<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"At first glance, there&amp;#039;s nothing unusual about the wooden shelves stacked with meticulously boxed car parts, particularly in a full-service shop like Zakira&amp;#039;s Garage in Cincinnati. It&amp;#039;s the labels on the boxes that tend to raise eyebrows. Don Butler, president of Zakira&amp;#039;s, gets a chuckle out of that. &amp;quot;We have car clubs come through here all the time. Guys see the shelves and ask, &amp;#039;Hey, where do you get all this replacement stuff for a 90-year-old Miller race car?&amp;#039; I have to explain that we make the replacement stuff for 90-year-old Miller race cars.&amp;quot;  In many ways, the story of American racing between the first and second World Wars is the story of Wisconsinite Harry Miller. After a stint working as a race mechanic for Ransom E. Olds, Miller struck out on his own to build carburetors before turning to engines and cars\u2014a move that would echo through American motorsport for almost six decades. His twin-cam, 16-valve four-cylinder, designed by legendary motorsport architect Leo Goosen, won the 1922 Indianapolis 500, and Miller engines or chassis took the winner&amp;#039;s flag at Indy nine of the next 12 years. Miller&amp;#039;s cars went on to influence European heavies like Ettore Bugatti, and 40 years after his 1947 death, the Offenhauser engine developed from the company&amp;#039;s four was still winning races.   Located in a nondescript garage near downtown, Zakira&amp;#039;s has restored five high-profile Millers to better-than-new condition and earned a fearsome reputation for being able to fabricate anything required, from carburetors to complete engines. Working closely with a handful of small American foundries, the crew produces three Miller designs from scratch: the supercharged 122-cubic-inch and 91-cubic-inch fours, plus the V-16 originally intended for use in the Cord L-29.  We arrived at the shop on a rainy February day to find all sorts of vehicles undergoing restoration and repair, everything from a first-generation Ford Thunderbird to a 1980s Toyota Land Cruiser being kitted out for rock-crawling duty. The undisputed star of the show, however, was the Miller-engined 1926 Locomobile Indy racer, fresh from a three-year, ground-up restoration and destined for the Amelia Island Concours d&amp;#039;Elegance. Gleaming, flawless, and surprisingly compact, with numbers and logos that look machine-perfect but are in fact hand-painted, the Locomobile compels anyone in its presence to touch it, to verify that it&amp;#039;s actually real. The cockpit, with its center-mounted shifter, is too tight for a six-footer to climb into. The massive, mirror-polished, four-spoke steering wheel sits inches from the driver&amp;#039;s chest.  &amp;quot;No small accidents in these,&amp;quot; Butler notes.  After the Locomobile&amp;#039;s departure, Zakira&amp;#039;s will begin two major projects. One is the restoration of a front-wheel-drive 1935 Miller-Ford that Andy Granatelli crashed at Indy in 1948. The other is far more ambitious: a customer-requested replica of the four-wheel-drive, V-16-powered Miller Special street car, lost to history decades ago and existing now only in blurry photographs. Although Zakira&amp;#039;s owns the factory drawings for the car, purchased years ago with the rest of Miller&amp;#039;s technical documentation, Butler notes that these are &amp;quot;perhaps 80 percent&amp;quot; complete. The rest will be imagined, engineered, and fabricated from square one.   Butler doesn&amp;#039;t hesitate to name this the ideal project, calling the V-16 car &amp;quot;the ultimate Miller, the most difficult thing we can imagine doing.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s a Herculean undertaking, though Butler says the team is excited by the idea of creating a fantastically complex machine using nothing but photographs and old drawings: &amp;quot;Building Millers is what we love to do. We can&amp;#039;t wait to get started.&amp;quot; Zakira&amp;#039;s Garage  Established: 1995 Home: Cincinnati, Ohio Specialty: Vintage Miller Indy Cars  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/features/a4473/shops-we-love-miller-time-64-10-roa0713/>