Against Death and Time: One Fatal Season in Racing's Glory Years (7 page)

The drivers made feeble attempts to protect themselves from the
debris. Some wore bandannas over their mouths and noses to keep
out the dust. Others wrapped cardboard around their midriffs and
their right arms, which were most vulnerable during the broad
slides that pitched the cars sideways. Some bit down on rags to keep
their teeth from rattling loose. Others simply faced the raging dirt,
knowing that by the end of the season their entire upper bodies
would be a mass of welted, black-and-blue flesh.

As brave as he was, Vukovich hated the mile tracks. "You get really
tired out there over a hundred miles," he'd say. "Or else the car does.
You make one slip and you're done. You couldn't pay me enough to
get me on that circuit."

Those words were spoken after his 500 victory, when his nearly
$40,000 share of the winnings had given his family a sufficient cushion to restrict his race driving. Prior to winning the 500 he had run
the lethal miles, driving with his usual relentless style and winning his
share of races.

Late in the year he did relent, at least theoretically. J. C. Agajanian,
the Los Angeles promoter, staged a 100-mile championship race in late
October at Sacramento's California State Fair and proudly announced
that Vukovich had entered. This was a pure publicity stunt, since he
had been paid a hefty sum merely to appear in a second-rate car and
attempt to qualify. His time was over 3.5 seconds slower than the pole
winner, Jimmy Bryan, and too slow to make the eighteen-car starting
field. Having collected his "appearance" or "deal" money, Vukovich
headed back home to Fresno no worse for the wear and indifferent to
his slow time. Already he was in training for his next race, a defense of
his Indianapolis 500 title. When a reporter asked him about his disappointing time at Sacramento, he shrugged and grumped, "Write whatever you want, you don't need me."

By the summer of 1953, Los Angeles had gone crazy over cars. Since
the population boom of the twenties, when the great western migrations reached full stride, the entire basin had become an automobile
paradise. Perfect weather, vast open acreage, the nearby mountains
with their miles of twisty roads, and the great dry lakes beyond the
mountains had produced an environment in which automobiles of
every size, shape, and design could thrive.

The plutocrats of the movie colony had been ideal customers for
the flashy Duesenbergs, Rolls-Royces, and Mercedes beyond the
reach of ordinary citizens. The automobile industry had created a style revolution when the Fisher Body Division of General Motors
hired young, brash Harley J. Earle, who was then customizing
Cadillacs for members of the movie colony at the Don Lee Agency in
Los Angeles. Earle was transforming drab, monochromatic roadsters
and sedans into flashy, multicolored rolling stock that altered the
entire consciousness of the industry. He would later become chief of
the General Motors Art and Color Section, which grew into the giant,
corporate styling department that created the incredible two- and
three-tone, be-finned "insolent chariots" of the car-crazed 1950s. Earle
would be but the first of many designers and stylists to rise out of Los
Angeles, both from the hot-rod and custom-car movement and from
the more formal precincts of the Art Center School in Pasadena.

By the twenties, a fledgling hot-rod culture had formed, in the main
by young men who took their modified Model T roadsters to the
mud-baked, high desert lake beds at Muroc, Russetta, and Rosamond
for high-speed runs. Other race cars still ran at dangerous ovals like
Ascot long after the multimillion-dollar, ultra-high-speed board
tracks built in the 1920s had either burned down or rotted away.

Following the end of World War II, thousands of veterans returned
with fevered enthusiasm for fast sports cars like the British MGs and
Jaguars they had discovered during their European tours of duty. The
sports car craze joined hot-rodder madness to infest the streets of the
entire basin, from the San Fernando Valley in the north to the eastern
Los Angeles suburbs to the surfer beach towns in the south.

In an effort to limit the outlaw world of street racing, the National
Hot Rod Association was formed to organize the "drag races" so
reviled and feared by the citizenry. The races slowly migrated onto
airport runways and special drag stops and off the public streets.

