This Genie Huffaker Mk10 is a Can-Am brute

This relatively obscure racing car emerged from the workshop of Huffaker Engineering, founded by Joe Huffaker in 1966. As a teenager, Huffaker had built various hot-rods for fun in the 1940s, and by the 1950s he’d started modifying other cars to take racing, his first a 1954 Austin Healey ‘Huffaker Special’.

His cars proved so competitive the operation grew, and within a couple of years a chap called Kjell Qvale, one of the founders of the Pebble Beach Concours and the first distributor of Jaguars on the USA’s West Coast, called on Huffaker to run British Motor Car’s (BMC’s) newly established USA motorsports operation. Huffaker’s motorsport businesses thrived, with cars he’d either built or run racing in Can-Am, IMSA, Trans-Am, IndyCar and more.   

The Genie Mk10 you see here, as you may have realised from the calibre of its Whitsun Trophy competition, is a Can-Am brute. Huffaker’s custom-built creations initially competed in Formula Junior, but before long Huffaker and his team developed the Genie Mk4, a racer with a mid-mounted 1,100cc engine and named after his wife Jean.

With a tubular space-frame chassis, independent coil-spring suspension, disc brakes and fibreglass bodies, the Mk4 was ripe for an upgrade, and before long the Mk5 was born. Then, when the United States Road Racing Championship (USRRC) was formed in 1963, Huffaker built a series of Genies fitted with a variety of V8 engines known as the Mk8, recognisable with its skirted rear wheels. Finally, what followed was the Mk10, with unskirted rear wheels and extra space to accommodate even larger V8 engines.

You’d wonder if such a creation would be jam-packed with incredibly rare and high-tech components, but as Will Nuthall, the car’s driver for the Revival weekend, told us, that couldn’t be further from the truth. 

“They used quite a lot of English bits in it,” Nuthall said, “and they made quite a lot of stuff themselves. So it's Triumph uprights and a Morris Minor steering rack, but they made their own gearbox, which is cable operated.” The reason the Mk10 has so many English parts is because of Joe Huffaker’s close ties to the aforementioned Kjell Qvale and BMC.

What isn’t a product of BMC however is the 550PS (404kW), 5.7-litre Chevrolet V8 mere inches behind Nuthall’s shoulders. Given the car weighs somewhere in the region of 700kg, there’s more than enough grunt to keep up a decent pace, even if, as Nuthall admits, this isn’t a front running car. 

Qualifying in 17^th, Nuthall went on to have a decent enough race, with a 14^th place finish that was especially impressive when you realise he had a bit of a mare with the four-speed, Huffaker-built cable gearbox. While the shifter says first, second, third and fourth, the chances of successfully engaging third are slim, and first is “a bit pointless”.

Nuthall explained: “I started in second [gear], went straight to fourth and used fourth for the whole race — it's got some torque! Everybody behind said it looked like there was black smoke coming out from the Chicane, which there was, but that's because the engine was nearly stalled. But I didn't even need to slip the clutch or anything, it just pulls away from the Chicane because it’s got that grunt.”

Nuthall and his dad, who between them run IN Racing, had looked after the car for the month or so prior to the Revival, but the bright blue torque-monster had only completed one test in the UK in that time; owner Giorgio Marchi competes with the car in Italian hillclimbs. Nuthall, who was racing and looking after another four cars across the event, said he’d make a few tweaks for next time, including the gearbox.  

“It’s got a bit of a dead spot in the centre of the steering,” Nuthall said, “and there’s quite a lot of pad knockoff so you have to pump the brakes. It was running a bit hot in the race — it's got a fan, but I think when you're doing 150mph the fan is actually stopping the air getting to the radiator. I might also put another mirror on it next time, it would be nice to see behind!”

Even though the Huffaker Genie Mk10 wasn’t at the front, it’s always a pleasure to see, hear and learn more about some of the Revival’s lesser-known machines. With any luck, it won’t be the last time we see the Genie at the Revival. Nuthall agrees: “Hopefully we'll get another crack at it next year. But if not, we weren't last, we overtook people, so I can't complain, right?”

Photography by Rob Cooper.