"The chassis was found in Tucson and traced to New Mexico.  Tracy Bird lived in either Phoenix or Tucson and raced a great deal in New Mexico. The photos are current from Alex's place  in Tucson. The roll bars were added after the chassis was built, based on the poor quality of the welds vs. the better welding on the chassis.  Notice the Morgensen trademark bar between the spring shackles mounted transversely from one spring to another on the rear suspension??

This whole thing is a mystery.  However, Jim Sitz is very good at this history and he remembers the Bird car well but has no photos of it.  Bird told Jim, in recent years,  that the Mercedes motor had little power, so he sold the car.  My guess is it was most  likely a 300S sedan motor which weighed at least 750 lbs.. Bird certainly would not have had the money for a Gullwing motor.    The car shows up in a Torrey Pines race program as a Mercedes??" 

"The frame looks like it had never been finished. There are no brackets, no  panels, nothing to make one conclude that it had a body or anything?  The frame is wider and lower than OY#1. OY#1 had electrical conduit throughout the rear portion of the car to  attach  rear fenders and to hold the > gas tank. The front fenders, etc. were supported by boxed strapping bar.

There is one person left out of the conversation and that was Jim Bryant.  Morgensen told me that he was responsible for much of the design of OY#1 and did the rear end transfer rod and the front end torsion setup. Morgensen also told me that Boyd was so good at welding that he could cut threads for a bolt. 

"There is no way to prove that this is the Tracy Bird car, at this moment.  In either case the car would not be an Ol' Yaller but, at the most, a car built for Bird by Morgensen and Hough."

"Mike is correct that there are no brackets on the chassis for any bodywork right now, but there have been.  I have stripped some paint off the chassis in the places where there were brackets in the drawing that you sent me, and there have been brackets in almost exactly the same spots.  They have been ground off, primered, and painted over.  The story I got when I bought it was that the last person that raced the car was in the process of restoring it when he died. 

His widow had all the loose parts hauled to the dump, but the chassis stayed. The son-in-law sold it to the guy I bought it from.  I am still trying to track down the name of the son-in-law, to try and get the name of the widow and the last driver. 

There are plenty of battle scars on this chassis, even some that suggest that the car has been upside down at some point, and some strange marks inside the engine bay. I would like to show the chassis to some experts in the condition it is in now, because some of the tell-tale signs will disappear as soon as I will start restoring it.  It must have sat outside for a long time, the steering box and the rear axle are rusted solid. (The rear axle in the photos is not the one that was in the car when the last owner before me got it, that axle was put in to make possible to push it around.)"