by Brock Yates
While Fitch had been uncomfortable at Indianapolis, he was fearless at tracks like Le Mans, where the tree-lined, four-mile Muslanne straight had to be driven at 150 mph throughout the dark of night, often probing through fog that obscured the circuit. So too for Walters, who never tried Indianapolis but appeared to posses sufficient courage and skill to drive any kind of race car at any level of competition.
The Cunningham team arrived at Watkins Glen like an army of conquerors. The three cars, painted white with blue stripes-the international American racing colors-were hauled in a giant semitransporter. A crew of mechanics led by Alfred Momo, a genius Italian emigre, tended to the cars while onlookers gaped at the entourage.
As a series of minor races involving slower MGs, Porsches, Triumphs, and the like buzzed around the course, the Cunninghamsto be driven by Walters, Cunningham himself, and a well-known eastern amateur named Sherwood Johnston-were given a final warm-up as their big V-8s were brought up to operating temperature.
The only serious competition would come from a brace of potent Ferraris to be driven by Jim Kimberly, the scion of Chicago's Kimberly-Clark Kleenex fortune, and Bill Spear, a hulking, bespectacled sportsman from southern Connecticut.
Lining the snow fences on the outside of the circuit were tens of thousands of spectators, most of whom had driven their own sports cars to the Glen. Many had camped out. Rude tents and smoky campfires still dotted the woods behind them. A few had built scaffolding from which to get a better view of the action, giving the scene the air of a medieval battleground.
The day being chilly, with a sprightly north wind blowing off the lake, Walters and others suited up in leather flight jackets for the main event. It would be one hundred miles in length, or twenty-five laps around the circuit, which featured a long downhill straightaway ending with a sharp right-hander. Since the Glen races aped European events, the course was run clockwise; all other track racing in America was run counterclockwise.
Compared to the wheel-rubbing duels carried out at Syracuse the week before, the Grand Prix was a gentlemanly affair. After a brief contest for the lead by Kimberly, Walters took command and drove away from the field for an easy victory. Kimberly came in second in his screeching red Ferrari; Johnston and owner Cunningham trailed home in third and fourth.
A few spins and a low-speed tumble into a bordering ditch broke the monotony of Walters' smooth and rapid country drive. The event was essentially a high-speed parade of rare and exotic machinery rather than a classic motor race in the American idiom.
Far to the west in California, and virtually unnoticed among the aficionados at Watkins Glen, but soon to be celebrated as a rising superstar in the wider world of entertainment, was a sullen, heavylidded actor from rural Indiana named James Dean. After a brief career on Broadway, the young actor was completing a starring role in an adaptation of John Steinbeck's novel East of Eden while working on a new picture titled Rebel Without a Cause. The buzz in Hollywood claimed that Dean, with his simmering good looks, subtle acting range, and raw, overpowering sexuality, would become an instant box office hit. That Dean had grown up fascinated with the nearby Indianapolis Motor Speedway and was already known as a skilled and daring motorcycle rider with ambitions to race sports cars was a component of his life unmentioned in the barrage of publicity. But this diversion would cap his pyrotechnic explosion onto the world scene and be inextricably linked to his immortality.
As I headed north to Geneva in a line of sports cars chugging through a phalanx of New York State Police, who had begun savaging the Glen crowds after they took the blame for the young spectator's death two years earlier, I could not help but wonder about the power and speed that new technologies were unleashing across the world. In Europe, Juan Manuel Fangio was about to win his second world championship at the wheel of a revolutionary Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix car that featured a featherlight alloy frame, a powerful eightcylinder fuel-injected engine, and streamlined bodywork that was light years ahead of the competition.
Seemingly every major automobile manufacturer was now engaged in some form of motor sports, with hordes of talented engineers armed with the quantum leaps in technology developed during the recent wars. Speeds were climbing like the fleets of jet-powered fighter planes now ruling the skies. One wondered where it would all end?
WHILE HE HAD ABANDONED AAA CHAMPIONSHIP competition completely-save for defending his Indianapolis 500 title-Bill Vukovich could not remain isolated from the sport that had made him a household name in America and a modestly wealthy man. Despite Esther's urgings that he retire and concentrate on running his two Fresno gas stations, Vukovich agreed late in 1954 to return to Mexico for a second try at winning the Carrera PanAmericana de Mexico. More commonly known in the motor racing world as the "Mexican Road Race," it was started in 1950 by the Mexican government to promote tourism and to develop the new Pan-American highway that had been completed in the late 1940s. The road, rising to elevations of over eleven thousand feet in the Sierra Madre Mountains, ran between the border town of Ciudad Juarez, south of El Paso, and Tuxtla Gutierrez, the fly-blown capital of Chiapas, Mexico's southernmost state.
