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20 Questions with Joe Vittone

Photography: Glenn Miller

VWT: What was your first car?

JV: The car that I really feel was my own first car, was a 1932 Ford, Model "B" four-cylinder Victoria. I always loved cars, and it was possible when I was a kid, to buy an old car that didn't need much work, fix it up and sell it for a little profit. I had a lot of old cars, I remember one car, a DeSoto; it was a roadster. Oh, what a beautiful car it was ! But it was a little heavy.

VWT: Were you in any car clubs?

JV: I belonged to the "Outriders" car club, in Los Angeles. I was so young at the time, though, that my parents wouldn't let me go to all the meets. Once in a while, we would get up to El Mirage Dry Lake, not as often as I would have liked to have gone, though. But it got me involved with a lot of people, like Eddie Meyer. It got me interested in engines and what people could do with them. I made friends with Vic Edelbrock, Roy Richter and Ed Iskenderian. Cliff Collins and I were very good friends. Cliff had a company called Harmon-Collins that made an excellent ignition system for flathead Fords.

VWT: What made you decide to go into VWs?

JV: I had a motorcycle shop in Stockton and sold interesting motorcycles like Royal Enfields, Douglas, Zundapps and Ariels. In doing this motorcycle business, I was fortunate to work with some very skilled mechanics. Through them, I not only learned how to make the engines go faster, but also to last longer. It's one thing to build something that goes fast, but only goes for a short time; you don't keep too many customers that way. At that time, a guy came to see me; it was 1952, with a funny-looking little car; it was the Volkswagen Beetle, which I was already familiar with, because I read all the car magazines of that time, even back then so I knew about the Volkswagen and it being "Hitler's car." The guy wanted me to be a dealer. I had to buy two cars and an enormous amount of spare parts inventory. You wouldn't believe the parts package that was involved with becoming a dealer! I told the guy that I thought the cars were pretty good, but if they were that good, why did I need all those extra parts? It didn't make sense, you know? I turned that guy down and referred the guy to a friend of mine, who took the dealership offer. In one year, that guy had sold only one car. Seeing that, I thought my decision not to become a dealer was all right. The next year, I think the dealership sold two or three cars. In 1954, they began to sell a little better and, at that time, I bought one. I tried to break that car and it wouldn't break! I put a couple of Amal motorcycle carburetors on it; I made a couple of manifolds and, of course, that increased the performance of the car quite a bit. I took the engine all apart and it looked to me to be a pretty strong little car, you know?
At that time, I decided that I would apply for a Volkswagen dealership, which I did and I was offered my choice of a whole bunch of locations, one right where I lived in Stockton, but I didn't want to take that one, because it would have meant taking it away from my friend, Jack Thornton, who had the dealership there.

They offered me about five different dealership locations in Southern California and I chose Riverside, because it had a racetrack there; a dirt track. So that's what made me decide to go into VWs. Of course, I didn't have any money, but I rented an old building, that used to be an old Hudson dealership. The distributor at that time was John Von Neumann and he liked motorcycles and because of that, I got the VW dealership.

VWT: What made you decide to race VWs? Did you originally intend to become involved in drag racing a VW or was that the influence of Dean Lowry?

JV: Well, that was normal for me. I would race anything on wheels. VW looked like a natural to me. I mean, it had the advantage of not having to worry about getting the weight onto the rear end for traction and an engine that was similar to a motorcycle, and it didn't look very hard to me to get some extra horsepower out of that engine. So, I had this VW dealership, and I hired Dean Lowry to work at the dealership.

He was a real nice guy, extremely knowledgeable and he was into drag racing Chryslers at the time, as I recall. I had been into drag racing motorcycles for a long time. Instead of racing stuff with large cubic inches, I always ran motorcycles with small engine displacements and made them go as fast as I could.

VWT: When did you start racing VWs?

JV: It must have been around 1957. I'm guessing now, but that should be about right. I was working on VWs, that still had the 36 hp engines, I got some help from my friend Cliff Collins and we changed the crankshaft. I believe we enlarged the displacement, but not very much, as there were no "big bore" kits around at that time. I believe we used a Porsche crank. To the best of my recollection, that car ran 91 mph the first time we ran it and that was encouraging. VW had a lot of problems back then. It wasn't common knowledge, but it was not unusual for a guy to come driving into my dealership with a broken crankshaft (they would still run with a broken crank). I would never tell the customer that it had a broken crankshaft. We would change the crank under warranty, but never tell the customer what the problem had been. Then, working with Cliff Collins, we drew a design for a new crankshaft, that corrected some of the faults of the original VW crank.

I tried to have the crank forged in the United States, but the forging companies here wanted more money than I could afford, to do it. So I flew to Germany and I talked to the Porsche factory there (I was also a Porsche dealer), made friends with the folks in the parts department and they told me who all of their suppliers were. I went to the manufacturer who made the cranks for Porsche and they made cranks for me. That started the crankshaft business.

At that time, I had no intention of starting a business. All I wanted to do was to help the Volkswagen factory get more of the youth market and the factory didn't seem to care one way or the other. I was very disheartened. Another thing I noticed was that the valve guides on the VW engines deteriorated very rapidly. It seemed like at about 20 or 25,000 miles, you would need a valve job and Volkswagen said you have to buy new cylinder heads. I thought "This is crazy! I can replace these guides and I can make them out of better material!"

It was always our intent to try and help the factory. We tried to sell these guides to the factory. They were not interested and they also said that if I persisted in this type of activity, I might find myself without a franchise to sell VWs! Well, I went ahead and did it anyway. I kept trying to work with them, but they were just so hard-headed I couldn't do anything with them. At Economotors, we offered the customers a choice of the normal 1131cc motor or the 1300cc with the EMPI crank for only $200 more. That really got me a lot of heat from the factory, but EMPI cranks didn't break.

VWT: What made you decide to start EMPI?

JV: I had ordered some stuff from an accessory outfit back East and when the parts got here, the quality was atrocious! I mean it was really junk. I called the place and asked about what kind of guarantee they had and the guy told me "if it breaks into two pieces, you own both parts." I thought, "Well, this guy really needs some competition!" Right there, that day, EMPI was born. I decided that we would have parts too, but in my opinion, it didn't just have to be as good as the factory part; it had to be better. The only thing I preached was quality, quality, quality. We got the best materials and we tried to improve upon the factory parts in every way. We went to all the best manufacturers, got acquainted with them and as you know, we had a lot of pretty nice products.

VWT: What is your most memorable race with the Inch Pincher?

JV: I would say that it was the race in Long Beach, Calif., Darrell was driving the Inch Pincher and Darrell won by beating a pretty fast Corvette. See, at that time, it wasn't common for Volkswagens to go that fast.

VWT: What is your proudest moment?

JV: I took my Dune Buggy (the EMPI Imp -ed.) to the Frankfurt Auto show and the Chancellor of Germany, Konrad Adenauer, sat in it along with Carl Hahn. We took pictures of everyone sitting in the car and then Dr. Hahn said that they would like to buy the car and put it in their museum in Wolfsburg. They did and the car is there today.