In a parallel movement, the California Sports Car Club organized
races staged on closed public roads and on airport runways as far
south as Torrey Pines outside San Diego and as far north as Pebble
Beach on the Monterey peninsula.

Thanks to the Southern California aircraft industry, which had
boomed during the war, thousands of young men were now skilled in
the arts of welding, lathe work, metal-crafting, tool-and-die-making,
drafting, and other skills necessary to build, modify, and maintain
high-powered automobiles.

As a nascent high-performance industry rose out of gas stations,
auto dealerships, and backyard garages, self-taught craftsmen began
manufacturing exhaust systems, camshafts, cylinder heads, carburetors, fuel-injection systems, magnesium wheels, custom bodies, chassis, and even entire cars. By the end of the twentieth century, such
pioneering names as Cragar, Bell, Edelbrock, Iskenderian, Halibrand,
and others served as the cornerstone of a speed-equipment industry
that generated over 30 billion dollars in annual revenues.

Meanwhile, master metal men, working with little more than tinsnips, a bag of sand, and a hammer, were creating aluminum masterpieces. Artisans named Kurtis, Kuzma, Lesovsky, and Deidt were
pounding out stunning race cars from sheet aluminum and chromemolybdenum steel tubing. Meyer-Drake manufactured powerful
four-cylinder racing engines in Glendale that were first designed by
Harry Miller and perfected by his shop foreman Fred Offenhauser in
the early 1930s.

In July of '53 the savagery of the Korean War finally ended, with an
uneasy armistice. Stalin was dead and a new, smiling president
named Ike promised a term of endless rounds of golf and evenings of
television laughs with Uncle Miltie while the nation supped on
Swanson's revolutionary frozen TV dinners. Reader's Digest scolded
smokers with a breakthrough series titled "Cancer in a Carton." The
tobacco industry and Liggett & Myers countered the blow with a new
L&M brand marketed with the slogan "Just what the doctor
ordered."

The Dow Jones sat in the mid 250s-within striking distance of the
pre-crash high of 1929. The Yankees dominated baseball and Hillary and Tenzing conquered Mount Everest. Hollywood was about to revolutionize the picture business with Cinemascope and 3-D. For the
first time since Pearl Harbor, the world seemed to be back on its axis.

Medley and I had returned to Los Angeles after the 1953 Vukovich
victory at Indianapolis and drifted our separate ways. He continued
his photography and his cartooning for Hot Rod magazine while my
freelance writing career began to bear fruit. I sold a screenplay to
Warner Brothers that was never produced, along with several stories
to Colliers and Look, two of the largest and flashiest weeklies in the
business. I soon had enough money to afford a small apartment in
Studio City and a used MG TC roadster that I bought from
Competition Motors, a hot dealership on Vine Street in North
Hollywood owned by a wealthy Austrian emigre and race driver
named Johnny Von Neumann.

The sports car crowd gathered at places like "Hollywood" Bill
White's Ascot Cafe on Slawson and the Coach & Horses on Sunset
Boulevard in Hollywood to discuss racing exploits and nighttime
adventures on the twisty Mulholland Drive in the hills above the
Cahuenga Pass.

The hot-rodders hung out at the area's drive-in restaurantswhich had become a Southern California fad-between their endless
street races and stoplight shootouts. Favorites included the In-n-Out
on Valley Boulevard in El Monte, Farmer Boys on Colorado, Bob's
Big Boy in Glendale, and Henry's in Arcadia, all of which would form
the basis twenty years later for George Lucas's classic movie about the
hot-rod culture, American Graffiti.

