Against Death and Time: One Fatal Season in Racing's Glory Years (3 page)

"He doesn't know the word fear. When he was a champion in the
midgets, he'd run over the Russian army to win. Had some of his
wildest battles with his own brother, Eli. No quarter. Eats nails and
spits rust."

But during the first few days at the boarding house, run by a family
named Manifold-which was such a weird coincidence that Tom and
I wondered if they'd changed their name just for the racing crowd-
Vuke and I somehow got along. He was generally distant and indifferent to anybody in the press, but us being hot-rodders from California
and army veterans, he treated Tom and I with easy good humor.

Most mornings, the three of us walked the few blocks to busy
Sixteenth Street and crossed into the immense Speedway. For most of
its history, it had been paved with bricks- hence it's nickname (the
Brickyard). But in the 1930s its owner, Eddie Rickenbacker, paved
part of it with macadam.

The place was scary. The long front straight, still brick, was bordered by yawning grandstands on the outside along Georgetown
Road and on the inside by the pits and a ramshackle five-story
pagodalike timing tower built before World War I. The straight was
4,000 feet long, to be exact, with the back straight the same length,
connected by four corners, each a quarter mile of a mile long, with
two so-called short chutes at either end. Some of the faster cars, like
Miller's Novi, would knock on 180 miles an hour before they
swooped into the curves. One mistake, and three-foot-thick cement
walls lining the track awaited, whitewashed to cover the deadly scars
that pocked their surfaces.

It was on this ominous rectangle, which had consumed the lives of
thirty-one men since opening in 1909, that guys like Miller and
Vukovich were planning to average 140 miles an hour.

The weather stayed steamy for the first week of practice. Not much
was going on, other than a few cars sporadically taking practice laps
and some rookies being given so-called driver's tests, which mainly
meant keeping their cars off the walls. The whole issue of safety was
a bit of a joke. The rules were what you might call rudimentary.
"Crash helmets" were required, but they were flimsy leather lids
developed for motorcycle racing in the 1930s. It was recommended
that "fireproof" clothing be worn. This involved soaking a shirt or a
pair of coveralls in a boric-acid-and-borax solution to inhibit firethe one component of the business that scared guys. Yet most of
them, including the hot ones like Miller and Vukovich, drove in normal street clothes-usually a T-shirt during the hot months.

T-shirts were a major fashion item among drivers. Most displayed
a Mobil flying red horse and a "Mobil Oil" logo on the front, courtesy
of Mike Petrovich's Mobil station out on Sixteenth. Another favorite
was the T-shirt handed out at Mate's White Front Saloon, a racer's
hangout across from the Speedway.

As a final precaution, the Speedway rules stipulated that all dentures and false teeth be removed, lest they be swallowed in a crash.

There was no mention of seat belts, which were optional. Most drivers wore them-surplus webbed types from World War II aircraftalthough it was known that most European drivers still refused to
belt themselves in, figuring it was better to be thrown clear in case of
a crash.

Nobody had even considered using a seat belt until 1941, when a
Cherokee Indian driver named Joie Chitwood found that his car
bounced so violently on the brick surface of the Speedway that he
couldn't keep his foot on the throttle. As a remedy, he tied himself
into the cockpit with a rope. This caused major concern among the officials, who openly worried that the young driver would "wear the
car" in the event of a rollover. Some star drivers, like the great Rex
Mays, were ardently against such a device.

Then came a 100-mile dirt track race at the Del Mar, California,
horse track in late 1949. Mays was tossed from his spinning car and
run over by a competitor. His death throes were featured in a shocking two-page spread in Life magazine. A year earlier, the national
champion, Ted Horn, had died a similar death after spilling out of his
car at the DuQuoin, Illinois, dirt track.

Slowly, the reality that staying inside a crashing car was safer than
being pitched out of it like a rag doll began to make sense. Yet nearly a
decade would pass before seat belts became mandatory in racing cars.

Practice went well for the first nine days, with only minor spins
and some dented aluminum. Everybody was getting serious in preparation for the first big weekend of qualifying when Cliff Griffith, a
twenty-seven-year-old Hoosier, took out one of the new Kurtis-Kraft
roadsters for some hot laps. He'd been running over 137 mph in his
black number 24, sponsored by Bardahl, an engine performance
additive.

