The Last Open Road

by Burt Levy

  So now what do you do?

  Do you send people without the required certificates home? Even if "home" is Montreal or San Luis Obispo or Lake Charles, Louisiana? And what about all the bullshit stories from drivers who swear they left their certificates back in their bureau drawers—even when it's obvious their cars have never been apart since the day they left the damn factory? Or do you simply smile and wink and look the other way when the same exact set of papers begins magically reappearing with eight or nine different MGs? Or do you (as Charlie Priddle strongly favored) come down like the Wrath of God on every single one of them, just so they'd learn their lesson and never dare do it again? Charlie had a surprising amount of support from some of the jerks who had their certificates (like that asshole Skippy Welcher, natch) and figured anybody without the proper paperwork ought to be barred from racing and sent home. Or maybe just to bed without supper.

  Fortunately, we managed to squeak the C-types through on account of they were brand-new and everybody wanted to see them run. So when Tommy explained as how "Jaguar Magnafluxes everything on their race cars, even the bloody wood rims on the steering wheels," the tech people clucked their tongues in agreement and gave us our sticker. But it was tougher for some of the other guys, and by the time hardliners like Charlie Priddle reluctantly agreed to let everybody run (just this once, mind you) they'd made sure to change their minds and reverse directions enough times to piss off everybody in the paddock.

  No sooner had the Great Magnafluxing Debate reached an uneasy resolution than we had another major flap about scheduling. Seems the official weekend schedule called for a hundred-mile smallbore race called the Kimberly Cup on Saturday and two races for the big-bore cars on Sunday. The first was a hundred-miler called the Sheldon Cup for cars up to four liters, followed by the big 200-mile feature for any cars over 1950cc that wished to compete. Naturally, there were a lot of guys who wanted to run both (like Tommy Edwards and that Phil Hill guy who drove for Ernesto Julio) and they suggested that maybe the organizers could switch the Sheldon Cup to Saturday, run the small bore race Sunday morning, and leave the feature where it was. That way the Saturday spectators would see some of the bigger cars, the small-bore guys would get to play in front of the Sunday crowd, and the drivers of the big iron would get to rest up and give the cars a decent once-over instead of running back-to-back on Sunday. This of course made too damn much sense for the organizing committee to accept without a monumental argument, and it was only after extensive lobbying, taking of sides, meetings in the hotel, and even a few strongly worded petitions that they finally agreed to change the schedule.

  "Makes it clear why so bloody many of us drink, doesn't it?" Tommy laughed as he headed off with Ernesto Julio to celebrate their victory. "Look after the car then, will you, sport?"

  "Sure thing."

  "And pop by for a quick one when everything's squared away."

  That left Chuck Day and me standing there with the two C-types, and before either of us could say a word, this enormous Fruehauf semi with Florida plates wheeled up in front of the Osthoff. It was gleaming refrigerator white with just a little checkered flag on the doors and the name"CUNNINGHAM" spelled out underneath in simple block letters. Everybody in tech stopped dead in their tracks and stared at it, slack jawed, like it was a live brontosaurus out for a stroll. It got so quiet that all you could hear was the distant putt-putt echo of that fishing boat trolling along the weed beds on the other side of the lake. The big semi eased to a halt with a shuddering sigh off the air brakes, and all of a sudden everybody was rushing over to get their first glimpse of the fabulous Cunninghams, just back from the twenty-four hours of Le Mans and the twelve hours of Rheims over in France. They were the only true American team trying to challenge Ferrari and Jaguar and the rest over in Europe, and although they hadn't actually won anything yet, they'd proved beyond any doubt that they could run head-to-head with the best of them.

  A well-drilled squad of crewmen in crisp white Cunningham coveralls sprung into action and quickly unloaded two mean, broad-shouldered C4R roadsters and an incredibly evil C4RK coupe. All three were painted the American racing colors (refrigerator white with wide blue racing stripes) and they all had bulging fenders and yawning, bottom-feeder grilles and cast-alloy wheels that looked modern as a flying saucer. The Cunninghams were about halfway between the anvil-heavy bulk of an Allard and the low-slung grace of our C-types, but had the unmistakably wide, squatted-down stance of an all-American fullback. And when one fired up, you couldn't miss the deep bass grumble of a hefty Detroit V-8. That was the best thing about them: They looked and felt and sounded 100 percent American.

  Chuck Day and I wandered over for a closer look, and you had to be impressed with the neat, sanitary job they'd done. And when they popped the hood on one, my eyes about popped out on stalks. Stuffed inside was the biggest, baddest V-8 ever to roll off a Detroit production line: the Chrysler 331 Fire Power. It was brand spanking new in 1951, and most of us pump jockeys figured it to be the undisputed King Kong of American V-8s. Why, it had enormous valves and hemispherical combustion chambers—just like a Jaguar!—so it breathed a lot deeper than your average, garden-variety sedan engine. It was a big sucker, too, what with huge chrome valve covers and cylinder heads the size and heft of granite tombstones. And the particular FirePower V-8s underneath the bulging hoods of those Cunninghams had all the latest go-faster equipment, including special manifolds with four Zenith carburetors and tubular-steel exhaust plumbing and bright blue Scintilla magnetos sticking up off the back of the block.

