Against Death and Time: One Fatal Season in Racing's Glory Years (36 page)

In 1935 Alexis Carrell, the noted French scientist and 1912 Nobel
Prize winner in medicine, published his international best-seller,
Man the Unknown. His philosophical speculations about the future of
mankind advised an intellectual aristocracy (a kind of twentieth century update of Plato's philosopher-king, proposed in his Republic several millennia earlier) that prompted widespread controversy and,
perhaps, later Nazi experiments with eugenics. But beyond such
ruminations, Carrell wrote at length about the rising frailties of the
human mind and body; our loss of audacity in the face of adversity;
our inability to withstand pain; and our increasing susceptibility to
mental tensions.

The men who raced cars in the mid-1950s (there were no women competing at the top level of the sport at the time) rode 150-mph
bucking broncos with no more protection than a rodeo rider. Dressed
in street clothes and wearing leather helmets (that research in 1960s
by the Snell Foundation revealed were actually more dangerous than
no headwear at all), the human form was essentially naked in the face
of high-speed impacts and fire. Seat belts were used by some and
eschewed by others who believed that being tossed clear of a crashing
automobile afforded a better chance for survival.

The mid1950s race cars were archaic monsters. No power steering
or brakes, no automatic transmissions, no protection from flying dirt
or stones; nothing but a seat, a steering wheel, and rudimentary
instruments. Behind the drivers were mounted fifty- to seventy-gallon
fuel tanks loaded with either fiercely volatile gasoline or methanolalcohol, which that burned with an invisible yet lethal flame. Many
cars carried extra oil reservoirs mounted near the cockpit that could
rupture and burn in a crash, meaning that drivers were literally
ensconced in tubs of explosives.

Worse yet, the suspensions of the automobiles had changed little
since the mid-1930s. Handling, such as it was, could not be easily predicted. The tires were skinny and lacked cohesion. The slightest error
could send a machine into an ugly, high-speed spin. Springing, either
by conventional leaves or torsion bars, was minimal, meaning the
driver would be pounded and pummeled even on smooth macadam,
not to mention a rutted dirt track or the brick paving of the
Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Add to that the unremitting heat of
the engine, and the deafening drumbeat of the exhaust, and the physical effort of steering, and a race driver of 1955 rode in a nightmarish, deadly environment that simply would not be tolerated today.

Protective headgear, first developed by British motorcycle riders in
the 1920s, had not been required at Indianapolis until 1935. Cloth
aviator's caps, useful only to prevent mussing of the hair, were
employed in European Grand Prix motor racing until helmets came into universal use in 1952. Fireproof clothing was essentially
unknown until the late 1960s when DuPont's Nomex synthetic material was developed. Full-face helmets would not be perfected until the
same period. Six-point reinforced shoulder, lap, and crotch belts
came into widespread use, as did self-sealing fuel bladders and
onboard fire extinguishers, all of which radically reduced the fatality
rate as speeds escalated to well over 200 mph in most forms of the
sport. (In 1955 the lap record, set by Jack McGrath, was 142 mph. By
the turn of the new century, lap speeds at Indianapolis commonly
exceeded 225 mph.) In the mid-1990s before engine limits were
imposed, several drivers had exceeded 235-mph averages, meaning
that the cars were negotiating the four sweeping Indianapolis corners
over 80 miles an hour faster than McGrath's overall average speed.
Even at those enormous velocities, drivers are often able to survive
crashes, thanks to ultra-strong carbon-fiber cockpit enclosures and
the above-mentioned safety components.

The thirty-three men who started the 1955 Indianapolis 500 fit the
profile of mid-1950s professional racecar drivers. They were essentially white Anglo-Saxons, with only Vukovich, his friend Ed Elisian,
and fellow Fresno veteran Fred Agabashian tracing their roots to
Eastern Europe. Seventeen were either native or transplanted
Californians, where the automobile culture had its deepest roots.
Jerry Hoyt, an Indiana native, and brash Oklahoman Jimmy Reece
were both twenty-six years old. Agabashian and Duane Carter were,
at forty-two, the senior citizens in the field. Most came from workingclass families, although Ray Crawford, a former World War II P-38
fighter pilot and ace, was a wealthy West Coast supermarket-chain
owner. (In contrast, many sports car drivers of the day came from
affluent backgrounds.)