Tom and I were hanging around the little Associated Press hut in
the garage area. The AP guys sat there, smoking cheap El Productos
and playing gin rummy when a light bulb went on. The light bulb
was connected to the network of caution lights around the track, and
when it flashed, it usually meant a crash.

Because the AP was really only there to record wrecks, when the
lightbulb flashed, the reporters and photographers would drop their
cards, grab their notebooks and Speed Graphics, and run like a bunch
of firemen to the scene of the accident.

"Griffith's into the wall in the first turn," somebody yelled. The
mad rush. Tom had a little CZ single-cylinder motorcycle, and we
piled on and skittered across the vast, manicured lawn of the infield
to the scene.

The sweet smell of fresh-mown grass and dandelions mingled
with the smoky odor of fire issuing from Griffith's car.

The ambulance and safety crews were there. Somebody was spraying carbon dioxide on the Bardahl Kurtis-Kraft, which was sitting, its
front wheels splayed in odd directions, in the middle of the track.
Fuel dripped out of its innards like the spoor from a wounded animal. Covered with white C02 powder, it looked more like a beached
whale than a race car.

Griffith was already in the ambulance-called "the crash wagon"
by the racing guys-and about to be hauled off to Methodist
Hospital. "He hit a ton," said a tall man with navy tattoos on his forearms holding a pair of stopwatches. He was one of the many crewmen stationed inside the first turn to clock speeds through the
corner, which were clear indications of how quickly various drivers
were negotiating the entire track. "He lost it. Got it sideways and
couldn't get it back. Then it caught on fire. Cliff got out, but he
looked like hell."

He should have. Somehow Griffith, an ex-soldier like virtually
every driver in the place, had managed to climb clear of the flaming
car, despite having broken his pelvis. His Mobil Oil T-shirt was
burned away in the fire.

Unlike gasoline, the methanol alcohol used in race cars burned with
a light blue flame that could barely be seen in daylight. The Bardahl's
fuel tank had been split open by the impact and Griffith had been
engulfed in fire. He suffered horrible second- and third-degree burns
over much of his upper body and would spend four months in the
hospital. Yet, like most drivers, he couldn't-or wouldn't-stop. He
returned to drive again the next year.

They dragged the Bardahl back to the garage area, better known as
"Gasoline Alley"-like the cartoon strip. Nobody could remember if
the cartoon had been named after the place, or the place named after
the cartoon. The car's owner, a wealthy guy from St. Louis named Ed Walsh, wasn't giving up. Although his driver had been burned, his
crew dove into the wrecked car and started to make repairs. The rumpled aluminum body was ripped off-revealing the charred, skeletal
remains of the frame-and the rebuilding began.

Gasoline Alley was like that. Death and injury all around, and yet
life went on, rife with gallows humor and a mordant sense of reality.
Live or die, the race goes on.

The area consisted of rows of wooden garages with green-and-whitetrimmed doors that housed the race cars and the necessary tools.
The work benches generally had coffee pots brewing and snacks
scattered around, creating a relaxed, homey feel to the spaces where
crewmen and drivers joked and horseplayed their way through the
long days. At noon, various teams would light up charcoal grills and
roast corn. Late into the night, the little alcoves would be jammed
with mechanics hammering and wrenching on the cars. Many would
then simply fall into cots and sleeping bags to be ready for an early
next day.

Gin rummy was the game of choice in Gasoline Alley, and somewhere, twenty-four hours a day, a serious game for serious stakes
would be under way. Usually in the game was Rodger Ward, a chunky
little former P-38 pilot who was known to have tons of talent, provided he could knock off the booze and the cards and quit chasing
the babes. He was a smart guy, maybe too smart for his own good,
and he radiated a cockiness that had yet to pay off on the race track.

It was a man's world. Women were forbidden to enter Gasoline
Alley, a last bastion of male misogyny. Old-timers recalled that
when French driver Louis Chiron entered the race in 1929, he
brought along his mistress, Alice Hoffmann, who customarily did
his timing and scoring in the pits. In Europe woman were allowed
in restricted areas, but not at Indianapolis. In deference to the visitors, the Speedway officials constructed a small platform for her on
the edge of the pits, where she would not sully the hallowed precincts. This archaic tradition would not be broken until the realities of the
women's movement finally overwhelmed the Speedway's establishment. In 1976, Janet Guthrie became the first woman driver allowed
to compete at Indianapolis.

