Against Death and Time: One Fatal Season in Racing's Glory Years (37 page)

It was also obvious to millionaire Tony Hulman, the Terre Haute
sportsman who owned the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, that his
track offered the same potential for a major crowd disaster as Le
Mans. Throughout 1956, plans were laid down for a major revision.
The 1957 race was run with the pit area separated from the racetrack
by a ten-foot grass apron and a low retaining wall. The new Tower
Terrace grandstands, had also been moved well back from the
Speedway and rigid cable fencing installed along the front straightaway grandstands. But the ancient track itself remained in a chute between the grandstands and many more crashes and fatalities
awaited competing drivers in the years to come.

While spectator safety was improved, drivers remained as vulnerable as ever. The Unites States Auto Club, which in 1956 replaced the
American Automobile Association as the sanctioning body for
Indianapolis and other championship races, did not require rollover
bars in race cars until 1959. Self-sealing bladders to contain fuel in
crashes would not be adopted until they were perfected by the military for use on Vietnam combat helicopters that were susceptible to
small-arms fire.

Back east, the small-town committee that organized the nowgrowing Watkins Glen Grand Prix realized that it was also operating
on an obsolete network of narrow public roads. Plans were made to
construct a dedicated 2.3-mile road course on vacant land overlooking Lake Seneca. In a mad dash of construction, the new track was
completed in time for the October 1956 event. Crowd safety was a
primary consideration, and the Glen circuit would rise to international stature when it hosted its first Formula One United States
Grand Prix in 1961.

Yet it would be years before crowds would be totally protected
from race cars. In the spring of 1957, international racontuer,
celebrity, and racecar driver Count Alfonso de Portago, an heir to the
Spanish throne, lost control of his Ferrari on a high-speed straightaway of public road during the running of the Mille Miglia road race
around Italy. A blown tire at 165 mph sent his car scything through
the roadside spectators, killing himself, his friend and navigator
Eddie Nelson, and ten men, women, and children. The incident
would end Italy's largest sporting event after authorities decided that
crowd protection on open roads was impossible. In 1960 another
Count-Wolfgang Von Trips-again driving for the Scuderia Ferrari,
tumbled into the crowd at the Monza Autodrome on the second lap
of the Italian Grand Prix, killing himself and fourteen spectators.

While innocent bystanders were slowly moved out of harm's way
with new track designs in the late 1950s and 1960s, questions lingered: What kind of men were prepared to risk their lives in such a
dangerous sport? Were they obsessed with a death wish, as some suggested? Were they mindless show-offs? Ignorant rubes? Simpleton
playboys? Pure antisocial psychopaths?

As the establishment press, the Vatican, safety experts, and some
politicians railed against the sport as a brutal, Neaderthal expression
of technological savagery that encouraged irresponsible behavior on
public roads, serious academics undertook studies to determine
exactly who these people who raced automobiles actually were.

In the early 1960s Dr. Keith W. Johnsgard and Dr. Bruce C. Ogilvie,
clinical psychologists at San Jose State College in San Jose, California,
embarked on an extensive scientific examination of race drivers and
their motivations. Johnsgard and Ogilvie chose to study 350 men and
7 women from the San Francisco Region of the Sports Car Club of
America who were participating in amateur road-racing events. Also
tested was a group of 30 professional drivers. The study would ultimately be expanded to include over 700 drivers, consuming more
than 4,000 hours of tests and interviews.

The results amazed and baffled both supporters and critics of the
sport. The tested drivers were found to be highly intelligent, ranging
from the ninetieth to the ninety-fourth percentile. They possessed a
need for achievement unmatched by other athletes. All were exhibitionistic and had intense, vivid desires for attention from the opposite sex. Contrary to public perception, the drivers indicated a strong
sense of self-control. As a group, they indicated below-average needs
for interpersonal relationships. This, coupled with fierce independence and with what Johnsgard and Ogilvie described as a "remarkable
freedom of guilt," suggested that mildly psychopathic personalities
were not uncommon.

Similar studies involving five top-ranked professional British Grand Prix drivers by English psychologist Bernice Kirkler in 1965
produced similar results: above-average intelligence, reflexes, and
hand-eye coordination. They also possessed superb self-control and
all improved performance under stress. Kirkler also discovered that
her five GP drivers had extremely strong urges to compete, were perfectionists, had intense needs to be in control, and possessed
extremely high tolerance to all forms of physical discomfort.

Kirkler further speculated that the driver's ardent competitiveness
extended to a subtle form of gambling with death. Winning affirmed,
in her words, their "fantasy of omnipotence." This urge to duel with
disaster and win was a far greater motivation for race drivers than any
sort of "death wish." At the end of Johnsgard and Ogilvie's six-year
study, none of the over six hundred amateurs studied had been killed
in racing accidents. By contrast, among the thirty professionals
examined during the same time frame, seven had died while competing and six others had been so severely injured, as to force retirement from the sport. The causes of death were roughly split between
driver error and mechanical failure.

Among the professionals, both studies revealed significantly belowaverage scores for personal empathy toward others. Emotionally intimate and sensitive relationships were universally low priorities. They
were self-reliant and realistic, with little need for dependence on others and feeling no abiding sensitivity to their needs.

All the professionals revealed an amazingly high capacity for performance under duress. This was further confirmed in the 1970s when
a team of psychologists from the University of North Carolina worked
with a small group of top NASCAR stock car drivers during the running of several Daytona 500-mile races. After wiring the subject drivers with sensitive telemetry, they discovered that during the race their
body temperatures rose to over 110 degrees, while their blood pressures remained normal, even during wild 160-mph crashes. Years later,
Rick Mears, a three-time winner of the Indianapolis 500, commented on what went through his mind at the moment of a major crash. "I
think, what do I do next?" This was repeated by Tom Wolfe when writing about Air Force test pilots in his best-selling The Right Stuff.

