most successful racing machines of the Twenties and Thirties, powered by a series of Peugeot-inspired dual-overhead camshaft four- and eight-cylinder engines.
Auto historian Griffith Borgeson has described Miller as “the greatest creative figure in the history of the American racing car,” but others have described him as more of an artist or perhaps the world’s best salesman, and much of the genius behind Miller’s success came from draftsman Leo Goossen and machinist Fred Offenhauser.