Interview: The Boss is Back

Tom Cantrell’s world revolves around excellence, and it seems he will go to any length to achieve perfection on, and off, the racetrack. The owner of a successful construction business in the Pacific Northwest and a collector of vintage cars, Tom has also built a formidable race team. With a true passion for racing history and a penchant for high horsepower machines, Tom’s stable of racecars is like a who’s who of excellence from the Big Bore era — including the remarkable project seen here.

As a frame of reference for Tom’s project, we first need to set the stage. While small displacement engines dominated racing through the post-war 1950s and early ’60s, the rapidly developing V8 engine quickly became the power plant of choice by the late 1960s. Across Europe and North America, throngs of eager spectators filled the grandstands, infields and surrounding hillsides at every racetrack to witness the spectacle of Big Bore racing.