"Big Daddy" Ed Roth's Mysterion Proved Two Engines Are Better Than One
The original Mysterion is gone, but these old photos of the custom car's development are incredible.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: "Big Daddy" Ed Roth built the fun stuff. The sort of wild and whimsical cars that tickled the fancy and pickled a kid's imagination for life. Back in the day when Roth was at the peak of his artistic career, creating cars such as the Mysterion, we were all snot-nosed little kids, and it was square to call him "Big Daddy" Ed Roth—simply "Big Daddy" Roth or just "Big Daddy" was how the cool guys said it.
Today, Roth's Mysterion exists mostly in the memories of those who saw it in person. Fortunately, Jeffery Jones, a guy who's as much a madman artist as Roth himself, re-created the Mysterion. In fact, the image above is of Jones's Mysterion. There's no doubt Jones is the world's leading authority on Roth's legendary twin-engined custom car.
Roth had a pair of 1950 Oldsmobile V-8 engines in place mated to Hydramatic transmissions in the earliest stages of the Mysterion's creation. The Ford Motor Company, by way of Bud "The Kat from AMT" Anderson, got wind of the build thanks to aRod & Customarticle and shipped three big-block engines to Roth.
Some recollect that the Blue Oval sent over a trio of high-performance 406-cubic-inch engines, but after extensive research, Jones concluded the V-8s were 390-cubic-inchers from the Ford Thunderbird. Roth fitted two of those big bent-eights into the Mysterion. The third ended up in his 1955 Chevy gasser.
It took some engineering tricks to turn the Mysterion's canted dual-engine configuration into something that drove. As such, only one of the engines actually ran. The other was stripped out and turned into a decoy engine that concealed an alternator spinning internally on a front two-main-bearings-supported jackshaft.
The sale of Jones's Mysterion at a Sotheby's auction held the car-collecting crowd in awe. Despite selling for $246,600, or double what it was expected to go for, Jones likely barely walked away with any actual earnings in his pocket given the cost of materials and amount of time he poured into the project. The car now resides in Chesterfield, Michigan as part of the Stahls Automotive Collection.
