Against Death and Time: One Fatal Season in Racing's Glory Years (22 page)

Travers took the photo back and laid it on the rubble covering his
desk. He turned to look out the window at a typically warm Southern
California morning. "Either way, it doesn't make any difference now."

"What now?" I asked.

"I dunno:'

Hopkins says he's gonna repair his car and keep going. But Frank
and I are out. I don't want to see that thing again. And Keck. He's got
a new babe who's into horse racing. The new car just sits there. I guess
he'll want us to finish it. But with rich guys like that, who knows?
Their money makes `em different. I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't
drop the whole project."

Travers was right. While the Keck streamliner car was entered in
the 1956 race, without a driver assigned, a call came in late December
from Superior Oil. It was Howard Keck's private secretary. She
announced coldly that the racing team was dissolved. Without ever
speaking to their boss, Travers and Coon picked up their tools and
walked out, leaving the streamliner, the winning Fuel-Injection
Special, a mass of spare parts and engines and several midget race
cars in the dark shop.

Puzzling over what was no doubt the last photo taken of Bill
Vukovich alive, I left Travers and headed back home to make my final
trip preparations. Surely the more civilized atmosphere permeating
the European-style motor sports I had seen at Watkins Glen would
help cleanse the memory of Indianapolis. Or so I naively believed.

TO GET TO PARIS FROM LOS ANGELES IN THE SUMMER
of 1955 was a serious journey. Intercontinental jet travel awaited the
development of the Boeing 707, which meant a series of hops via a
Pan Am Douglas DC-8B. With its four Pratt & Whitney radial engines
humming away, these 300-mph giants took me from Burbank airport
to New York's Idlewild, then to Gander, Newfoundland, and finally
into Paris's Orly airport. The trip, including an overnight stop in New
York, consumed the better part of two days-which still stood as a
massive gain in time over earlier travel by transcontinental train and
ocean liner between New York and Cherbourg.

After a day spent working the kinks out of my body in Paris, I took
a train to Le Mans, a bustling trading center lying to the south and
west of the capital that had served as Eisenhower's headquarters in the
latter stages of World War II. Like all major French towns, its history dated back to Gaul and the Roman occupation. It had been the scene
of endless sieges and massacres during the Hundred Years War and
was said to be the favorite haunt of Henry II and the birthplace of
Jean Bon, the first Plantagenet king. It had suffered heavily in the
Franco-Prussian war and in World War I. It spread out from its shellpitted fortress walls housing a twelvth century cathedral that towered
high above the River Sarthe.

The city had hosted automobile racing since the early 1920s. The
only victory by an American driver in an American-built car in a
major European Grand Prix race came at Le Mans in 1921, when
Californian Jimmy Murphy drove a Duesenberg in a win notable
because the Indiana-built race car carried four-wheel hydraulic
brakes, a revolutionary breakthrough in an era when even the most
exotic automobiles employed crude, cable-operated units based on
technology dating to horse-drawn buggies.

Since 1923, Le Mans had been the site of the world's longest and
most difficult endurance race. The local Automobile Club D'Ouest
organized, each June, a twenty-four-Hour race for productionbased automobiles to test both speed and endurance. At that time
of the year, in that northern latitude, the night lasted little more
than six hours. Over the decades, the great European marques Alfa
Romeo, Bentley, Bugatti, Jaguar, Talbot, Ferrari, and MercedesBenz had dominated the event and, like Italy's Mille Miglia, the
race had become a major national holiday. Run over an 8.4-mile
circuit through the provincial countryside on a rough rectangle of
public roads closed for the occasion, the great race attracted hundreds of thousands of spectators who spent the day jammed fifty
deep on the perimeters of the track or in the amusement park that
carnival operators erected for the occasion. Aside from a large
grandstand on the main straightaway, there were no provisions for
the spectators, who crushed together like subway riders around the
course. The privileged few were offered food and drink at the Cafe de Hippodrome on the edge of the three-mile-long Mulsanne
straight.

The magazine had arranged lodging for me at the small Hotel
Moderne in the center of the city, near the Place de la Republique,
were the Cafe Gruber was located. This was the main hangout for
English-speaking race teams and notables, meaning that interviews
and informal chats with drivers and team managers might be carried
out away from the noise and frenzied atmosphere of the racetrack.

