Against Death and Time: One Fatal Season in Racing's Glory Years

by Brock Yates

  Unlike gasoline, the methanol alcohol used in race cars burned with a light blue flame that could barely be seen in daylight. The Bardahl's fuel tank had been split open by the impact and Griffith had been engulfed in fire. He suffered horrible second- and third-degree burns over much of his upper body and would spend four months in the hospital. Yet, like most drivers, he couldn't-or wouldn't-stop. He returned to drive again the next year.

  They dragged the Bardahl back to the garage area, better known as "Gasoline Alley"-like the cartoon strip. Nobody could remember if the cartoon had been named after the place, or the place named after the cartoon. The car's owner, a wealthy guy from St. Louis named Ed Walsh, wasn't giving up. Although his driver had been burned, his crew dove into the wrecked car and started to make repairs. The rumpled aluminum body was ripped off-revealing the charred, skeletal remains of the frame-and the rebuilding began.

  Gasoline Alley was like that. Death and injury all around, and yet life went on, rife with gallows humor and a mordant sense of reality. Live or die, the race goes on.

  The area consisted of rows of wooden garages with green-and-whitetrimmed doors that housed the race cars and the necessary tools. The work benches generally had coffee pots brewing and snacks scattered around, creating a relaxed, homey feel to the spaces where crewmen and drivers joked and horseplayed their way through the long days. At noon, various teams would light up charcoal grills and roast corn. Late into the night, the little alcoves would be jammed with mechanics hammering and wrenching on the cars. Many would then simply fall into cots and sleeping bags to be ready for an early next day.

  Gin rummy was the game of choice in Gasoline Alley, and somewhere, twenty-four hours a day, a serious game for serious stakes would be under way. Usually in the game was Rodger Ward, a chunky little former P-38 pilot who was known to have tons of talent, provided he could knock off the booze and the cards and quit chasing the babes. He was a smart guy, maybe too smart for his own good, and he radiated a cockiness that had yet to pay off on the race track.

  It was a man's world. Women were forbidden to enter Gasoline Alley, a last bastion of male misogyny. Old-timers recalled that when French driver Louis Chiron entered the race in 1929, he brought along his mistress, Alice Hoffmann, who customarily did his timing and scoring in the pits. In Europe woman were allowed in restricted areas, but not at Indianapolis. In deference to the visitors, the Speedway officials constructed a small platform for her on the edge of the pits, where she would not sully the hallowed precincts. This archaic tradition would not be broken until the realities of the women's movement finally overwhelmed the Speedway's establishment. In 1976, Janet Guthrie became the first woman driver allowed to compete at Indianapolis.

  Griffith's crash was quickly forgotten. It was simply part of doing business in big-time automobile racing. "You pay your money. You take your chances," said one crewman as he walked away from the scene. "Cliff knew what he was doing. Today it didn't pay off."

  Sometimes Tom and I would walk across Sixteenth Street at the end of practice for a few beers at the White Front, a stark, concrete block-house that consisted of little more than a few beat-up tables, a long bar, and a half-broken piano. The drink of choice was the Boilermaker, composed of a draft beer and a shot of cheap whiskey. Woman were not banned from the White Front, but were seldom seen inside its grim precincts. The talk consisted of the endless rumors and gossip at the Speedway and the outrageous spike in prices that awaited visitors to Indianapolis during the month of May. That year it involved the scandalous inflation of the price of gasoline, which had been bumped from 23.5 cents per gallon to a stratospheric 26.9 cents.

  Rain and drizzle descended on the Speedway for nearly two weeks. Because the cars' tires were not capable of gripping a wet track surface, the days devolved into endless gin rummy games in Gasoline Alley and chatter the guys called "bench racing" in the cafeteria and across the street at the White Front.

  Jimmy Bryan, a tough guy from Phoenix generally described as "brave as Dick Tracy," was more dangerous in the garage area than on the race track. A relentless practical joker, Bryan packed an arsenal of powerful M-80 firecrackers and was known to unload them on friends in phone booths, under dinner tables, and in automobiles. Two years earlier, Bryan had closed down the entire Pennsylvania Turnpike by pitching an M-80 into a toll booth.