Johnsgard, perhaps the most experienced academic in the study of
race driver psychology, summed up the subject best when he wrote,
"The dimension that separates them [professional race drivers] most
clearly from the men on the streets is intelligence. In contrast to the
general male population, the race driver has unusually high abstract
intelligence, high achievement needs, strong heterosexual needs, high
exhibitionistic needs, above-average needs for change and a high
degree of self-sufficiency. He is very non-differential, dislikes nurturing others, and has a low need for order and planning ahead. He is
quite expedient and free from guilt. He is reserved and very toughmined as against being sentimental and dependent. Taken together,
the profile is a rather classical `masculine package:"

After the James Dean madness, my life changed. I sold the MG and
bought a Chevrolet business coupe. My writing switched to network
television sitcoms. Their feathery plotlines and inane dialogue
helped erase memories of the death and carnage I had witnessed at
Indianapolis, Le Mans, and on the road to Cholame.

I never saw Diana again, although I heard through friends that she
had moved to Europe and continued her groupie life with the Grand
Prix crowd until March 14, 1957. It was on that day at the Modena
Autodrome that, while testing a Ferrari protoype, Gino Castellotti
crashed to his death. His goal had been simply to regain the lap
record at the obscure circuit after Frenchman Jean Behra captured it
for crosstown rival Maserati a day earlier. His demise, like most others in the sport, was the result of pure hubris and an affirmation that
Alexis Carrell's "audacity" had not disappeared entirely from the
human psyche.

Following Castellotti's death, Diana apparently abandoned motor racing entirely. Word drifted back to Los Angeles that she ultimately
married a German banking mogul and settled into a reclusive life in
Gstaad, Switzerland, skiing in the winter and hosting lavish parties in
the summer. In the late 1980s, when Ferrari prices went off the
Richter scale with mad speculation in the collector market, I recognized her Ferrari Mexico being auctioned in Monaco. It was sold to a
Japanese businessman for $6,500,000.

It was in 1957 as well that the automobile industry rebelled against
the steadily escalating horsepower race. Ford, Chevrolet, and Chrysler
were engaged in a vicious battle for supremacy in the steadily growing
NASCAR Grand National stock car series. Chevrolet and Ford were
selling "special service" packages that included all manner of heavyduty performance parts for racing cars. Chevrolet produced a limited
run of lightweight, two-door 150 sedans, all in black-and-white paintwork, known as "Black Widows." Under their hoods were fuelinjected, 283 horsepower, race-tuned Corvette V-8s. Ford answered
by equipping its similar two-doors with Paxton superchargers that
boosted horsepower to over 300.

The Automobile Manufacturers Association, pressured by car
companies that did not participate in NASCAR, voted to limit advertising involving bogus claims of power and speed. Bill France, the
crafty boss of NASCAR, responded by banning special engines with
fuel-injection and superchargers. General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler
then suspended their racing operations, at least in public, to appease
their stockholders, the media, and the noisy safety lobby. Sub rosa
support would continue until 1963, when Ford denounced the
hypocrisy and resumed official motor racing participation. The other
manufacturers soon followed.

By the end of the decade, thousands of miles of Interstate highways
had been constructed. Seat belts were slowly being installed in a few
models, but another thirty years would pass before automobiles
would include truly effective safety devices such as air bags, anti-lock disc brakes, better tires, and crush zones in the bodywork. Racing cars
would also become safer, but a counterbalance of radically increasing
speeds kept the grim reaper in the game.

As daily life became safer through advances in medicine, environmental clean-ups, and quantum leaps in technology of all kinds, the
dangerous days of 1955 faded into the fog bank of history. The risks
taken by men in the primitive machines of the day, be they racing cars,
jet fighters, or motorcycles, or in the new sport of scuba diving, seem
irrational today. Perhaps they were induced by chemical imbalancesif some current experts are to be believed. They claim that crossed circuitry in the brain's neurotransmitters causes such problems as
Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity
Disorder (ADHD), which in turn triggers risk-taking.

An extension of that logic implies that hiding under one's bed except
to eat healthy foods is a shining example of sanity. If everyone behaved
"normally," there would be no explorers, no astronauts, no test pilots,
no Lindberghs, Francis Drakes, Colonel Stapps, Neil Armstrongs, ad
infinitum. Truth be known, living is dangerous to one's health. This
was best stated by the German philosopher Goethe, who said, "The
dangers of life are infinite, and among them is safety." Tacitus noted,
"The desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise."

The savage year of 1955 perhaps produced nothing of great benefit to the human race (aside, possibly, from fluoride-laced Crest
toothpaste, Disneyland, Dacron, microwave ovens, instant oatmeal,
and the first McDonald's fast food). But as men challenged the physical penalties of power and speed without fear, they perhaps in some
small way affirmed the elemental value of audacity as a vital component of the human spirit.

The great racing driver Parnelli Jones, who was only beginning his
dazzling career in 1955, once observed, "If you're under control,
you're not trying hard enough."

That perhaps applies to everyone on earth.

Automobile and Culture. Gerald Silk & Associates, Harry N. Abrams, 1981.

Cutter, Robert, and Bob Fendell. Encyclopedia of Auto Racing Greats. PrenticeHall Publishing, 1973.

Brottman, Mikita, ed. Car Crash Culture. Palgrave Press, 2001.

Clarke, R.M., and Anders Ditlev Clansager. Le Mans, the Jaguar Years, 19491957. Brooklands Books, Ltd., 1998.