Unlike at Indianapolis, where the entered cars were housed in
Gasoline Alley, there were no such centralized accommodations at Le
Mans. Cars were prepared for practice and the race at rented garages
and car dealerships scattered around the city, and driven daily to the
track on public roads. Indy machines were Spartan single-seaters, but
the sports cars set for Le Mans carried full road equipment-lights,
fenders, two seats, spare tires, and even horns-according to the
fiendishly complex regulations that governed the race.

While the large teams entered by the Mercedes-Benz and Jaguar
factories rented warehouses and factory annexes and filled them with
mountains of spare parts and legions of expert mechanics-all
clothed in the coveralls that were the fashion of the day-smaller
operations were left to prepare their cars in private garages and in the
open courtyards of small hotels.

The Moderne was no exception. Below my window in the small
courtyard, two independent English teams, one with an MG, the
other with a Triumph, labored into the night, the rattle of their spanners and the garble of Cockney mechanics echoing off the stone walls
of the little canyon. Everywhere in the city, the rumble and whine of
racing engines being tuned up for the race added to the chatter of the
crowds, the clatter of the street traffic, and the cries of vendors hawking souvenirs.

Having arrived at Le Mans before official practice began, I spent
the days at Gruber's Curbside cafe. It was alive with beautiful people decked out in the latest fashions. Men in Lacoste shirts, tailored
slacks, and Gucci loafers were everywhere, while an endless parade of
Pucci- and Chanel-draped women battled for my attention. The
square swarmed with all manner of Ferraris, Porsches, and other
svelte roadsters, all vying for space and adoration.

Early in the going, I met an American journalist named Peter
Coltrin. He was a scrawny man in his early thirties with a receding
chin and wispy reddish hair. A Kansan by birth, he had left the heartland as a private in Patton's Third Army-and never returned. He
had begun photographing motor races for several obscure British
magazines and had taken up residence in Modena, Italy, near the
fabled Scuderia Ferrari, a place that was becoming increasingly
important in international motor sports circles.

Embittered about what he considered to be the excess and
hubris of his homeland, Coltrin was a classic expatriate whose
forerunners had convened in Paris in the twenties following World
War I and again in the forties and fifties following the collapse of
Germany. Coltrin was given to rages on subjects ranging from
President Eisenhower's middle-class obsession with golf to the
brinksmanship of John Foster Dulles to the dreadful state of
American car engineering. He was a Europhile, a midwestern emigre who ardently rejected American culture and technology. Yet
Coltrin was a fountain of information about the European racing
scene and I therefore tolerated his tirades in hopes of gathering
valuable inside gossip.

Late in the afternoon, as we drank Camparis and sodas, Coltrin
smiled and said, "Oh god, here they come. The guys from
Cunningham."

I turned in my chair to see two clean-cut men in sports shirts ease
under the blue canopy of the restaurant and seat themselves at a
small table near the curb.

I recognized them from Watkins Glen. The older one, with a square jaw and a sandy wad of curly hair, was Briggs Cunningham.
The other, leaner, and with a level stare of faint defiance, was Phil
Walters, the superb driver who had won at the Glen with ease.

"Briggs keeps showing up here trying to beat the Europeans;"
Coltrin said. "Got to admire him. At least this time he was smart
enough to give up on his giant Chrysler-powered lumps and buy a
Jaguar. But his second car is powered by an Offenhauser, one of those
silly dirt-track engines from Indianapolis."

"Like the one that dominated the 500 with Vukovich?" I mused.

"Yeah, they do allright with that roundy-round stuff, but not here
where real performance counts," countered Coltrin.

"Why do you have such a hard-on for your own country?" I asked.

"A lot of us do. We're tired of being linked to a nation of smalltown Babbitts. Like Gertrude Stein said, `There's no there there."'

"Cunningham is an heir to a meat-packing fortune," I countered.
"His middle name is Swift, like in the meat-packing business. He's a
very wealthy Yale man. He can afford to build his own sports cars. He
doesn't look like a small-town Babbitt to me."

"Maybe not. But he's out of his league here," said Coltrin, waving
at the waiter for another drink. "Briggs is a pure gentleman amateur.
A sportsman loaded with money who surrounds himself with real
talent. Like Walters. Glider pilot in the war. Ran midgets and stock
cars professionally under the nom de plume `Ted Tappet' because his
family thought racing as a professional was beneath his station.
Began to use his given name when he hooked up with Briggs. Now
he's got a shot with Ferrari. He's headed to Modena right after this.
Wants to run Formula One. No more of this sports car stuff. Walters
wants to go head-to-head with guys like Fangio and Moss."