Most were World War II combat veterans who had returned home
with a taste for adventure in an increasingly placid and peaceful
nation. Most were married, although they remained on the road for most of the year. While they exhibited a warrior's camaraderie at the
racetracks, few close friendships were formed. Said one driver of the
day, "You don't want to get too close to these guys. You never know
how long they'll be around."

It was an all-male, lily-white sport. Women were not allowed in
the pits or the garage areas until the late 1970s. African Americans
were almost unseen. In the 1930s, "Rajo Jack" deSoto had competed
at the dangerous Legion Ascot track in suburban Los Angeles. In
1955, thirty-four-year-old Wendell Scott was laboring on backwater
Virginia stock car tracks before his rise to fame in NASCAR Grand
National competition and his ultimate recognition in the 1977 biopic Greased Lightning starring Richard Pryor. Fifty years later, little
has changed in terms of racial, ethnic, or sexual diversity, although a
great influx of South Americans, mainly from Brazil and Argentina,
has had an enormous impact on motor racing worldwide.

Race drivers of the 1950s fit Hungarian psychoanalyst Michael
Balint's description of "Philantasim," meaning the enjoyment of
thrills in daily life. Balint recognized that high speed was a crucial
component in the entire psychology of mobility. In his 1959 book,
Thrills and Regressions, Balint divided civilization into the thrill-seeking Philobats and the nonaggressive Ocnophiles, who were repelled
by high-intensity movement like automobile racing. The Philobat, by
contrast, sought to develop skills that would permit high-speed
movement in such sports as car racing, motorcycle riding, skiing,
surfing, flying, etc. With this went an inability to relate to others and
a selfish, introverted satisfaction gained from the activities. Balint
maintained that the Philobat immersed him- or herself so completely
in the task of driving that "skill should no longer require any effort,"
and even risky racetrack competition became "a kind of fairyland
where things happen as desired." In so doing, the Philobat "exposed
himself unnecessarily to real danger in search of thrills and confidence that he can cope with any situation."

Balint's observation about risk-taking behind the wheel of an
automobile was but one of many examples of intellectual probing
into the world of motor racing, most of which descended into psychobabble relating to exhibitionism, Freudian sexual innuendos, egocentrism gone wild, and overt death wishes. Poet Mario Leone
skidded into the hyperbolic fence in 1914 with his "Fornication of
Automobiles," in which he likened the collision of two motor vehicles
to a kind of technological sexual encounter:

Involuntary collision
furious fornication
of two automobiles-energy
embrace of two warriors
bold of movement
syncopation of two heart motors,
spilling of blood-gas.

Years later, the nonsense intensified when Ralph Nader artfully, if
hysterically, assaulted the admittedly oafish and isolated leadership of
General Motors and the entire automobile industry with his 1966
polemic Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-in Dangers of the
American Automobiles. The book was a modest seller until it was
revealed that GM had hired private investigators to trail Nader and
had tapped his telephone. General Motors president James M. Roche
was forced to make a public apology and a large financial settlement
that funded several auto-safety efforts.

Energized by the Nader flap, Congress passed the National
Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act, which required automakers
to offer seventeen major safety features, including seat belts, collapsible steering columns, paddled instrument panels, etc. This legislation opened the floodgates for government involvement an
industry that should have had the foresight, in view of rapidly changing public attitudes in the 1960s, to have engineered its own
safety components.

Literary contributions, absurd as most were, reached a nadir (no
pun intended) with the 1973 publication of British novelist J. G.
Ballard's Crash-a scatalogically bloody, schoolboyishly pornographic
tale of a blitz through London motorways and occasional racetracks
in a drug-fogged, blood-stained, metal-crunching, sex-soaked bash
that one reviewer described as "the first pornographic novel based on
technology." Ballard, writing in the first person, dealt with a "hoodlum
scientist named Vaughan" (who, the reader learns in the first sentence
of the book, is already dead) whose apparent mission is to engage in a
fatal, psycho-sexual car crash with Elizabeth Taylor.

