An explosion at the acetylene gas works in downtown Indianapolis caused the company to relocate out of town, near the race track in Speedway, Indiana.

This hobby resulted in Allison building a shop at the track in Speedway where he maintained his fleet of race cars.

[2] The company's only regular production item was a patented steel-backed lead bearing, which was used in various high performance engines.

[a] It also built various drive shafts, extensions and gear chains for high power engines, on demand.

Later its main business was the conversion of older Liberty engines to more powerful models, both for aircraft and marine use.

[1] Allison moved to Florida to invest in real estate after World War I, leaving Gillman in charge.

[2] In 1929, shortly after the death of James Allison, the company was purchased by the Fisher brothers,[2] who instructed it to use the cylinder design for a six-cylinder engine for a "family aircraft".

Before work on this design had progressed very far, Fisher sold the company to General Motors, which ended development owing to financial pressures of the Great Depression.

It was soon found as the primary power plant of the new generation of United States Army Air Corps (USAAC) fighters, the P-38 Lightning, P-39 Airacobra and P-40 Warhawk.

The Army had been leaning heavily towards exhaust-driven turbochargers, instead of the more common mechanically driven superchargers, favoring the theoretical advantage of using the otherwise wasted energy in the exhaust.

Thus, little effort was invested in equipping the V-1710 with a complex two-stage supercharger, and when placed in aircraft designs like the P-39 or P-40, which lacked the room for a turbocharger, the engine suffered tremendously at higher altitudes.

For this reason, in 1947, the Army decided to take General Electric's versions of Frank Whittle's jet engines and give them to Allison to produce instead.

The Navy was interested only in the T40,[citation needed] but the complexities of the drive shaft arrangement doomed the engine and the project was eventually cancelled.

Unlike the competing General Electric GE-36 UDF, the 578-DX was fairly conventional, having a reduction gearbox between the LP turbine and the propfan blades.

Noise considerations, plus a significant reduction in the real cost of aviation fuel, brought the NASA funded program to a halt.

[9] In 1965 a drag racer, Jim Lytle, created a car known as Quad Al which incorporated four World War II surplus V-12 Allison aero-engines in a four-wheel drive configuration, and developing approximately 12,000 hp (8,900 kW).

[12] In the year 2000, some of these restrictions were alleviated,[13] and in 2001 the US government chose the F-35 with Rolls-Royce LiftFan and Pratt & Whitney F135 engines.