Against Death and Time: One Fatal Season in Racing's Glory Years (11 page)

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.