Against Death and Time: One Fatal Season in Racing's Glory Years (2 page)

BOOK: Against Death and Time: One Fatal Season in Racing's Glory Years
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In 1955 James Dean and Rebel without a Cause shook the establishment along with a mass of young, flat-to-the-floor rock and roll musicians including Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl
Perkins, Gene Vincent, Chuck Berry, and the immortal Elvis Presley.

Meanwhile, Detroit had discovered new sources of power through
revolutionary, large-displacement V-8 engines, which triggered a
"horsepower race" and prompted critics like writer John Keats to brand
the chrome-encrusted monsters "insolent chariots." At the same time,
Europeans were invading the shores with new "sports cars" and a
strange, beetle-shaped economy car called the Volkswagen. On the race
tracks, high technology was producing cars capable of doing 180 miles
an hour with little or no commensurate concern for spectator safety.
Death and injury on an unprecedented scale would be the result.

Four incidents shook the world of automobiles in the pivotal year
of 1955. First came the shocking deaths of two of the world's greatest
drivers at the peak of their powers-Italian former world champion
Alberto Ascari and Indianapolis 500 superstar Bill Vukovich. Then
came a gruesome disaster at Le Mans, France, when a Mercedes-Benz
race car plunged into the crowded grandstands and killed at least
eighty-eight people. Later that year, James Dean drove into immortality in what for a time was the world's most famous automobile crash.

In attempting to chronicle these incidents and the worlds they
emerged from, I have employed what is referred to as "faction," in
which a first-person, unidentified narrator is a witness to much of the
action in an attempt to more intimately link the reader to the real and
events. In so doing, the narrator meets and has an affair with a woman
who in actuality is an amalgam of the wealthy, privileged women who
followed the sport of automobile racing during that period. Aside from this pair, the rest of the characters in the story are real people.
The events are as factual as I could make them, notwithstanding the
passage of time and the blurring of memories. In working on this
project, I have been particularly grateful to the following individuals
who, over the years, have offered first-person accounts of the events
portrayed. They include Tom Medley, John Fitch, Rodger Ward, Jim
Travers, David E. Davis, Jr., Jesse Alexander, Lee Raskin, Jim Sitz, Dan
Rubin, Phil Hill, Denise McCluggage, Donald Davidson, Chris
Economaki, L. Spencer Riggs, Phil McCray, and the late Hans Tanner.
A special thanks to John Fitch and his autobiography, Adventure on
Wheels-A Race Through Life.

One note regarding poetic license. The character Peter Coltrin in
chapters 9 and 10 did not actually arrive in Modena until 1957.
However, Coltrin was a classic example of the many American journalists who went to Europe in the 1950s to immerse themselves in
the world of high-speed automobiles and who became enamored
of life around the Scuderia Ferrari. I have based my portrayal of
Coltin's behavior and attitudes on numerous interviews with those
who knew him.

I hope that in a small way, he and the other vivid characters on the
following pages will help to bring alive one of the most tumultuous
and riveting periods in automotive history.

Brock Yates

Wyoming, New York

 

I MET HIM IN A TUSSLE FOR THE BATHROOM. HE
was built like a middleweight. Forearms like bowling pins. His face
was spread with a toothy smile, but his eyes, ink-black beneath a
heavy brow, showed little amusement. It was obvious that his good
nature would remain only so long as I gave him first shot at the
shower.

We were on the third floor of a rooming house three blocks from
the Indianapolis Motor Speedway on the second day of May in 1953.
I was sharing a room with my old high school pal Tom Medley, a
photographer and sometime cartoonist for Hot Rod Magazine, a Los
Angeles-based monthly that had been started seven years earlier by a
struggling Hollywood press agent named Bob Petersen. I had come
east with Medley, having just been mustered out of the army and still
bearing shrapnel scars picked up on the Yalu River. He had an assign ment for the month at the place they called the "Brickyard."
Unemployed as I was, I tagged along as his gopher, taking notes, running errands, and sharing what we considered to be the hefty room
rate of twelve bucks a week.

"Who's that tough guy who just beat me out of the bathroom?" I
asked Medley, who was sorting out Speed Graphic camera equipment
on his single bed.

"Must be Vuke," he said.

"Nuke? Bill Vukovich?"

"That's him. Stays here every year with his wife."

"The guy they call the `Mad Russian'? The guy who almost won the
500 last year? What the hell is he doing in a rooming house?" I asked.
"I figured guys like him would stay downtown at a fancy hotel like the
Claypool or the Riley."

"Let me tell you something," said Medley, laying down his camera.
"Everybody thinks that guys who race at Indy are rolling in dough.
Forget it."

"Come on," I protested. "This is big-time stuff."

"Maybe for the car owners. They're mostly rich guys in it for the
sport. They get 60 percent of the purse. The driver gets 40. And if the
car breaks, he gets zilch."

