Old School Dune Buggy reunion aims for most diverse gathering of pre-Manx sand toys
Water pumpers. Pan buggies. Tunnel buggies. Sand rails. The names may all sound unfamiliar to outsiders and even to those who originally called their homebuilt rigs “dune buggies” and didn’t mind the terminology, but organizers of this year’s Old School Buggy Reunion hope they become more commonplace as they expose more people to the history of motorized beach blasting.
“The first time I took my dad’s tunnel buggy up to the dunes, guys were asking me, ‘What do you call this?’ and ‘What is it?'” said Cort Elgar, the founder of the Old School Buggy Reunion. “I was shocked — if nobody else, the guys on the dunes should know what it is, and so I started wondering if people really understood the history of dune buggies.”
As Elgar pointed out, the under-recognition of vintage sand toys comes from the ever-evolving and largely non-commercial nature of the early dune-buggy hobby.
“It goes beyond Bruce Meyers and the Manx,” he said. “That’s not really where its origins are.”
Instead, the dune buggy got its start in the late 1940s, when families across the country (“wherever there was a dune complex: Pismo; Glamis; Dumont; Silver Lake, Michigan; Oregon; Idaho; Oklahoma,” Elgar said) stripped their old sedans of fenders and hoods to reduce their weight and fitted balloon tires, then hit the sand. By the Fifties, those families discovered that if they took the bodies off their cars entirely and set the engines (and bench seats) way back, they’d get better weight distribution, and soon after they started to build dune buggies from the ground up with square-tube frames, hand-grooved farm implement tires, and a sort of skid-steer setup that replaced the foot brake to compensate for the weight removed from the front of the vehicle.
“There was a lot of experimentation because they really hadn’t proven what works best then,” Elgar said. “The guys building the dune buggies would scab parts off whatever, they were trying not to spend a lotta money.”
By the early Sixties, Volkswagens began to take the place of those earlier sedans. Sans their bodies, they became known as pan buggies. Shorn of their floorpans, they became known as tunnel buggies. The older buggies based on full-size sedans became known as water pumpers for their engines.
Unlike hot-rodding, in which many of the pioneers later went on to form major aftermarket companies or enjoyed plenty of exposure in timing associations’ record books, many of those vintage dune buggy builders never reached legendary status. Meyers, of course, revolutionized the sport with his versatile and oft-replicated dune buggy, which introduced a flood of new enthusiasts to off-road motorsports, but the only other big names in the hobby Elgar could think of were Dave Beckett, who introduced the first production paddle tire, and Mike Mazzone, who offered turnkey sand rails out of his shop in El Cajon, California.
After the Meyers Manx revolution, Elgar said the next evolution in dune buggies came in the Seventies when the traction afforded by Beckett’s paddle tires, along with aftermarket parts for Volkswagens that afforded them enough power to make use of that traction, led to lightweight mid-engine sand rails capable of not only climbing dunes their predecessors couldn’t but also skittering across the faces of those dunes.
That general design ruled the dunes until the Nineties when, influenced by desert racers who built their rigs for taking the abuse of uneven terrain at high-speeds, modern dune-buggy builders began adapting long-travel suspensions and high-horsepower V-8 engines with the goal of not only scaling tall dunes but also leaping from their peaks at high speed.
With dune-buggy builders constantly improving on their designs, they rarely stopped to document the niche motorsport, Elgar said. “I don’t think they ever looked back,” he said. “That’s why not a lot of people know about their history.”
For example, Elgar said that tunnel buggies were bountiful on the beaches in their day because they were incredibly cheap, yet when tube-frame buggies hit the scene, pretty much every owner of a tunnel buggy swapped his rig’s parts over to a new tube-frame buggy and discarded the old chassis.
Some hardcore water-pumper dune-buggy owners kept the flame alive through the decades, and Elgar said a couple original clubs from the Sixties — the Dune Masters and the Sand Pipers — have always catered to that style of dune buggy. For the most part, however, Elgar encountered blank stares when he went to restore his father’s tunnel buggy in about 2005, leading him to research the history of dune buggies and, in an attempt to beat the bushes for more old school dune buggy enthusiasts, start the Old School Dune Buggies and Sand Rails Facebook Group.
By 2016, Elgar said he thought he could put on a small show of maybe 30 or so original dune buggies, so he organized the first Old School Buggy Reunion at Oceano Dunes State Vehicular Recreation Area near Pismo Beach, California. “I was totally shocked at what showed up, it was really just mind-blowing,” he said. More than 40 water-pumpers turned up, most of them pulled from barns or garages by members of the same families that ran them 50 years prior. A number of pan-and-tunnel buggies, as well as full-bodied Manx-style buggies, showed up as well. All told, about 150 vehicles showed up.
Its success led Elgar to plan a follow-up, and he said he already has more than 450 commitments for this year’s event. Part car show, part performance exhibition, the reunion will feature a parade down the beach and some freestyle dune climbing. “But really, it’s just an opportunity for people to get together, pass on stories, reconnect, and see cars they haven’t seen for years,” Elgar said.
The 2018 Old School Buggy Reunion will take place August 18 at Oceano Dunes State Vehicular Recreation Area. For more information, visit OldSchoolBuggies.com.
SOURCE: Hemmings
AUTHOR: Daniel Strohl