Run south to north over 1,900 miles, the race was held in eight daily stages varying in length from 100 to 300 miles. It attracted hundreds of entries, ranging from rank Mexican amateurs to top professionals in cars entered by major manufacturers like Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, Ferrari, Lancia, and Alfa Romeo from Europe, and Chrysler and Lincoln from the United States. Vukovich signed on with the latter-Ford's premier luxury division-which had specially prepared five powerful Lincoln Capri hard-top coupes for him and fellow Indy drivers Chuck Stevenson, Jack McGrath, Walt Faulkner, and Johnny Mantz.
Open road races like the PanAmericana had long been popular in Europe and South America. Sicily's Targa Florio and the famed Italian Mille Miglia were still run annually on the Continent. Like the Mexican version, they were fiendishly dangerous, both for the competitors and for the millions of spectators who lined the highways. A car careening into a crowd was common. Hundreds had been killed over the years.
American drivers returning from the PanAmericana told of horrific moments when the road ahead would be jammed with peasants parting like the Red Sea as their cars barreled into their midst. They had been warned not to slow down, because this would confuse the timing of the crowds, who had learned to move in cadence with the approaching automobiles. Others recalled the constant thumping beneath their tires as they ran over dogs, and others the daring young men on the roadside who reached out to touch the speeding automobiles for good luck.
Vukovich had run for Lincoln in 1953, but he encountered mechanical problems at the start and was never a contender. In 1954 he teamed with navigator Vern Houle, a California hot-rodder and expert mechanic who would ride shotgun, reading a detailed map and advising Vukovich of the curves, corners, and hazards that lay ahead. The Lincoln team, like the other professional operations, stationed crews along the route at fuel and tire depots-a massively expensive and complex campaign designed to win the large production car class and perhaps to challenge the lighter, faster Ferraris and Porsches for the overall win.
Vukovich and his teammates tended to view the PanAmericana as a long, high-speed lark, a fast drive on open roads. The race, to be held in the final week of November, offered Vukovich a break in the routine of running his gas stations in Fresno and a chance to socialize with his good friends in professional racing, including his rival, McGrath. The pair, so different in stature and background-one small and swarthy from immigrant stock, the other tall, lean, and fair-skinned from solid Scottish-Irish heritage-were able to compete with near-suicidal intensity on the racetrack and still remain pals.
The prerace parties and endless mariachi bands ended quickly for the Lincoln team. Both the Stevenson and Mantz cars retired within miles of the start at Tuxtla with burned pistons, presumably caused by the low-octane gasoline supplied by the Mexicans. Worse yet, McGrath crashed, but without injury to himself or his
codriver.
That left Vukovich and Faulkner to carry on for the team that had dominated the 1953 race. Clearing the narrow streets of Tuxtla, their dusty verges clogged with cheering crowds, Vukovich began to run flatout across the open desert. Save for the occasional tumbling sagebrush, the odd stray cow, and a few clusters of peasants dotting side paths leading into the distant hills, the road north was vacant. Far in the distance, shrouded in the hazy inferno of the early-morning sun, lay the foothills of the mountains. The noise and heat inside the Lincoln, its interior gutted, its windows cut out to save weight, was unbearable. But again Vukovich, the tough guy from the blazing Fresno summertime, was impervious. He began broadsliding the big Lincoln through the sweeping corners while occasionally getting it airborne over the humps and hummocks that dotted the cactus-lined highway.
As they powered out of the steaming desert and into the mountains, Houle began urging Vukovich to slow down, yelling over the deafening racket of the engine that the car was about to break under the strain. He cautioned that nearly two thousand miles of hard driving lay ahead. Vukovich, the bit in his teeth, ignored him, charging hard as the Capri, built and designed in faraway Dearborn as a luxury cruiser, was pressed into the unlikely role of pure race car. Somehow Vukovich managed to keep the slewing monster on the road until a few miles south of the backwater city of Petlacingo, when he lost control on a tight bend and the enormous, five thousand-pound Lincoln bucked and bounced into a ravine. It tumbled end over end five times before stopping on its roof, precariously balanced on the edge of a one thousand-foot drop-off. Hanging upside down in their seat belts, the cockpit filled with smoke, Vukovich turned to Houle with a wide smile on his face. "OK smartass, now you drive;" he sneered.
