by Burt Levy
Now, you'd think a hair-raising experience like that would dampen a guy's enthusiasm. But not my buddy Cal. No sir. The first thing he wanted to know was if we could get the brakes fixed and the wheels pointed more or less straight in time for the race that afternoon. "Gee whiz," I asked him, "aren't you a little, you know, scared? I mean, that coulda been a pretty damn serious wreck."
"Yeah," he shrugged, "I 'spose it could at that."
"That car coulda flipped right over on top of you. . . ."
Cal's face lit up in one of his patented rich-kid grins. "But it didn't, did it?" And that seemed to pretty much settle things as far as Cal Carrington was concerned.
We had about an hour before the Sheldon Cup race, and seeing as how Tommy's C-type was running just fine, me and some of the MG guys decided to see if we could maybe fix Robby Bernard's V-8-powered TC so Cal could run it. They liked seeing an MG running faster than most of the Jaguar 120s. And who could blame them? Still, the MG/Ford combination was lumped in the same class with our pair of C-types and Creighton Pendleton's Ferrari, where it really didn't have a prayer of picking up a trophy. "What's the point?" I asked Cal as I leaned my head under the fender to have a look at that bent tie-rod.
"Hey," he grinned, patting that mongrel MG on its radiator cap, "it's a ride."
As you can imagine, it was no simple truck to fix the damn thing, because you couldn't really get at the master cylinder without pulling off the exhaust pipe on that side, and everything was still hotter than a barbecue grill down where we needed to be working. So we soaked down a couple shop rags and applied them a little at a time so as to cool things off a little without causing all the castings to shatter like a bunch of heavy-duty Christmas ornaments.
Fortunately, one of the MG guys had a rebuild kit for the master cylinder, and somebody else scrounged me up a couple empty tomato cans out of the trash, which I transformed with a hammer and a pair of tin snips into a cheesy pair of heat shields for the exhaust. They surely wouldn't have won me any awards for engineering excellence or fine craftsmanship, but it looked like they might get the job done. As for the bent tie-rod, the best we could do was heat it up with a torch we borrowed from the Cunningham trailer and kind of pry and hammer it more or less straight again. I did the fine adjusting with some kite string and a yardstick we borrowed from the Osthoff s maintenance man, and if I do say so myself, those wheels looked pretty damn straight when I was finished. Especially if you held your thumb out in front of your eyes and squinted real hard.
Come race time all the cars drove around to the train station parking lot and waited while a bunch of S.C.M.A. grid marshals fought with the drivers and crews about who belonged where. To tell the truth, the starting positions were pretty much pulled out of a hat, and some painfully slow guy in a new Nash-Healey somehow wound up on the pole. But right next to him was our old buddy Creighton Pendleton and his slightly oversized Ferrari. The second row consisted of Cal in the Ford/MG hybrid and a guy from Cincinnati in a J2 Allard with an Ardun Mercury under the hood. Phil Hill's C-type was back on the third row, right next to Tommy, and I must admit, those two C-types looked really sleek and modern compared to all the other iron on the grid. Some of the guys toward the back were upset about being behind obstacles like Skippy Welcher's ex-everything XK120M, and bitched about it right up until the engines fired. But it did them no good as the field rumbled off for a slow pace lap to get everybody settled in and all the mechanical bits up to operating temperature.
After the field arced out of sight in front of Siebken's and growled off into the countryside, I had my first real chance to take in the enormous crowd that had assembled five- and six-deep all the way down Lake Street and damn near as many lining the hill from Schuler's Tavern up toward that blind crest another half mile away. I have no idea how many spectators were actually on hand that day (somebody said it was over a hundred thousand!) but wherever you went, you had heads and torsos and elbows poking at you from all sides.