  Wow!

  The most incredible thing was that one individual human being could afford to bankroll the entire operation. Briggs Cunningham had single-handedly managed to gather up some of the best hands and cleverest brains in the country, opened himself up a shop in West Palm Beach, Florida, and set about building real world-class American sports cars! It took more than just an obscene amount of money to do something like that. You had to have spirit and patriotism and a special sense of commitment. Which is why everybody in the whole S.C.M.A. was pulling for Briggs and his team. Sure, it would've been easy to carp about somebody with the colossal wherewithal to launch his own personal racing team and compete even-up with the best in the world. But most Stateside racers were proud that somebody had the guts and simoleans to take a little homegrown American iron across the Atlantic and keep the Brits and Italians (not to mention the French and Germans) honest. Even though Briggs's team could pretty much steamroller the opposition at every Stateside event.

  Which is precisely why Creighton Pendleton and his crew were trying to get his 4.1-liter Ferrari dropped quietly down into the Sheldon Cup race on Saturday afternoon to run against the 3.4-liter Jaguar C-types. Sure, he said he'd still run the Sunday feature (and why not, since odds were he'd win his class), but what Creighton really wanted was an overall win—the kind that the Fred Average types in the spectator areas could understand—and there wasn't much chance of that happening Sunday afternoon unless John Fitch, Phil Walters, and Briggs Cunningham all took a wrong turn and drove all three C4Rs down the boat ramp at Fireman's Park. Problem was, the rules were pretty darn specific that the Sheldon Cup was for cars up to 4000cc's—period! —and Creighton's Ferrari was known to be a 4.1. But somehow he and his crew thought there might be a way around that little detail (after all, the rules had proven themselves to be engraved in putty two or three times already that particular Friday afternoon) and so you had a smiling, freckle-faced Sid Muscatelli explaining in the most reasonable of voices that the extra l0lcc was only a lousy 2.5 percent, and if you bothered to measure the actual piston instead of the bore, why, they'd almost nearly be there, right? Of course, what Sid didn't bother to mention was that our C-types (which everybody figured as the cars to beat in the Sheldon Cup) had a hell of a lot less at 3442cc's all told.

  To the complete amazement of ignorant and politically naive persons like myself, the Powers That Be (led by—you guessed it!—Charlie Priddl
e) decided it was in the best interests of everyone concerned to let Creighton Pendleton III and his oversized Ferrari run in the Sheldon Cup on Saturday afternoon! They came to this conclusion on the grounds that, well, who the hell needed grounds? The truth of it was that Charlie and his cohorts had lost two big ones already that Friday afternoon, and everybody in the upper echelons of the S.C.M.A. hierarchy felt it was time to let them win something, if only to keep all the racers properly off balance.

  14: YOUR CHEATIN' HEART

  THE OFFICIAL end of the S.C.M.A.'s Monte Carlo Rallye to Elkhart Lake was scheduled for six o'clock Friday evening, and the organizing committee's Grand Plan was to have all the entrants parade their MGs and Jags and Porsches and such down the middle of Lake Street while the local high school band played Sousa marches and cheering fans waved and whooped and threw fistfuls of confetti. But seeing as how most all the contestants had long since rolled into town, and furthermore how the scoring had been abandoned as an impossible mess, most everybody was over at the Quit-Qui-Oc Golf Course, where Mr. Briggs Swift Cunningham was hosting a quiet little barbecue for a couple hundred of his close personal friends. It wasn't any sort of official gathering, but it was pretty hard not to get an invite if you had anything whatsoever to do with the races. Heck, I even got one.

  It was quite a spread, what with four 55-gallon oil drums slit lengthwise and propped up on angle-iron legs to serve as charcoal grills and half a dozen guys in white aprons doling out barbecued chickens and full slabs of spareribs. Next to the grills were big buckets of molasses baked beans and three kinds of potato salad and two kinds of coleslaw, plus fresh-baked bread from a bakery over in Sheboygan and a whole table full of apple, cherry, peach, and blueberry pies still piping hot from the ovens at Siebken's. To wash it all down, they had trash barrels filled with crushed ice and bottles of soda pop, not to mention six highly popular beer tappers scattered around at strategic locations. Thankfully they kept it real informal, which was nice for dirty-fingernail types like me who weren't used to casual, spur-of-the-moment parties that cost more than I made in a year. But at least there was something to celebrate, since this was the first time anybody had seen the Cunningham team since they got back from Europe. They had the three C4Rs laid out right in the middle of the eighteenth putting green, the roadsters on either side and the coupe hunkered down between them, with an American flag planted solidly in front of them and a couple colored floodlights shining down from someplace up in the trees. Looking at them made your chest sort of swell up. Honest it did.

