Frank Kleinig's Hudson 8 once held on to over 7,000rpm... and lived...
I have the story somewhere. Kleinig was running it in a hillclimb, the biggest hillclimb in Australia at the time, at Rob Roy in Victoria. It was about 1948 or so.
Kleinig was a demon at hillclimbs. In road races he wasn't so ferocious, but as a bundle of energy released suddenly for a furious run up a hill, he was held in awe.
The gearing was such at this climb, however, that he was forced to make a gearchange some 80 yards or something before the finish line. His mechanic, Clive Gibson (who tells this story) told him to hold the gear over the line because he was under pressure from another competitor.
He did, it did and the whole thing survived.
The top line Hudson race engines here had a low pressure oil pump and a squirter system that sent a stream of oil out in the path of the dippers on the ends of the rods. With this they avoided losing lubrication through the oil not closing into the 'trough' carved by the dippers as they rotated.
Hmmm... somewhere I have a photo of the car...