The field came around and reformed down the middle of Lake Street, and then the starter (it was that same doofus in the Great White Hunter getup I remembered from Bridgehampton) climbed a little wooden podium on the side, looked everybody over like a high school math teacher before a big exam, and gave 'em the green. Engines roared, tires squealed, and there was quite a bit of jockeying for position as the field thundered down toward the hard left in front of Siebken's and the fast guys struggled to find a way around that Nash-Healey. But you could see they were being pretty careful, too, on account of the spectators pressed in along both sides and the fact that there wasn't anything in the way of an escape road. As the last of the stragglers disappeared from sight, you could hear the unmistakable, wild-animal howl of Creighton Pendleton's Ferrari leading the pack through Wacker Wend, climbing the gentle hill, and then braking and downshifting for the sharp right into Hammil's Hollow. After that it got pretty quiet for a minute or so, and then you could pick up the echo of the cars as they passed the public boat launch on the other side of the lake. Sounded to me like Creighton's Ferrari, the two C-types a few seconds behind and running in close company, another gap, and then a whole freight train of cars one right after the other. I figured Cal and the Ford/MG to be somewhere in that bunch. After that it got quiet again, and then you could make out the faint yowl of the Ferrari and the two C-types climbing the long, steep hill toward the blind crest with the pine tree growing right smack-dab in the middle of it. No question Creighton and at least one of the C-types gave it a big lift just before the hilltop—maybe even a stab at the brakes?—but the other C-type went over flat stick. You could hear it.
When they roared back through town, it was Creighton in front with Phil Hill in the silver Jag all over him, then about a two-second gap back to Tommy in the Westbridge C-type. And then just a huge, empty space with nobody in it. On the very first lap! When the rest of the field poured into town, it was an Allard and two of the quicker XK120s and some guy in a Frazer-Nash and our boy Cal in that overpowered MG all in a clot, followed by more Jag 120s and another Allard and a whole bunch of cars bottled up behind that stupid pole-sitting Nash-Healey. "Pretty good race," a familiar voice said, and I turned to find Chuck Day standing next to me, casually chewing gum and shielding his eyes from the afternoon sun.
"Yeah," I agreed, "that Phil Hill is doing a hell of a job in the silver car."
"He doesn't exactly poke around, does he?"
"Not hardly. And we figured that was the slower of the two cars."
"It was."
"How's that?"
"I said it was."
"Oh?"
Then the field came by again, and Phil Hill was still right on the Ferrari's ass, but the gap back to Tommy Edwards had grown by another second or two. And Tommy looked like he was really trying, getting it all hung-out-to-dry sideways through the right-hander in front of Schuler's Tavern. "Jeez," I said, "he's really pushing it pretty hard, isn't he?"
"Yeah. Maybe even a little too much."
There was something to that. "So," I asked Chuck Day after the cars passed, "what did you mean when you said the silver car used to be the slow one?"
"Aw, it wasn't nothin', really. Phil just complained after first practice that the green car had more suds, so we sorta poked around until we found the problem."
"Oh? Mind letting me in on it?"
"Sure thing," he shrugged. "It was no big deal. Turns out they just made a little mistake at the factory."
"A mistake at the Jaguar factory race shop?" I asked incredulously.
"Yeah. They had the timing mark on the flywheel two teeth off, so it was running about 5 degrees retarded. Cams and ignition both. No big deal. . . ." Well, he could say "no big deal," but believe me, it took one hell of a sharp mechanic to figure that one out. I mean, he'd never even seen a damn C-type before!
The race between Creighton Pendleton and Phil Hill turned out to be a genuine classic. Phil's Jag was all over that Ferrari like a wet laundry bag, but the Ferrari had ju
st that little bit extra in the horsepower department so Creighton could pull away enough on the straights to keep the Jag from ducking underneath going into the corners. And he made it extra tough by driving more or less down the middle of the road, so there really wasn't much space for overtaking. Meanwhile, Tommy was slipping farther and farther back, losing the odd second or two every lap no matter how hard he tried. And it must've been double tough on him since he still thought he had the faster of the two C-types. Maybe that's why he was trying so damn hard and slowing himself down.