  While guys like Bryan horsed around and drove like wild men, others were deeply serious and seemed wary of the Speedway. Indianapolis was like that-some drivers accepted its challenges without the slightest hesitation, while others, perhaps more cerebral, viewed it with rightful anguish. It was not a matter of courage, but rather of motivation. Indianapolis was a place that demanded more than bravery. To be successful, a level of audacity bordering on insanity had to be called forth, a fevered urge for speed that transcends logic-which, at 180 miles an hour, becomes a useless component of the human mind.

  To hurtle into the Speedway's sweeping corners knowing that the slightest error would send you into the outer walls required a reflexive suspension of reason, forcing a driver to rely on pure passion and mindless, desperate desire.

  On the Friday before the first day of qualifications, the weather cleared. A warm sun blossomed over the Indianapolis skyline when Medley and I left the rooming house and began walking toward the track. Then we heard it: an unearthly bellow, punctuated by a faint, bancheelike screech. "A Novi. Come on," he said, breaking into a sprint toward the track entrance.

  We got into the garage area to find a crowd gathered around a fierce, white, tubular-shaped car. The war whoop of its monstrous V8 engine was a siren song for the racing crowd, laden with mystique and danger.

  The Novis were the fastest cars ever to appear at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway-and perhaps the most lethal and star-crossed. The Speedway crowd called them "hoodoo machines," jinxed and permeated with death. The first of the two Novis, built by Glendale's Frank Kurtis in 1946, had already claimed the life of veteran Ralph Hepburn-after he had set the track's lap record. He made a tiny error entering the third turn. The Novi nosed onto the infield grass. Hepburn, fifty-two years old and a veteran of eighteen 500-mile races, did what was expected of a front-wheel-drive machine at speed; he applied power to pull the car back into line. But the explosive 550 horses of the Novi overwhelmed him. The car arrowed across the track and bunted the wall head on. Hepburn was killed instantly.

  Two years later Duke Nalon, another veteran driving the second Novi, was leading the race when the right rear axle snapped. Nalon skated backward into the wall, where the eighty-five-gallon methanol fuel tank burst open and engulfed the car in flames. Nalon somehow wriggled loose and escaped, although the burns he suffered would keep him hospitalized for months. The Novi meant rampant, haunted horsepower to many at the Speedway, and its legend was only enhanced when the car's designer and creator, W. C. "Bud" Winfield, a technical genius, was killed in a highway crash near Clovis, California. There were two Novis, identical in form and shape. Lean and low, they looked like massive French baguettes on wheels. Both were painted refrigerator white, with "9" and "15" painted on their enormous hoods.

  They were officially called Novi Governor Specials. Their owner, a Michigan industrialist named Lew Welch, built, among other things, speed governors for Ford tractors. Welch's relationship with the aging, eccentric mogul dated to the 1920s and was cloaked in mystery. Some believed that Ford money backed the two cars.

  The pair were parked outside their garages, glinting in the sunshine as crewmen worked among a swirl of bystanders.

  "See that young guy in the sport coat and open shirt?" said Medley.

  I spotted him, a plain man with dark hair and a large, flat nose.

  "Yeah, so what?"

  "Henry Ford's bastard son, Ray Dahlinger."

  "Cut the shit," I blurted.

  "True fact," said Tom. "Everybody knows it but never talks about it. They say of Henry had an affair with a Detroit babe named Evangeline Cote. He got one of his senior e
mployees, named Roy Dahlinger, to marry her. Her father and brother both got Ford dealerships in Michigan as payoffs to shut them up. That's Ford's kid, Ray Cote Dahlinger. He hangs out with the Novi team here at Indy."

  "Jeez, and I thought old Henry was this Bible-thumping puritan."

  "And a Jew-baiter to boot. But the old son-of-a-bitch put America on wheels," said Medley.

  "And the Dahlinger family in high cotton."

  A small man wearing a beret and wire-rimmed glasses stood over the open engine bay of the number 15 Novi. He was jean Marcenac, the brilliant Frenchman who crew-chiefed the two cars. A crewman named Radio Gardner struck a large starting motor into the blunt snout of the Novi. Race cars carried no starters, and the unit looked like a giant Electrolux vaccuum cleaner. It whined for a moment, before the engine blurted into action. The noise sent men reeling, covering their ears against the primordial shrieking. Acrid methanol fumes poured out of the twin exhaust pipes, causing eyes to water and noses to smart, adding to the Mephistophelian aura of the machine.