The pair eased gingerly out of the car, afraid it would continue its plunge. They crawled up to the roadside, where it was decided that Houle would flag a ride into Petlacingo while Vukovich guarded the car. Local looters were known to descend on wrecks and scavenge the wheels, body parts, and even the engine within minutes.
Poor Houle's adventure was far from over. A Ferrari Monza sports car screeched to a halt. It was driven by the notorious Italian sportsman Giovanni Bracco, the son of a wealthy textile manufacturer from Biella. Bracco was a classic European gentleman daredevil, driving his expensive Ferraris and Maseratis in road races with wild abandon. Two years earlier in the Mille Miglia, his co-driver, Umberto Maglioli-who also became a Ferrari driver of note-lit the mad-driving Bracco 140 cigarettes during the one thousand-mile race around Italy, in addition to feeding him slugs of brandy to keep his brio at full tilt.
A year later, still loaded with tobacco and brandy, he had won the Mille Miglia, beating a factory-entered Mercedes-Benz 300SL driven by German professional Karl Kling. Bracco would later attribute his victory to thinking-as he powered through the rain-swept Futa and Raticosa passes high in the Apennines-about how the German SS had massacred Italian partisans in the recent war and how his victory would help avenge their deaths.
Houle piled in beside Bracco, whose Ferrari had been delayed with mechanical trouble. The Italian rocketed away from the wrecked Lincoln. Running 140 mph with his foot flat on the throttle, Bracco asked Houle to hold the steering wheel while he lit a cigarette. Vukovich had asked poor Houle to drive on a lark. But Giovanni Bracco was serious.
The race ended, minus a shaken Houle, a mildly soused Bracco, and Vukovich, and with a victory for the aforementioned Maglioli. But like the first four Mexican races, the toll had been high. A local driver named Hector Palacios lost both legs in a high-speed crash that killed his navigator, Vincente Solar. Four other drivers, a second co-driver, and two spectators also died. Among them was English expatriate Elliot Forbes-Robinson, a popular sports car driver from Los Angeles who was serving as navigator for Jack McAfee, another top West Coast road racer. They had been competing in a powerful Ferrari entered by multimillionaire playboy John Edgar, whose team of big Italian machines was dominating amateur competition in California.
Unable to control the crowds and the ever-increasing speeds, the government cancelled the Carrera PanAmericana de Mexico. Four decades later it would be revived, in name only, as a rally for vintage cars.
While Vukovich and his Lincoln teammates were escaping various disasters south of the border, Jim Travers and Frank Coon were back in Los Angeles plotting a new assault on the Indianapolis 500. Car owner Howard Keck had decided that the now-aging Fuel-Injection Kurtis-Kraft had to be replaced. This was fine by Travers, who had secretly called the car the "Toonerville Trolley," referring to what he believed to be builder Frank Kurtis's archaic fabrication techniques. There had been bad blood between Kurtis and Travers from the start, with both claiming to have created the so-called roadster design for Indy cars. While Travers no doubt had a strong influence on the conceptualization of the car, Kurtis had in fact developed two others using the general theme prior to building Keck's. Vukovich continued to call the much-honored race car builder "Cold Roll Kurtis," thanks to the steering failure that had cost him the 1952 race. He and the Keck team called the Kurtis operation the "blacksmith shop," which was unfare, since he employed excellent craftsmen and, say what one might about his overall designs, the detailing and finish on Kurtis products was first-rate.
Kurtis countered that the Keck team had insisted on an unproven, seldom-used Manning steering gear, which was at the root of the 1952 problem. Still, the aged car that had dominated the last three 500s and had revolutionized speedway design remained a bone of contention between its builder and its crew and driver.
Nevertheless, the Kurtis-Kraft Company on Alger Street in Los Angeles was booming with orders. Twenty-one of the thirty-three cars in the 1954 500 had come from his shop, and seven of the top ten finishers, including Vukovich's winner, were fabricated by this brilliant, self-taught son of a Croatian blacksmith. Clearly, until somebody came along with a better idea, Frank Kurtis's roadster concepts were the cars to beat at the Indianapolis 500.
