Bob Norwood and the P4

To a performance car fanatic, automotive racing conjures up great cars, great races and great personalities…icons like Carroll Shelby, Phil Hill, Alain Prost, Enzo Ferrari, Mario Andretti, Richard Petty, Zora Arkus Duntov and Bob Norwood.

While Bob Norwood may not have the easy household-name familiarity of the others, his accomplishments are well documented; in fact he has 137 listings in the Guinness Book of Automotive World Records in the areas of super car and high-performance automotive design…much of it revolving around well over 30 years of work with Ferraris.

Norwood’s passion for automobiles started at 13 when he competed in his first drag race, driving a 1946 Ford Coupe, inKansas. He continued drag racing while in high school, driving a six cylinder GMC G-Gas Coupe, an A-Sports Corvette and an altered wheel base funny car, an AFX Hemi Plymouth and a Hemi-powered Sunbeam Alpine. In the early ‘70’s he raced super stocks in a Hemi-Cuda reaching number two in Division 7 A/FC point standings. Norwood raced an AA/FC with Dale Armstrong and eventually moved to race the “Lone Star Flyer”, a BB/FC car from Denton, Texas.

In the late ‘70’s he founded Norwood Autocraft in Dallas, Texas. The initial focus of the business was vintage Ferrari restoration and service. His first cars were a Ferrari 330 2+2 road car and a Boano Ferrari club racer. In subsequent years Bob would shift his focus to full car construction of performance automobiles, including racing cars.

Concentrating initially on Ferraris though, Norwood built a Ferrari V-12, Ferrari speed record cars and authentic Ferrari P-4 replicas. The first Ferrari replica was a 59/TR (Testarossa) built in 1981. Creation of four replicas began the same year.

In 1982, Norwood built his first P4 replica – this one used a boxer frame and engine (23 years later, the car is still around in Belgium).

In 1986 Bob began his initial program to recreate a more exact replication of the P4. His interpretation of the ’67 racer featured an all-aluminum body that was meticulously formed by copying life-size photos of the original car. A frame was reverse engineered to fit the body and once the body frame combo was intact, the suspension, drive-train and interior were all handcrafted to fit. The engine was a Ferrari 400 I 12 cylinder mated to a Porsche 5 speed gearbox. Ultimately the car would go on to set a track record at the Mineral Wells, Texas race track.

The end result of Bob’s labors was a car so close in design, looks and craftsmanship to the original that the Ferrari plant inItaly, in a tribute to his accomplishments said the car “represented Ferrari extremely well”.

While the P4 occupied a lot of Bob’s time, it was not his only project…he was also at work building an 83/308 Ferrari, the first with programmable fuel injection that competed on the Bonneville Salt Flats. In 1985 it set the F-GT and F-Modified class speed records at 168 mph and 170 mph respectively…and those records still stand today.

During 1988, Bob built a Ferrari GTO to Bonneville race specs and ran it at a phenomenal 287 mph, a record that still stands as the fastest Ferrari in the world (that’s not a typo sports fans – it really ran at 287 mph). Then he turned his automotive talents to his favorite type of runner - a nearly stock intercooled twin turbo Ferrari Testarossa that topped out at 210 mph and in the process won Road & Track’s Shootout. Norwood is still manufacturing the Testarossa with the most recent test obtaining over 1000 hp at the rear wheels of what is essentially a street car.

Currently Norwood’s Autocraft shop builds race and street motors for several teams. He spends long hours turning tubular steel and pistons into well constructed, trophy-winning racing machines. While some say his exploratory work in the area of fuel injection and engine management keeps him pushing the automotive envelope, others are convinced envelopes have always been in Bob’s rear-view mirror.

His automotive talents seem to know no limits as he successfully races alcohol and nitro funny dragsters, motorcycles, Cam AM cars and challenged the limits of nitrous and oxygen as super oxidizers. Bonneville has been good to Norwood as he has three records, two of which he still owns, despite eleven years and numerous attempts to break them. In 1992, Oldsmobile had Batten and Norwood fabricate and test their Aerotech racing cars to set forty-seven new endurance records with the new Auroraengines. Many of the drivers were from the Norwood Autocraft organization.

Norwood expanded to other marquee’s including Porsche when he created Porsche Club racers, an all-wheel drive Porsche C-4 and Porsche racing engines as well as applying the dual-fuel concept of turbo-charging to an Acura NSX.

Norwood's $500,000 Porsche creation - the racer DOOM - made its appearance in 1995. It was a super car with ultra-high-tech fabrication utilizing components of Indy cars and other radical cars put to use in a new way. The 3.6 supercharged enginedesigned to last 24 minutes did the job beating every competitor. And, thank you very much; the record remains unbroken to this day.

In the late ‘90’s he built two new 4 cylinder Porsche 968 turbo DOOM cars and continued to press for as much horsepower from the Testarossa as possible. Norwood filed a patent on a new turbocharger turbine upgrade. He also continues to manufacture his high performance replica cars and now has scratch motors that feature a V-12 with either 777 or 1000 cubic inches and 302 cubic inch V-12's for P-4's and GTO's.

With his great respect for the Ferrari brand, his success in achieving all-out performance and his ability to marry current technology with icons of the automotive past, who better to champion the re-birth of the Ferrari P4 than Bob Norwood?