Balchowsky’s insistent use of whitewall “street” tires was a constant source of amazement and incredulity when others were using proven racing tires from Pirelli, Dunlop or Continental. When asked why, he’d earnestly explain to the gullible that the gas station in front of his shop had a sale on whitewalls and had given him a good deal.

The truth is that Max had gone to Akron to study tire construction with the engineers who designed them. They in turn had given him a small instrument about the size of a pocket watch, called a durometer, to test the Shore hardness of tire treads.

Being a drag racer, Max knew a certain amount of tread suppleness gave improved traction. He constantly tested every tire he could get his hands on and soon learned that premium Vogue whitewalls, sold as an option on expensive sedans of that era, were softest.

When he first tested them at the San Fernando drag strip, he cut several tenths off his previous best times. “To know anything for certain, you have to prove it to yourself by doing it,” Max said. “No advice is real or worth following unless you confirm it for certain by doing your own research.”

Rags to Riches

Max and Ina Balchowsky specialized in repairing, tuning and modifying foreign cars for an elite Hollywood clientele who couldn’t find the talent to keep their glamorous machinery running properly. Instead of trying to deal with uncommunicative or uninterested factory contacts in Europe, Max figured it was always faster, easier and far less expensive to create his own superior replacement components derived from American parts scrounged from junkyards.

With an almost encyclopedic cross-referenced knowledge of which American-made components might fit into some foreign housing with some careful machine work, Max could, for example, replace the blown ring and pinion in an alloy Maserati differential case within days for a fraction of the cost of importing some weaker, obsolete, almost nonexistent part.

Blown engine? No problem. An American V8 with more power, torque and reliability would usually fit.

This, of course, drove the purists crazy, but his clients loved it. Hollywood, after all, was about appearances, not reality. Many of the Balchowskys’ jobs were for the movie industry. Their best-known work may be the several identical Mustangs made for Steve McQueen’s “Bullitt.” All were built at Hollywood Motors.

Why Buicks?

Buick V8s were Max’s specialty in an era when the speed equipment industry was concentrating its efforts on small-block Chevrolets and Fords. Many wondered, “Why Buicks?” As usual, it was a matter of cost. Balchowsky could build a racing Buick engine for hundreds of dollars less than a comparable hot Chev’ small-block or 289 Ford V8.

Max was wise enough to research and understand the merits of improved induction flow when others hardly knew the science existed. He discovered many speed secrets by hanging out with professional motorcycle racers and tuners, who used their self-built dynamometers and flow benches to extract more power from their single- or twin-cylinder flat-trackers.

As a result of this experience, Max built his own flow bench and began laboriously comparing every cylinder head he could find. While others were pursuing the “common wisdom” of porting intake runners as large as possible and using larger valves, Balchowsky discovered that his “nailhead” Buicks, with their smaller-diameter intakes, actually encouraged greater efficiency by straightening port flow instead of impeding it with larger-diameter valves.

When Max’s first Buick-engined special, a ’32 Ford roadster called the Buford, began winning consistently, he became a back-door recipient of support from Buick despite it being technically verboten for any GM division to be involved in “performance-related” activities.

Much like Smokey Yunick in Daytona, Max quietly defied the status quo in those days of the so-called corporate AMA ban on racing. He constantly tried innovative ideas that he simply saw as common-sense solutions to problems that mystified Detroit’s finest.

Elegantly Economical

Of all the specials Hollywood Motors built, Old Yeller II, constructed in 1959, is probably the most famous. Driven often in the day by the likes of Dan Gurney, Carroll Shelby, Bob Bondurant, Billy Krause, Bob Drake, Paul O’Shea and Max himself, it became a blue-collar crowd favorite because of its apparent underdog appearance when, in fact, it was equal in performance to the finest from Europe.

With a simple 1¾-inch chrome-moly tube-frame chassis fabricated over chalk lines drawn on the shop’s concrete floor, Old Yeller II was elegantly simple. Its double A-arm front suspension was a clean combination of drilled Jaguar uppers with lowers made of shortened Pontiac units and their integral ball joints.

Most people assumed the holes in the Jag A-arms were for lightness, but they were actually added to purposely weaken them. If the car happened to slam into a guardrail, the A-arm would crush, saving the chassis’s attachment point.