During a recent trip to Milwaukee, I had the opportunity to hang out with Tony Stevens, Brooks Stevens's grandson, for part of a day, and came across this most unusual remnant of the Brooks Stevens collection.

According to Tony, it's a Willys six-cylinder with a casting number of 905101, but as you can see, it's been extensively modified, with a hemi-type head, three carburetors on an unusual intake manifold that appears to have been designed to hold five, reversed intake and exhaust (compare to the stock Willys F-head six-cylinder in the foreground of one of the photos), and tubular split exhaust manifolds. Tony said he doesn't know why it was built, by whom, or how it ended up in his grandfather's collection.

Nevertheless, it took quite a bit of an investment of time and know-how for Willys to put something like this together, and we can't imagine a company of limited resources such as Willys got this far without having some sort of plan for the engine. Was it intended for widespread production? Did Willys have some sort of racing skunkworks? And who was behind such an intriguing engine?

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