The Hurst Hairy Olds was conceived as both a technical showcase and a competitive response. Hurst Performance developed the car with assistance from General Motors engineer John Beltz to dispel widespread doubts in the automotive press about whether a chain-driven automatic transaxle could withstand the stresses of high-performance driving. A secondary motivation was to provide a rival to Hurst's own Hurst Hemi Under Glass, another exhibition drag car that had drawn enormous crowds by driving down the quarter-mile on its rear wheels.
The base vehicle was an Oldsmobile 442 in body-in-white form, chosen for its structural rigidity. The transformation was extensive and radical.
Hurst installed not one but two Oldsmobile 425 cubic-inch (7-litre) engines into the 442 bodyshell, one at each end of the car, each paired with its own Oldsmobile Toronado chain-driven automatic transaxle. The result was a four-wheel-drive layout in which both the front and rear axles were driven independently by their own complete powertrain.
To handle the power, each engine was fitted with a Cragar Equipment-modified 6-71 GMC supercharger and ran on a blend of nitromethane and alcohol. The cockpit accordingly featured two of almost every control: two cable-operated shifters, two tachometers, two sets of oil pressure and temperature gauges, and two accelerator pedals. Driver Joe Schubeck had to manage both drivetrains simultaneously.
Weight was reduced through aluminum body components and Plexiglas windows. Despite these measures the combined power of the two engines produced extraordinary torque, and a pair of drag parachutes was mounted in the positions normally occupied by the taillights. Four-wheel disc brakes provided the stopping force required. The completed car produced around 2,400 horsepower and was capable of generating eleven-second elapsed times down the quarter mile — with tires smoking from all four corners.
The Hurst Hairy Olds made its public debut on March 4, 1966, at a drag meet in Bakersfield, California. The reaction from crowds was immediate: a car laying rubber from all four wheels while trailing smoke from both ends was unlike anything spectators had seen before. The exhibition tours that followed drew large audiences throughout the 1966 season.
The practical difficulties of campaigning the car were substantial. The tremendous torque applied through the front wheels produced severe torque steer, making it genuinely difficult to keep the car traveling in a straight line. The rear engine's position contributed to unloading of the front wheels, which caused the front engine to overspeed. Visibility for the driver was extremely poor because tire smoke from both ends enveloped the cockpit, compounded further by engine oil spraying from the valve cover breathers under supercharger pressure.
Despite these challenges the drive chains themselves proved more durable than critics had predicted, validating the core engineering claim Hurst had set out to demonstrate.
A second Hurst Hairy Olds was constructed for the 1967 season. This car's career was brief: it was wrecked during an exhibition race in Niagara, New York. The wreckage was shipped back to Hurst Performance and the car was dismantled.
The 1967 car achieved a notable afterlife in miniature. Monogram produced a 1/24-scale plastic model kit of it that became one of the most popular model kits of the 1960s, allowing the car's extraordinary appearance to reach audiences far beyond those who witnessed it in person.
The 1966 Hurst Hairy Olds survived intact and is preserved at the R.E. Olds Transportation Museum in Lansing, Michigan, where it remains on display as one of the more unusual artifacts of American automotive performance history. Its twin-engine, four-wheel-drive layout has no direct parallel among the funny cars and exhibition dragsters of its era, and the car is remembered as much for its engineering audacity as for its performance on the strip.