"The car was owned and raced by Dick Levinson, who was a part owner of the Fremont Hotel in Las Vegas. It was based on an MG chassis (I don’t know which model, probably a TD.) I’m not sure which engine it was running at the December Las Vegas race, but by the time of the next race there, in April 1961, it had a small-block Chevy. 

It retained most of the MG running gear, including the tiny drum brakes. It was a real handful and it took Levinson a while to get comfortable racing it. Beside this beast, Levinson drove a Gullwing, which he had painted candy apple red with gold striping. It too wound up with a Chevy V8. Both projects were done by Stu Whitton, the owner of Grand Prix Motors, a small sports car shop on South Main Street  in Las Vegas. 

Levinson later bought a Lotus 15 from LA driver Hank Tubman.  He didn’t get to race it a lot because he blew up the Climax engine in his garage at home while showing the car off to a young lady. There was later an effort to install a 4-cylinder Chevy II in it, but that never came to fruition..Whitton apparently retained the Lotus chassis because I saw it again when he was running it for his son’s novice race at Vegas in the mid-‘70s. The Climax had been replaced by a Datsun 4-cylinder."