Cal was putting up a pretty good effort in the Ford-powered MG, hanging on behind the quickest of the Jag 120s but slowly losing contact. And then he didn't come around anymore. I was worried, of course, but figured it was probably OK on account of they didn't red flag the race or send out an ambulance or anything. Apparently, he was just parked somewhere by the side of the road with mechanical problems again. Or at least that's what I hoped.
When the leaders thundered past with four laps to go, you could see Phil Hill had dropped back about five or six car lengths instead of hanging all over the back of the Ferrari. "You watch," Chuck grinned. "Phil's been setting him up. This is the lap he gets past." And, sure enough, the silver C-type was solidly in front the next time around. He stayed there all the way to the checker, too.
After the race, they towed Cal in with the right-front end of the MG/Ford somewhat rearranged. "What happened?" I asked as they dropped it off the hook.
"Aw, th'damn brakes went out again."
"They did?"
"Yeah. Pedal went right to the floor heading into Dicken's Ditch."
"Wow."
"Lucky for me there's an escape road there."
"Sure is," I agreed. "But then, why'dja crash it?"
"Aw, there was some idiot photographer squatted down right in the middle of the damn escape road. Can you believe it? I had to damn near drive up a tree to keep from hitting him." It turned out Cal had most likely saved that photographer's life, on account of he came charging down the escape road at a hundred-plus with no brakes and had the presence of mind to wait and see which way the guy was gonna jump before he yanked the wheel and swerved the other way. It would've been real easy to make a snap decision and turn the car one direction or the other, and if the poor lensman happened to jump the same way, he would've found himself pretty much wearing the front end of Robby Bernard's Ford-powered TC.
I looked underneath to see what happened to the brakes, and was relieved to discover it had nothing to do with the work we'd done before the race. No, this time the brake pipe on the back axle had busted, and it didn't take Sherlock Holmes to figure out why. Somebody'd left the little brass nut off that holds the brake line T-fitting to the axle, and so the brake line was getting a nasty little twist thrown into it whenever the axle moved up and down. It was only a matter of time.
One of the MG guys brought us over a couple cold bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon and Cal gave us a thrilling eyewitness account of the super-duper passing move Phil Hill pulled on old Creighton Pendleton. "Creighton was kinda hogging the middle of the road so there was really no safe way around—I mean, the pavement's pretty narrow there and you're going awfully fast—and so Phil just kinda sat there on his bumper and worked him over for about eight laps, darting and feinting around in his mirrors. After he had Creighton good and worried, he dropped back a few lengths and took a run on him down the backside between Kimberly's Korner and where I was stranded up by the hairpin. He had it timed just perfectly, got himself a nice little boost coming up in the Ferrari's slipstream, made like he was gonna pass on the outside, then whipped around the inside at the little kink going into the braking zone. Without ever lifting his foot off the damn floorboards! Boy, what a pass!"
After helping get Robby Bernard's MG loaded up so they could haul it down to some garage in Cedarburg where a guy named Kovacs could fix just about anything—even on a Saturday afternoon—I went wandering around in search of Tommy Edwards. But he was nowhere to be found. I located the green C-type easy enough (parked right where it belonged next to the silver one) with Phil Hill, Chuck Day, and Ernesto Julio standing in the middle of the usual crowd that gathers around winners like flies on fresh dogshit. Ernesto had brought out a case of his special private-stock California wines and even had honest-to-goodness wine glasses and some stiff in a tux to do the opening and pouring. Some guys are just real handy with money.
"Anybody seen Tommy?" I asked.
Everybody shook their heads and kind of looked off the other way. But before I took off to go looking for him in the bar, I had myself a glass of red and a glass of white (in different glasses—the guy in the tux insisted!) and made sure to congratulate Phil Hill on a hell of a drive and a really nice win. He looked down at the ground and shrugged and thanked me in a quiet, almost apologetic voice, and right then I knew this guy was going places.