  "That thing even sounds like death," muttered a reporter from the Indianapolis Star standing next to me. "It already killed Hepburn. Its sister tried to kill Nalon. Wonder how much time Miller's got."

  Marcenac was unperturbed as he fiddled with the throttle linkage, blipping the engine to warm the oil.

  Back at his Pasadena, California shop, he had agreed to start the Novi engines at odd hours, after neighborhood complaints about the noise and concerns from a nearby pottery store owner that the awesome harmonics might shatter his more delicate pieces.

  As the engine was warming, Chet Miller sidled out of the darkened garage and into the sunlight. He donned a crash helmet, a domeshaped object resembling a kitchen pot. He had trouble with the chin strap, thanks to a permanently bent left arm, the relic of a major crash at the Speedway in 1938. Miller had swerved off the backstretch during the 500 in order to avoid fellow driver Bob Swanson, who was sprawled in the middle of the track following a melee that had killed the defending champion, Floyd Roberts.

  "Chet's going for the record," said a short man standing behind me. "They say he went over 140 on some stopwatches this morning. Now he's gonna make it official."

  Miller climbed into the giant machine, sliding deep into the leather seat and grasping the flat steering wheel, which appeared to have been salvaged from a Greyhound bus. He crammed the beast in gear, idled out of the garage area through a canyon in the grandstands, and disappeared. The crowd stampeded off toward the pits, expecting to see history made as the first 140-mile-per-hour lap was recorded at Indianapolis.

  Medley and I reached the pits-no more than a wide apron on the inside of the front straightaway-as Miller rumbled off the fourth turn and arrowed toward us. The shriek of the Novi V-8 bounced and rattled off the high roof of the grandstands, echoing across the Indian flatlands. The Novi rushed past and squirted out of sight into the first corner.

  Another lap. Miller gaining speed. Stopwatches clicking along pit row. "One thirty-eight!" somebody shouted.

  "He's still warming up," came another voice. "Next lap he'll stand on it."

  The drum roll of power. A flash of white at the far end of the straightaway. The ungodly howl of the Novi's supercharger blended with the ominous rumble of its exhaust to create a deafening racket. Miller blazed past, hunched over the steering wheel as he had done thousands of times. If anybody knew how to get around the dreaded rectangle, it was Chet Miller. Or so everyone thought.

  The screech of agonized rubber on pavement.

  "Oh, oh, the voice of Firestone," said Medley. "I hate that sound."

  "The Voice of Firestone" was Speedway slang for the howl that Firestone racing tires emitted during a spin, filched from the title of a popular NBC Radio classical music program sponsored by the Akron company.

  Another screech, and then a hollow, thumping explosion unique to the impact of soft metal on concrete.

  A track official ran onto the front straight, waving a black flag. Practice was stopped. An ambulance bolted out of Gasoline Alley, its light flashing, and rushed toward the first turn. A thousand faces along pit row gaped in silence.

  A woman screamed. I turned to see Miller's wife, Gertrude. She was sitting in the low bleachers behind the pits, the closest a woman could get to the all-male action. She slumped in tears into the arms of a younger woman beside her. Others gathered around her, all wives of drivers who sat in tormented isolation. Sobbing uncontrollably, Gertrude Miller was led away by her friends. As drivers' wives, they were all potential victims of instant tragedy.

  Medley and I turned and trudged back to the garage area. A pall hung over the place. The racing fraternity, as it was called, had a sixth sense about serious crashes.

  Something serious had happened to Chet Miller. He was dead.

  His accident was identical to that which had killed Ralph Hepburn in the same car six years earlier. The Novi had bobbled slightly entering the turn, then dove to the inside apron. Partially on the grass, Miller had repeated Hepburn's error by nailing the throttle. Again the beast seized its reins and arrowed into the wall at 120 miles an hour. Chet Miller died with the same basal fracture of the skull that had killed his teammate.

  One second, Miller was chasing the fastest lap in Indianapolis Speedway history. Another second, and he was dead.