Griffith's crash was quickly forgotten. It was simply part of doing
business in big-time automobile racing. "You pay your money. You
take your chances," said one crewman as he walked away from the
scene. "Cliff knew what he was doing. Today it didn't pay off."

Sometimes Tom and I would walk across Sixteenth Street at the
end of practice for a few beers at the White Front, a stark, concrete
block-house that consisted of little more than a few beat-up tables, a
long bar, and a half-broken piano. The drink of choice was the
Boilermaker, composed of a draft beer and a shot of cheap whiskey.
Woman were not banned from the White Front, but were seldom
seen inside its grim precincts. The talk consisted of the endless
rumors and gossip at the Speedway and the outrageous spike in
prices that awaited visitors to Indianapolis during the month of May.
That year it involved the scandalous inflation of the price of gasoline,
which had been bumped from 23.5 cents per gallon to a stratospheric
26.9 cents.

Rain and drizzle descended on the Speedway for nearly two weeks.
Because the cars' tires were not capable of gripping a wet track surface, the days devolved into endless gin rummy games in Gasoline
Alley and chatter the guys called "bench racing" in the cafeteria and
across the street at the White Front.

Jimmy Bryan, a tough guy from Phoenix generally described as
"brave as Dick Tracy," was more dangerous in the garage area than on
the race track. A relentless practical joker, Bryan packed an arsenal of
powerful M-80 firecrackers and was known to unload them on
friends in phone booths, under dinner tables, and in automobiles.
Two years earlier, Bryan had closed down the entire Pennsylvania
Turnpike by pitching an M-80 into a toll booth.

While guys like Bryan horsed around and drove like wild men,
others were deeply serious and seemed wary of the Speedway.
Indianapolis was like that-some drivers accepted its challenges
without the slightest hesitation, while others, perhaps more cerebral,
viewed it with rightful anguish. It was not a matter of courage, but
rather of motivation. Indianapolis was a place that demanded more
than bravery. To be successful, a level of audacity bordering on insanity had to be called forth, a fevered urge for speed that transcends
logic-which, at 180 miles an hour, becomes a useless component of
the human mind.

To hurtle into the Speedway's sweeping corners knowing that the
slightest error would send you into the outer walls required a reflexive suspension of reason, forcing a driver to rely on pure passion and
mindless, desperate desire.

On the Friday before the first day of qualifications, the weather
cleared. A warm sun blossomed over the Indianapolis skyline when
Medley and I left the rooming house and began walking toward the
track. Then we heard it: an unearthly bellow, punctuated by a faint,
bancheelike screech. "A Novi. Come on," he said, breaking into a
sprint toward the track entrance.

We got into the garage area to find a crowd gathered around a
fierce, white, tubular-shaped car. The war whoop of its monstrous V8 engine was a siren song for the racing crowd, laden with mystique
and danger.

The Novis were the fastest cars ever to appear at the Indianapolis
Motor Speedway-and perhaps the most lethal and star-crossed. The
Speedway crowd called them "hoodoo machines," jinxed and permeated with death. The first of the two Novis, built by Glendale's Frank
Kurtis in 1946, had already claimed the life of veteran Ralph
Hepburn-after he had set the track's lap record. He made a tiny
error entering the third turn. The Novi nosed onto the infield grass.
Hepburn, fifty-two years old and a veteran of eighteen 500-mile races, did what was expected of a front-wheel-drive machine at
speed; he applied power to pull the car back into line. But the explosive 550 horses of the Novi overwhelmed him. The car arrowed
across the track and bunted the wall head on. Hepburn was killed
instantly.

Two years later Duke Nalon, another veteran driving the second
Novi, was leading the race when the right rear axle snapped. Nalon
skated backward into the wall, where the eighty-five-gallon methanol
fuel tank burst open and engulfed the car in flames. Nalon somehow
wriggled loose and escaped, although the burns he suffered would
keep him hospitalized for months. The Novi meant rampant,
haunted horsepower to many at the Speedway, and its legend was
only enhanced when the car's designer and creator, W. C. "Bud"
Winfield, a technical genius, was killed in a highway crash near
Clovis, California. There were two Novis, identical in form and
shape. Lean and low, they looked like massive French baguettes on
wheels. Both were painted refrigerator white, with "9" and "15"
painted on their enormous hoods.