The Offenhauser engine was created by Fred Offenhauser and Harry Miller in the early 1930s, developed from Miller's existing twin overhead cam racing designs. After Miller's business collapsed and Offenhauser operated the shop independently, the company established the engine as the dominant power unit in American open-wheel racing. In 1946, with the engine's reputation already established, Offenhauser sold the company to Louis Meyer and Dale Drake.
Meyer was a three-time Indianapolis 500 winner as a driver, and Drake was an experienced engineer. Together they renamed the enterprise Meyer-Drake and continued refining the four-cylinder engine that Offenhauser had built, working alongside longtime Offenhauser draftsman and engineer Leo Goossen, who became a full-time Meyer-Drake employee and played a central role in further development.
The core of the Meyer-Drake product was the Offenhauser engine's monobloc construction — casting the cylinder head and engine block as a single unit — which eliminated head gasket and cylinder stud failure modes and allowed consistently higher cylinder pressures than competing designs. This reliability, combined with competitive power output, made the engine the near-universal choice at Indianapolis and in sprint and midget car racing.
Meyer-Drake produced engines in several standard displacements to suit different rule sets: 270 cubic inches under AAA rules, 252 cubic inches under USAC rules, and smaller configurations for sprint and midget classes. They also manufactured blocks, pistons, connecting rods, and crankshafts to individual customer specifications, making the shop as much a bespoke racing engineering facility as a manufacturer of standard products.
Under Meyer-Drake ownership, the Offenhauser engine won the Indianapolis 500 repeatedly and dominated the World Drivers' Championship rounds held there between 1950 and 1960. In all eleven World Championship editions of the race, Meyer-Drake-powered cars won outright and claimed all three podium positions, with Offenhauser-powered cars starting from pole in ten of those eleven years.
The total Indianapolis 500 win count for the Offenhauser engine — 27 victories spanning the original Offenhauser era and the Meyer-Drake years — represents a record that no engine manufacturer has come close to matching.
In 1965, Louis Meyer sold his ownership interest to Drake, his wife Eve, and their son John Drake. The company operated under the Drake family until John Drake sold the shop to Stewart Van Dyne. During the latter years, the engine was adapted for turbocharged competition as American Championship racing rules evolved, producing outputs of 750 horsepower or more from the 168 cubic inch turbocharged variant introduced in 1968 with which Bobby Unser won that year's Indianapolis 500.
The final engine in the original Offenhauser lineage was the DGS, introduced in 1975 and named for Drake, Goossen, and Sparks. The last Offenhauser victory at any major event came at Trenton in 1978, and the last race for an Offy-powered car was at Pocono in 1982.
Meyer-Drake's legacy is inseparable from the Offenhauser engine itself — the defining American racing engine of the twentieth century. The partnership's stewardship of the Offy during its most competitive and technically refined period ensured that the engine remained the benchmark in American open-wheel racing through multiple generations of rule changes and technological shifts. The Meyer-Drake name appears in the FIA's records as the official engine designation for all World Championship Indianapolis results between 1950 and 1960, and remains the formal identifier for the most successful era of Offenhauser power.