Kohler engines asked the competition, “Wanna race?” And the results cemented Kohler’s reputation for top-notice performance.
In the early 1970s, Jeff Miller, a Kohler Co. corporate airline pilot and hobbyist corvette racer, was visiting a Kohler engine plant in Toronto for business. He saw a Kohler engine in action and began to imagine how this extraordinary piece of equipment could be adapted into a powerful racecar engine.
Soon after that inspiring work trip, Jeff began conversations with the company engineers about the idea of building a racecar around the technology used in Kohler’s small engines. Fanning the flames of Jeff’s passion, the company gifted one of the engines to Jeff and his newly assembled crew. The Wynnfurst Racing team was born.
The team worked with Carl Haas, the sole importer of Lola chassis in North America, to build a chassis specifically for the 1972 Kohler engine. In support of Wynnfurst Racing and Jeff’s efforts, Kohler became a lead sponsor of the team that featured their engine in 1974. The new engine and Kohler sponsorship lead the team into the SCCA and Can-Am series, where Jeff, his team, and their Kohler racecar¬– powered by an experimental 850-cc liquid-cooled two-cycle KOHLER engine–dominated the track. The team won six SCCA National Championships in D Sports Racer and C Sports Racer classes and earned 13 victories in the June Sprints series.
Now more than thirty years later, Wynnfurst is still fielding Lola chassis with Kohler engines. Many advancements have been made to the original engine to make it a more powerful and more reliable engine for the demands of today’s sports car racing.
Today, the legacy of Jeff’s original drive lives on through his son Jason Miller, a Kohler engineer and current driver of the Kohler and Wynnfurst racecar. Watch Jason’s story of making it Kohler in the lab and on the track.