A half-century since the automobile revolutionized personal
transportation on a worldwide scale, the carnage of 1955 finally triggered a response in the scientific community. Car crashes on the
highways, racing cars tumbling into crowds, and champion drivers
dying all contributed to a rising awareness of automobile safety-an
issue that had been essentially ignored since Gottlieb Daimler and
Karl Benz's pioneering machines had first rolled out in the years
1885-87.

In May 1955, Air Force colonel John Paul Stapp organized the first
automobile-safety conference at Holloman Air Force Base in New
Mexico. The year before, Stapp had subjected himself to stupefying
feats of physical endurance on an Air Force rocket sled that had accelerated to 632 miles an hour before stopping dead in 1.4 seconds. This
deceleration imposed an unbelievable 40 g (40 times the pull of gravity) on Stapp's body. This experiment, and others like it, proved that
pilots could eject from jet fighters at up to 1,800 miles an hour and at
altitudes of up to 35,000 feet.

Such courageous experiments prompted Time to feature Colonel
Stapp on its September 12, 1955 cover with the description: "The
fastest man on earth and No. 1 hero of the Air Force."

Stapp invited members of the automobile industry and the armed
services, research laboratories, medical experts, and representatives
from national safety councils to participate in the conference. It was
clear to Stapp that crash injuries in automobiles involved massive
decelerations. If automobile interiors and structures could be
improved to absorb impacts while passengers were better contained,
injuries and fatalities might be reduced. The meetings continued
through 1957 and resulted in recommendations to relocate padded
instrument panels away from front seat passengers; doors with
rigid latches that would remain in place in crashes; anchoring seats
more firmly to the chassis; and improving seat belt design to hold
passengers in place.

After Colonel Stapp was transferred to advanced studies in the
aerospace field, his auto-safety conference was taken over by
University of Minnesota engineering professor James J. Ryan, who
carried on as a leader in automobile-safety studies and research.

It was in March 1955 that Colonel Stapp and others at Holloman
staged a breakthrough experiment using a World War II surplus
Dodge weapons carrier vehicle and a pair of crude dummies
strapped in the front seats. The tests used the instrumented dummies to measure impact and damage to the human form.
Anesthetized pigs were later employed in violent crash tests to
improve interior safety components.

Scientists learned that the average human body, if properly
restrained by a seat belt, could survive a crash involving up to 30 g's
with minor discomfort. A 40 g's impact would cause serious injuries
to lungs, hearts, and abdominal organs, while anything over 50 g's
would probably be fatal.

Meanwhile, engineers at Daimler-Benz AG in Germany had been
conducting research that revealed new truths about automobile structures. Up until then, car bodies and frames had been unyielding masses
of steel that refused to bend or deform in crashes. This transferred enormous deceleration forces to the most vulnerable component in
the vehicle, i.e., the human bodies. Daimler-Benz began to build its
Mercedes-Benz cars with "crush zones" that would deform and
absorb energy in a crash-the exact opposite of orthodox engineering theory that a car body ought be made as rigid as possible.

It was these pioneering efforts in 1955 by Colonel Stapp and other
engineers in and out of the automobile industry that slowly-and
sometimes frustratingly-led to such current safety components as
air bags, crushable, energy-absorbing body structures, three-point
seat belts, better headlights, and safer interiors, plus radically
improved anti-lock disc brakes, radial tires, traction and stability
control, etc. These engineering advances, now common on all automobiles regardless of size or price, have been a major contributor to
reducing the automobile death rate from 6.06 per 100 million miles
driven in 1955 to under 1 per 100 million miles today-in a nation
where motor vehicles have more than doubled, to over 220 million,
and highway miles traveled per year have nearly tripled.

The shocking crash at Le Mans in June 1955, generated radical
changes in track design. The Automobile Club d'Ouest, which operated the Le Mans 24-Hour race, widened the front straightaway
where the Levegh tragedy had occurred and built larger and more
effective barriers for spectators. Within a few years, the entire circuit
would be lined with fences to further protect the crowds.