I located Tommy over in Siebken's bar, and he'd obviously already had himself several stiff drinks. But they weren't exactly cheering him up. In a single afternoon, it seemed like he'd changed from a guy who could drink all night and never show it to a guy who could get himself righteously stiff on four or five watered-down scotches. He had a grim look on his face, and it didn't help much when I explained about the timing marks and how Chuck Day had made the silver car at least as fast as the green one. But Tommy just wasn't interested. Far as he could see, he'd been beaten by another driver in a lesser car, and that had never really happened to him before. It had never even happened in an equal car. And that's why it didn't help much when I told him the silver Jag was running a whole lot better come race time.
The official weekend program listed a "Concours d'Elegance and Motoring Fashion Show" for 7:30 Saturday evening, and that gave me just enough time for a couple commiseratory drinks with Tommy and a quick run back to the room to shower and put on some clean clothes. Only I didn't exactly have any on account of I'd put the best stuff I had on that morning, then spent most of the day crawling around under Robby Bernard's overstimulated TC. Fortunately, Ernesto Julio overheard me moaning about it in the bar (he'd come over to buy Tommy a few more drinks, which he really didn't need) and nothing would do but that I go up to his room and take whatever the hell I wanted out of his closet. "Hey, no problem," he told me. "Take any damn thing you want."
"You sure? Even one of those pirate shirts?"
"Pirate shirts?"
"You know. Like the one you were wearing in the bar under the stairs the other night?"
"Why not?" he shrugged, rolling his palms up. But then he leaned forward and stared at me eyeball to eyeball. "That is, if you think you're man enough to pull it off. It's easy to look like a damn sissy in an outfit like that. Especially if you don't have the balls to wear it properly. Capiche?"
I told him it was a risk I was willing to take. So I went up to Ernesto Julio's room and borrowed myself a puffy silk shirt and a pair of freshly pressed tan slacks that were only about two sizes too big and headed back to my room for a major cleanup before I dared to put that stuff on. Fact is, I spent better than twenty minutes in the shower, trying to get most of the grease out from under my fingernails. When I came out of the bathroom, I saw Tommy stretched out on the bed in his driving suit, staring up at the slowly rotating ceiling fan. "How're y'feeling?" I asked, like he'd been sick or something.
Tommy waved one of his hands halfheartedly through the air. "I'll be fine after a hot bath and some dinner," he sighed, his voice all heavy with liquor. "You run on along. I'll be down in awhile." So I put on Ernesto Julio's shirt and pants and headed downstairs to see just what a Concours d'Elegance and Motoring Fashion Show could possibly be.
"Concours d'Elegance" is a French phrase that means prettying up a car so that it's too damn nice to drive, and you would simply not believe all the spiffed up cars they had on display under a string of party lanterns down Lake Street. There were the usual MGs and Jaguars and Porsches and such you expected, all polished and gleaming in the soft yellow lig
ht, but there were other cars, too. Huge, magnificent-looking Rolls Royces and Bentleys and even a V-12 Lincoln Continental. I noticed a gorgeous metallic blue Alfa Romeo coupe that some designer guy named Brook Stevens had just brought back from Italy, plus one of those flamboyant, supercharged 540K Mercedes convertibles that were such a hit with the Nazi bigwigs during the war. There was a really nice Model T next to an old Overland, an older Mercer, and of course Charlie Priddle's antique Stutz. Across the way, a slippery, boat-tailed Auburn Speedster was parked beside a Murphy-bodied Duesenberg and this block-long, liquid-smooth French thing called a Delahaye. They may have been designed more for pulling up in front of fancy restaurants than screaming around corners, but those cars were sure as hell magnificent to look at. I spent the better part of two hours there, just walking up and down, taking it all in. A lot of people—and especially women—simply don't understand the magic of automobiles. But there it was for all to see, spread out down the middle of Lake Street like a damn smorgasbord.