  Briggs Cunningham was there, too, walking around from one person to the next, quietly making sure each and every one of them had enough to eat and drink. And in return, each and every one of them would thank Briggs personally—not just for the party, but also for building those tough-looking Cunninghams and taking them overseas to show the rest of the world that Americans had the know-how to build something besides fat, chrome-encrusted four-doors with automatic transmissions and mushy steering.

  I ran into Cal and Carson Flegley in the beer line, and you could see Carson was starting to get a little edgy on account of practice was scheduled to start the next morning and his laps with Cal had pretty much convinced him that he was in over his head. And naturally Cal was stoking the fire, since the S.C.M.A. had decided to award a special trophy to the top-finishing stock MG in Sunday morning's rescheduled smallbore race, and Cal was pretty damn certain he could win it if only Carson would let him drive. "Sure," Cal remarked offhandedly, "that blind hill coming into town looks a little scary at first. Can't see a damn thing over the top. Heck, there might be a car stalled or sideways or even flipped clear over smack-dab in the middle of the road. But you gotta take it flat in top anyways. Only way to get a decent lap time. 'Course, you could lift—even tap the brakes, just to settle the nose a little—but the fast guys'll leave you so far behind it won't even be funny." Carson swallowed hard a couple times, his Adam's apple bobbing up and down. "And then there's that swoopy section just past the power station," Cal added with a cavalier wave of his hand. "You really can't afford to lift off there, either. . . ."

  "Y-You can't?"

  "Hell no! Not in a bone-stock MG, anyways. Not if you wanna be, you know, competitive. . . ."

  That's when I decided I should wander off before I inadvertently started sniggering and gummed up Cal's game. I mean, I wanted to see Cal drive almost as much as he wanted to do it. After all, Cal was my driver, and it seemed like some little fragment of the glory reflected back on me whenever he did well.

  I saw Tommy over talking with Ernesto Julio and Chuck Day, and with them was a small, thin, quiet young fellow with hollow cheeks, wiry hair, and quick, darty eyes. "Hey, sport," Tommy called out. "Step over and meet Phil Hill."

  I walked over and shook hands. "So," I said with just the hint of an edge in my voice, "you're the guy who's supposed to beat my friend Tommy here, right?"

  Phil Hill shrugged and didn't say anything.

  "Well," I continued, with maybe a few too many beers for inspiration, "I think you're gonna find that's a pretty tall order. Especially in equal cars. . . ."

  "Equal cars?" Ernesto Julio howled, rolling his eyes. "Are you trying to tell me Colin St. John didn't keep the fastest one for himself? Hell, that's what I'd do."

  "Sure, we kept the best car," Tommy allowed through a crocodile smile. "But from what I've heard, we'll bloody well need it. Old Phil here's been building himself quite a formidable reputation out on the coast. Haven't you, Phil?"

  Phil Hill looked down at the ground like he'd maybe dropped something and shrugged again. Of course, this was all part of the game, putting the old needle in and trying to work the other guy around a little before you actually had to go out on the track and run wheel-to-wheel with him.

  Later I wandered over to take a closer look at the cars. The Cunningham team had them all polished up and gleaming like huge china figurines, but if you looked closely, you could see the little telltale dings and stone chips left over from their European campaign. I remember touching my fingers to the nose emblem of that wicked-looking C4RK coupe, and for just an instant an electrified shiver went through me, as if I could hear the war cry of that enormous Chrysler V-8 thundering down the midnight straightaways at Le Mans.

  A dance band fired up over next to the clubhouse, and they were pretty decent even though they played mostly older, slower songs like "The Tennessee Waltz" and "Goodnight, Irene." I noticed Sally Enderle standing over by one of the beer tappers, all by her lonesome, and I decided to casually wander over and say hello and maybe see how long it would take her to shoo me away. But she actually seemed glad to see me. "So," she said through a wavering smile, "how's the mechanic who blows up other people's MGs doing?"

  "Me?" I said, looking around like there was maybe somebody behind me. "Oh, I'm OK, I guess."

  "Yeah? Me, too. I feel great!" She rolled her head back until she was looking straight up at the sky, and I noticed she had to hang on to the beer tapper to keep from toppling clear over. "Take a look up there. You ever seen so many stars?"

  I had to admit I really hadn't, and then it turned all heavy and quiet between us, like cement setting up. "So," I asked, just trying to make conversation, "y'think Creighton's all set for tomorrow? That's quite a machine he's got there, yes siree. And where the heck is he, anyway? Haven't seen him around all night. . . ."

  Sally looked me up and down like she was trying to figure where some bad smell was coming from. "Maybe he decided to turn in early," she snapped, glaring so hard her eyeballs seemed to vibrate. "Do I look like his damn keeper to you?"

  "Oh, n-no, Sally," I mumbled. "A'course not. I just sorta, you know . . ."

  "Lissen, Bub," she growled, pointing her chin into my face like an automatic pistol, "you don't need to wonder anything about me at all, understand?"

  Boy, I could feel my ears burning.

  "And as for Creighton's Ferrari, why don't you try getting your information from one of the other me
chanics. You all speak the same inane language, don't you?"