Win a J&J Chassis 410 Sprint Car with a Don Ott Racing Engine (or $50,000 Cash)

What you're looking at

Not a road car. This is a purpose-built 410 winged sprint car, the 16th the National Sprint Car Hall of Fame & Museum has given away in a fundraiser that's been running for more than three decades. The chassis is a J&J Auto Racing deluxe kit out of McKenzie, Tennessee, built up as a complete roller on J&J's own components. The engine is a 410 cubic-inch V8 hand-assembled at Don Ott Racing Engines in York Springs, Pennsylvania, and the museum quotes it at 900-plus horsepower — which, for a mechanically injected 410 on methanol, is exactly where it ought to be.

The rest of the build sheet reads like a Knoxville Nationals entry list: Winters Performance rear end, Wilwood brakes, Keizer forged wheels, KSE steering, Kinsler injection, Hoosier rubber, Vision 1 composite bodywork, a Builtwiser top wing, Callies internals, a Barnes dry-sump system, a Shaver/Wesmar gear drive. More than 30 suppliers donated both the parts and the labor, which is the whole point of the exercise — the entry money goes to keeping the museum's doors open rather than to building the prize.

Why it matters

Put 900 horsepower in a car that weighs about 1,400 pounds with the driver aboard, on torsion bars and a direct-drive rear end, and you get the most violent thing on four wheels at any county fairground in America. There's no gearbox and no starter — it gets push-started, and there's nothing between the crank and the quick-change but a clutch and an in-out box. The top wing isn't decoration either; it's what plants the car through the middle of the corner, and in a flip it's what takes the hit first.

You also don't assemble one of these piece by piece and come out ahead. The engine alone costs more than a well-optioned new pickup, and a fresh roller underneath it with this parts list is another serious chunk. Winning a complete, zero-lap, top-shelf car is a genuinely different proposition from buying a used one and inheriting whatever the previous owner stopped maintaining.

The fine print worth knowing

Be clear-eyed about what shows up: no VIN, no title, no plates. It arrives on a trailer, it runs methanol, it needs a crew to push it off and a shop to freshen the motor every few nights out, and tires are a consumable you count in races rather than years. If you don't already have a program — or a buyer lined up — the honest move is the museum's $50,000 cash option, which is offered in place of the car rather than alongside it.

Entries run through TapKat, opening at $25 for 18 entries and scaling up through larger bundles to $2,000 for 4,000. There is a genuine free route: a mail-in request with no donation carries the same eighteen entries as the cheapest paid tier, which is a far better ratio than most giveaways offer. Note the sweepstakes is not open to residents of Washington State. Entry closes Dec 13, 2026 at 11:59 PM CST, and the drawing is Dec 21, 2026 at 10:00 AM CST at the museum in Knoxville, Iowa. The sponsor is the National Sprint Car Hall of Fame & Museum Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and it states that no purchase or payment is necessary to enter or win — the free-entry route and the full eligibility terms are set out in the official rules linked from the entry page. Whichever you take, the car or the cash, it lands on your return as income, so budget for the tax bill before you start shopping for a hauler.