"Guess, just guess what this is," said Gary Cerveny, pointing at the engine in his Hisso Special roadster. We examined the mill, noting its canted stance, bare aluminum finish, and mix of cast and custom-fabricated components. We went frantically through our memory banks searching for the answer before admitting defeat. "Uh, airplane engine?" was our lame guess.

As it turns out, we were half right. The dragster's four-cylinder is a custom construction made by removing one bank of a 1914 Hispano-Suiza aircraft V8. The resulting 358ci four-banger is often referred to as a "Half-a-Hisso," thus the Hisso Special name on Gary's machine.

See all 10 photos Modifications from the earlier usage of the engine include the log manifold and three Stromberg 97s.

To understand why anyone would cut up a perfectly good 718ci V8, you'll need to go back in time to the end of WWI. Surplus military equipment was available at incredibly cheap prices, and racers were shoving airplane engines into all sorts of race cars. The Hispano-Suiza V8 was big and cheap, but it was also very heavy—nearly 500 pounds—so you didn't see a whole lot of Hisso-powered race winners. By the late 1920s, folks had come up with the idea of halving the Hisso, resulting in a slant-four, which not only fit better in a small race car but was also incredibly competitive in classes that were governed by number of cylinders rule, rather than a displacement limit.

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Most of these halvsies were being used in sprint-car racing, where they were so successful they were eventually banned. All Men Must Die, and All Winning Engines Must Be Banned. Those are universal truths. Luckily for the Hisso, drag racing was getting into weird engines just as sprint-car racing was cracking down on them, so when a couple of young Southern Californian drag racers heard about the engine, they thought it might be just what they needed for the car they were building.

Paul Aicher and Ron Benham were members of the Four-Ever-Four racing club—pretty sure you can guess the requirements for membership—and the enormous quad-cylinder Hisso was perfect for their dragster-to-be. They built the frame out of mild-steel tubing and hand-bent aluminum for the hood and sides. The nose and tail are fiberglass off a 1950s IndyCar. The rest of the suspension was made from a grab-bag of junkyard parts; in the front, they used a Willys axle, a Model A spring, friction shocks, and a modified Ford steering setup. In the rear, Ford axlehousings are joined to a Cyclone quick-change. The end result looked more like an IndyCar than a dragster, especially with the 18-inch Halibrand wheels.

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Benham and Aicher built the Hisso Special in the 1950s, earning a spot in a four-cylinder feature in the June 1960 issue of HOT ROD and a four-page story a few years later in the March 1963 issue of Car Craft. At the time of the CC story, Aicher ran a best e.t. of 12 flat at 107 mph and he and Benham were hoping to dip into the 11s. In our research of the car, we ended up talking to Jim Brierley, who remembered racing against the Hisso back in the 1960s. "It was mostly Fords running, but there were Chevy blocks with Olds heads, Ranger aircraft engines, Wright 'Gypsy' engines, and the Hisso. It was a nice engine—water-cooled, single overhead cam, all aluminum. I remember one time at Riverside Raceway, the tach needle was just laying at the bottom of the tach. I asked Paul how he knew when to shift: 'Simple,' he said. 'When the steering wheel gets too big to hang onto, it is time to shift. '" That should give you an idea of the vibration issues the Hisso had at redline.

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Like all the wild and wacky rides of the early 1960s, the Hisso Special couldn't compete forever, and Benham and Aicher eventually moved on. The Hisso spent a few decades in museums and private collections until vintage racing enthusiast Gary Cerveny ran across it in a San Francisco garage. "I was up there to look at a Kurtis, which turned out to be a copy," Gary says. "I spent my life in aviation, and I like aircraft-engine-powered cars; I raced jet dragsters in the 1980s, but I didn't recognize the engine. I liked the style of the car, the magnesium IndyCar wheels. The seller said it ran, so we pushed it all over the Bay Area trying to start it."

Once Gary had the car in his garage in Malibu, California, he and his wife, Diane, fiddled with the tuning, rebuilt the carbs, and got it running. Because the Cervenys didn't want to repeat the hilly push-start experience every time they wanted to take the Hisso out for a drive, Gary added an electric fuel pump, which he removed for our photo shoot. Mostly, though, the Hisso is a great representation of how some of the little guys approached racing with a mix of old parts and imagination. "It's a really interesting mix of technology," Gary says, "the 1950s hot rod engineering, and the airplane engine, which was very innovative for 1914."