Michigan State's missing dragster: Alumni trying to find car missing since 1974

EAST LANSING - The story of how a group of Michigan State University students turned an Oldsmobile test car into a competitive dragster began in an Okemos bar.

It was the fall of 1969, and members of the MSU Society of Automotive Engineers were enjoying a pitcher of beer with Jim Miller, a team sponsor from Oldsmobile.

Monthly meetings were about the only thing the group was doing at that time, said team member Paul Aurand, and, that evening, Miller began chastising the group for their inactivity.

“We turned it around and said to him, 'Why don’t you get us a car from Oldsmobile and we’ll go racing,'” Aurand said.

Miller did.

The car was a 1969 Oldsmobile Cutlass W-31. The team began racing it in the spring of 1970.

But the story of the MSU dragster ends with a cliffhanger.

No team members have seen the car since 1974. Dennis Kline and a handful of his teammates left the car at MSU upon graduating.

Today, they're on the hunt for their long-lost dragster.  

“We think it might be in hands of a racer or someone in Mid-Michigan who doesn’t know they have it,” Kline said.

The amount of time that has passed and the fact that the car didn’t have a VIN number make tracking it down a daunting task.

Kline received tips about the car after posting on Craiglist, and even tracked down the trailer the team used to haul it to races, which had been sitting in a field in Grand Blanc for more than four decades.

When Kline opened it up, it had a different car inside.

And if they ever find the car?  

“We still have the keys for it,” Kline said.

Kline and his former teammates are reuniting in November for a presentation on W-31 collegiate teams at this year’s Muscle Car and Corvette Nationals’ convention in Chicago.

They hope to locate the car, or at least learn its fate, ahead of the event.

The first hurdle to getting a racing car was finding a place to work on it, Aurand said. Fortunately, one of the founding members of MSU SAE procured a key to an old blacksmith shop behind MSU’s Farrall Agriculture Engineering building.

“Calling it a garage was a bit of a stretch, but at least it was ours,” Aurand said, noting it had dirt floors and little in the way of amenities.

One night later that fall of 1969, Aurand got a call from Miller, who told him to meet him in front of Wonders Hall.

Miller drove Aurand to an Oldsmobile engineering building, where he opened up an impound area and handed him the keys to the red 1969 Oldsmobile Cutlass. The VIN had been taken off of the dash, and there was no registration to speak of.

“He told me not to get caught, Aurand recalled. “I parked it in the blacksmith shop, and we started working on it.”

Team members wrote letters to area auto parts and manufacturers, asking for components for the car, which Oldsmobile had been using as a durability test car.

“We needed a clutch, drag slicks, Tachometer, piston rings, just about everything you can imagine was donated by major corporations,” Kline said.

Kline, an industrial design major, raced a car of his own prior to joining the MSU team.

"When I found out there was a student racing activity, I was ecstatic," 

He was responsible for the car's graphics and the team's public relations prior to graduating in 1973. He went on to work for Chrysler as an exterior stylist. 

The team was very competitive, Kline said, racing at tracks across the state. There wasn’t a team at the University of Michigan to race against, so they kept coming back to race the weekend racers and other well-financed teams.

“We were just a bunch of baby-faced kids that didn’t know any better,” he said.

Fred Bowen shared time behind the wheel of the MSU car during the spring of 1971. 

"There was a real rush feeling the acceleration of that car leaving the line at the drag strip and clearing a quarter mile at between 102 and 105 miles per hour," Bowen said.

Oldsmobile was far from a "grandpa car" back in those days, he said. They were often innovative and stylish, and the W-30 and W-31 fit neatly into the high-performance category. 

As for finding out what happened to the car — whether it was dismantled, crushed or preserved out of sight — Bowen is optimistic.

"I'm betting there is someone out in the world that knows what became of it."

Contact RJ Wolcott at (517) 377-1026 or rwolcott@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @wolcottr.

Have a tip?

For anyone with information about the car, send an email to KlineDA@yahoo.com.