  Engines were silent. A pall hung over the entire track. Mechanics, crews, members of the press, and the various manufacturer's reps who infested the place, stood zombie-like, each digesting the tragedy in his own way.

  We headed instinctively toward the Vukovich garage. Travers and Coon were laboring, heads down and mute, on the Fuel Injection Special-the number 14, battleship-gray Kurtis-Kraft that Vuke was to drive. He lurked in the back, shielded from the press. We were among a select few allowed into his private space.

  "Tough deal about of Chet," mumbled Medley.

  "Yeah, he was a good guy," answered Vukovich.

  "I wonder what happened?" I asked.

  "Nothin' happened," snapped Vukovich. "He made a mistake. He got killed. That simple. You don't make a mistake in this place. Some days you eat the bear. Other days the bear eats you."

  He turned away and began to sort through a mass of spark plugs on the bench. "What are you gonna say to the press? They're sure as hell gonna ask your opinion about the crash," I said.

  "They can write whatever the hell they want. They don't need me," he grumbled.

  A scrawny man with streaky gray hair walked up as we left Vukovich in his sullen isolation. It was Ken Purdy, the editor of True Magazine and an accomplished writer about motor racing.

  "You've gotta wonder about all this dying. When's it gonna stop?" I said.

  Purdy, who was given to literary references, fired back, "Probably never. Ernest Hemingway said there are only three real sportsbullfighting, mountain-climbing and automobile racing. The rest are children's games played by grown-ups."

  "You've got to die to make it a sport?" I countered.

  "Let me put it this way. Tazio Nuvolari was maybe the greatest race driver who ever lived. Someone once asked him why he risked his life in a racing car. `How do you want to die?' he asked his inquisitor. `In bed, in my sleep,' was the answer. `Then how do you find the courage to turn out the lights at night?' said Nuvolari. Ironically, Nuvolari died in bed, but his point pertains," said Purdy.

  Seemingly satisfied that he had answered my question, Purdy began framing pictures with his trendy new Nikon 35 mm single-lens reflex camera and wandered back into the crowd.

  Somewhere, as if by a signal, an engine fired up. It was the guttural rumble of an Offenhauser. Another joined in. Then two more. Crew chiefs were back at it, warming up their engines in preparation for the track to reopen for more practice.

  The debris of the Miller crash would be swept up, and business would begin again, as if nothing at all had happened.

  The bark and roar of the big engines spoke of a new beginning. Chet Miller was dead. A race ca
r was wrecked. It was time to begin the resurrection.

  Rumination over a tragedy would not be tolerated. Any reflection might bring into harsh light the potential futility of the entire enterprise-that seeking unseemly speed for a few moments of glory and a pocketful of money bordered on insanity. Death was a partner in big-time automobile racing. To exclude it somehow unraveled the meaning of the contest. This was a war against fear and reason, and to pause, much less to wave a white flag, meant weakness, capitulation, and defeat.

  Within an hour, the track was open again. Other men were charging past the ugly smear on the turn-one wall that marked Miller's last moment on earth.

  The rains came again the following day, which was supposed to be the start of qualifying. Each entrant would be given four laps on the Speedway. The thirty-three drivers recording the quickest times would make the 500-mile Memorial Day race. The rest would load up their cars and go home.

  The low-pressure system that had cursed the Midwest for most of the month of May ended by early afternoon. The grandstands filled with perhaps 100,000 fans, each of whom had paid fifty cents for the privilege of watching one car at a time circulate the track.

  The gloom hung over the Speedway until mid-afternoon, when the American Automobile Association officials judged the track dry enough for qualifications. Freddy Agabashian, a mannerly northern California veteran, managed to gain quick time in a new Kurtis roadster entered by the Chicago-based Granatelli brothers.

  An ugly bank of rain clouds loomed in the west as the Fuel Injection Special was rolled out of its garage and Vukovich climbed aboard. Running in the rain was sure disaster, yet he headed onto the Speedway for his four-lap run against the clock.

  "This looks like To Please a Lady," cracked Medley as we sprinted to the pits. He was referring to the 1951 MGM feature starring Clark Gable and Barbara Stanwyck, wherein Gable had braved a rainstorm to qualify for the 500.