Fred Rosner

Mechanic
CLASS OF 2001

Fred Rosner first got involved in racing in 1949 at the age of 14 working on Charlie Blair’s Stafford Speedway dirt car. Over the next fifty years he worked on cars for many legends of the sport including Ed Flemke, Red Foote, Bill Wimble, Bugs Stevens, Gene Bergin, Pete Hamilton, and Kenny Shoemaker. He was a mechanic on the early flathead powered cars that won championships at Millers Falls driven by Bernard Gee (52) and Ray Brown (53). In 1957 he wrenched the Mike Maguire owned, Ray Brown driven, OHV 312 that raced at Riverside Park.

A highlight of his career was building and maintaining the #3 that Rene Charland ran in the 1962 and 63 seasons, when Charland won the first two of his four consecutive National Sportsmen Championships. “One season that I worked with Rene,” Rosner remembers, “we ran 109 different races and won 37 of them.”

Rosner was the first of the vagabond mechanics to travel up and down the East Coast with the famed “Eastern Bandits.” In 1964 he was the first northerner to be inducted into the Mechanics Hall of Fame. In the same year he won one of his most treasured awards; the Master of Mechanics award from the P.A. Sturtevant Co., a large unusual trophy that proudly sits in his office today.

In addition to building cars that competed all over New England, Rosner has had some experience on the Southern superspeedways. In the late 50s and early 60s he made trips to Daytona preparing cars for fellow Hall of Famers Gene Bergin, Red Foote, Denny Zimmerman, and Rene Charland.