Travers was bound to produce that better idea. Backed by Keck, he sketched out a plan for a fully streamlined car with enclosed bodywork. Early in 1954, Mercedes-Benz had entered international Grand Prix racing with revolutionary streamliners that had helped world champion Juan Manuel Fangio and his young teammate, Stirling Moss, dominate the season. While Mercedes-Benz would eventually abandon the full-bodied cars because of their extra weight, their strange aerodynamic behavior (a mystery in those days), and driver complaints that they could not see the front wheels, the streamliner idea seized the Indianapolis crowd. Several car builders in Los Angeles embarked on plans for just such swoopy machines, including Travers and Coon.
But rather than depend on the time-honored four-cylinder Meyer-Drake-still known as the Offenhauser or "Offy"-Keck underwrote Travers's idea for a radical new power plant. It would require the financial muscle of an oil mogul like Keck to finance such a project. Leo Goossen, the widely respected designer/draftsman for Meyer-Drake, was commissioned to lay down engineering drawings for the radical new engine.
Rather than an in-line four-cylinder like the ultra-rugged "aircompressor" Offy that had been the standard power source at Indianapolis since the mid-1930s, the Keck team planned on a compact three-liter V-8 to be supercharged by a Rootes-type blower. A similar supercharged system had been employed successfully by Wilbur Shaw in his Italian-built Maserati, which had won the 500 in 1939 and 1940.
Sadly, the idea for the engine arose at roughly the same time that the much-respected Shaw, who was then serving as president of the Speedway, died in a plane crash, in late October 1954. He was returning home to Indianapolis from a business meeting in Detroit.
Working with expert designer Norman Timbs, Travers created several experimental body shapes and tested them at the CalTech University wind tunnel to gain maximum efficiency. This was two decades before anyone thought of using "ground effects," wherein the airstream would be used like a reverse wing to literally glue a racing car to the pavement. Timbs and Travers were i
nstead seeking the slipperiest shape possible to permit maximum speed on the straightaways. But Travers added one fillip-a small wing, attached to the tail, that could be used to adjust weight on the suspension as tire wear and fuel load changed during the race. This may have been the first wing of any sort-now standard equipment on all race cars-ever tried. Travers also was the first to attempt so-called weight-jacking, by adjusting the suspension to equalize poundage on all four wheels. He and Coon did this with the Fuel-Injection Special by setting agricultural scales under the wheels, then adjusting the torsion bars and shock absorbers accordingly.
The actual construction of the radical new streamliner was assigned to master fabricator Quinn Epperly, who, following Travers's instructions, worked with lighter chrome-molybdenum tubing to shave 75 pounds from the standard Kurtis-Kraft-style tubular chassis. Another 35 pounds was carved off the car by using a special aluminum differential-a critical pounds amount considering that the full-fendered body work would add an extra 150 pounds to the car.
As 1955 arrived, Travers, Goossen, Coon, and Epperly were racing against time to build both a new car and a new engine from the ground up. They believed they could finish the chassis and body by May, but the vastly more complex issue of creating a completely new engine remained a question.
Meanwhile, the automobile world's attention had turned eastward, where the Detroit industry was making massive strides in performance. Chrysler had introduced its radical new 300, a lovely two-ton coupe carrying a 300 horsepower V-8 engine. Two of these brutes would be turned over to Karl Kiekhaefer, the diminutive, tough-talking Wisconsin industrialist who was manufacturing his highly successful Mercury outboard engines. He then hired former bootleggers "Fonty" Flock and his brother, Tim, to drive his cars in the NASCAR "Grand National" stock car series, which was exploding in popularity. His Chrysler 300s went on to dominate big-time stock car racing, winning twenty-four of thirty-eight Grand Nationals during 1955. The upstart series was being run by "Big Bill" France, who rose out of his modest Daytona Beach gas station operation in 1947 to become one of the richest, most powerful men in worldwide sports. France had been tossed out of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway pits in 1954 by crusty chief steward Harry McQuinn. McQuinn was a leader in the "Chicago Gang" of ex-drivers, promoters, and track officials who maintained de facto control of the American Automobile Association's racing policies. Competition outside the approval of the AAA was branded as "outlaw." Participation in races unsanctioned by the AAA meant instant expulsion, as had happened to the 1948 500 winner, Bill Holland, who had been discovered racing in a Florida stock sprint car race under an assumed name and was banned for two years. He, like many other professionals, felt forced to compete in "outlaw" events to make a living, there simply not being enough AAA-sanctioned events to generate a reasonable income.