"I figured a guy like Vukovich would have money of his own."

"He's a car mechanic by trade. Got a little shop in Fresno. Wife.
She's here somewhere. Stays out of sight. Two kids. No insurance. If
he's hurt, he lays there until he gets better."

"It doesn't seem worth the risk."

"It isn't to a normal human being. These guys aren't normal."

"So the `Mad Russian' is really mad."

"Hell, he isn't even Russian. Some press guy stuck him with that.
Real name is Vucerovich. Czechoslovakian. Either way, don't mess
with him."

I didn't mess with Bill Vukovich, although during that month our little races to the only bathroom became a small joke. He always won,
partly because he was quicker afoot than I, but mostly because it
seemed important to him. Second was not a place where Bill
Vukovich wanted to be.

I first heard about Vukovich at an Indianapolis going-away party
the racing fraternity traditionally held in late April at the Club La
Rouge on Ventura Boulevard in West Los Angeles. It was a large,
dark room lined with blue-upholstered vinyl booths and draped
with red velvet curtains. The place was owned by a New Yorker
named Shapiro whose idea of French decor no doubt came from
second-rate Parisian brothels.

A swing band tooted away in a corner while the local Indianapolis
crowd-mechanics, accessory manufacturers, rail birds, hangers-on,
girlfriends, wives, and a few drivers-drank and bragged about their
chances at Indy. Johnny Parsons, a chiseled movie-star type who had
won the Indy 500 in 1950, was there, as was last year's winner, the
young, strapping Troy Ruttman. He had to be six feet three and was
still wearing a sling after breaking his arm in a freak accident in a
Midwestern sprint car race.

Ruttman had won at Indianapolis driving for J. C. Agajanian, a
big-time LA garbageman who strutted around the room in his
omnipresent cowboy hat topping an immense Armenian hook nose.
"Too bad Bill Vukovich isn't here," he said to Medley, placing a beringed paw on Tom's sloping shoulder. "I'd bet him a thousand bucks
that we'll beat him again." Agajanian was choosing to forget that
Vukovich had Ruttman doomed to a distant second until Vukovich's
steering failed eight laps from the finish.

"Jesus. Everybody in the place thinks they're going to win back
there," I said to Medley as a waiter planted two more Seven Crown
and 7-Ups-"Seven and Sevens" were all the rage-in front of us.

"They think that way because they have to. If they didn't, they'd be
in another line of work."

Chet Miller strolled in with his wife, Gertrude. A few scattered
claps and whoops. He was a small man, slightly hunched and nearly
bald. But he could drive. He had been in sixteen 500-mile races at
Indianapolis since 1928 and had logged over 5,000 miles at the big
track-but had never won. Third place was his best. This year was his
biggest shot. He was driving a Novi, the fiercest, fastest, meanest race
car in the world: 500 steaming horsepower that could make or break
a man. The best had tried and failed. Ralph Hepburn had paid with
his life. The Novi brooked no mistakes, yet had carried Miller to a
track record just short of 140 miles an hour.

"If anybody's going to break 140, it'll be Miller," said Medley.

"A little guy. Looks like my tailor. That is, if I could afford a tailor."

"He's been doing this since the Depression. Fifty years old. Still
hasn't made enough to retire. He runs a little upholstery shop for
fancy cars over in Burbank. Business with the Hollywood types," said
Medley. "But he can drive the shit out of those big Novis. Some say
they're jinxed. Too much horsepower. Too radical. Faster than hell,
but as evil.

"These guys are nutty about jinxes. Green cars. Peanuts. Black cats,
woman in the pits. The number thirteen. All taboo. You'd be surprised what guys carry in their cars for good luck: St. Christopher
medals, baby shoes, rabbit's feet, coins. Weird stuff. But I guess you've
gotta be a little weird to even get in one of those things."

"What about that guy Vukovich?" I asked. "Sounds like he had it
wrapped up until his steering broke."

"He'll be tough. Good car. Vuke calls it a roadster because he sits
down low, deep inside the cockpit. Frank Kurtis built the thing up in
Glendale. Another one of those Eastern European types. Croatia or
somewhere like that. The car owner is Howard Keck. Superior Oil.
Big money. Got two of the best wrenches in the business. Jim
Travers. They call him Crabby. Got an attitude. His buddy is Frank
Coon. Smart asses. Call 'em the Rich Kids.

"When Vuke first showed up at the Speedway two years ago, he
had a shitbox car-an old stove entered by an Italian contractor
from back in Ohio. A lot of other guys wouldn't get near it. A
hoodoo car they called it. One that'd bite back and kill you. But
when Vuke saw the thing for the first time he walked up to it and
said, `I can drive that pig.'

BOOK: Against Death and Time: One Fatal Season in Racing's Glory Years
5.93Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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