A flock of magazines were published to serve the various enthusiast groups. By far the largest was Medley's Hot Rod magazine and its
sister, Motor Trend, published by the Petersen Group, which had
taken up high-rise headquarters on Sunset Boulevard. Serving the
sports car scene was Road & Track, where, from its Playa del Rey headquarters, it lavished praise on the European machinery pouring into the basin. Other, smaller publications concentrated their coverage on
the oval-track racers who remained active in the region, although the
famed Gilmore Stadium had been torn down in 1951, to be replaced
by the CBS television studios. Built in 1934 on the corner of Fairfax
and Beverly boulevards by oil baron Earl Gilmore, it was the first stadium dedicated to the booming sport of midget auto racing-the
competition that spawned great stars like Vukovich.

While automobile enthusiasm percolated, there was little crossover
among the various subspecies. The hot-rodders laughed at the sports
car set, with their English-style driving gloves and woolen caps, calling them "tea-baggers," "strokers and brokers," and "sporty car drivers," while the MG and Jaguar aficionados denounced professional
Indy types as "circle burners" and "roundy-rounders."

It was into this world of car nuts of all types that Detroit made its
entrance in early 1953. Cadillac and Oldsmobile had been producing
high-performance V-8 engines since the late 1940s but had been reluctant to abandon their giant, soft-spring sedans in order to compete
with the sports cars pouring into the American market from Europe.

But in January 1953, the Chevrolet division of General Motors
entered the fray when new GM models were shown at the corporation's "Motorama," held annually at New York's Waldorf-Astoria
hotel. Among the flashy machinery was a svelte two-door roadster
called the Corvette. Its body was fiberglass and its power plant a
modified six-cylinder-the "Blue Flame Six" used in the division's
mundane passenger sedans. There had been little choice, in that
Chevrolet's arch rivals within the corporation, Cadillac and
Oldsmobile, refused to share their powerful V-8s with the struggling,
entry-level brand. Chevrolet, under siege at the time from Fordwhich had a new V-8 of its own-was left with its own tepid sixcylinder tied to a two-speed "Powerglide" automatic transmission.
This immediately handicapped the Corvette in the marketplace
against rivals like Jaguar, which employed a high-performance, dou ble-overhead, camshaft six that produced 180 horsepower versus the
Corvette's 150. Moreover, the Jaguar used a four-speed manual transmission of the type preferred by enthusiasts. Worse yet, the new XK
140s from Jaguar boasted a top speed easily 25 mph higher than the
Detroit upstart. Despite high hopes that the Corvette would penetrate the import sports car market, only 183 were sold in 1953 and
rumors drifted through the automobile industry that the project
would be cancelled.

The hard-core sports car crowd who gathered regularly at the
Coach & Horses scoffed at the Corvette. Bar talk denounced the
"fiberglass flyer" powered by a "shushbox automatic." It made no
impact on the anointed, who understood the value of a "real" sports
car. Ford then countered with plans for a two-seater called the
Thunderbird to be introduced in 1955. It would be described not as
a sports car, but as a "personal car," with emphasis on creature comforts and smoothness as opposed to the more elemental pleasures to
be found in the Corvette.

The great Detroit horsepower race was about to accelerate. It had
begun in 1948-49, when Cadillac and Oldsmobile developed powerful overhead-valve V-8s that almost doubled the output of the aged
in-line six- and eight-cylinder engines that had been the industry
standards for decades. These revolutionary new units were quickly
imitated throughout the industry, leaving only Chevrolet with their
antiquated six. Yet rumors arose that a revolutionary lightweight
Chevrolet V-8 was in the works for 1955.

Already, Chrysler and Lincoln had engines producing well over
200 horsepower, and both were major contenders in the violent,
high-speed Carrera PanAmericana, a 1,500-mile open road race that
ran the length of Mexico. Other manufacturers were hastily creating
big, thirsty, high-compression V-8s that would easily surpass the 200
hp and soon would nudge past 300.

Mounted as they were in giant, three-ton sedans and coupes equipped with smallish drum brakes, vague steering, and soft suspensions, these behemoths were far from sports cars. Much of their
surplus horsepower was employed in such avante-garde gadgetry as
power seats, steering, windows, and automatic transmissions. Still,
100-mph road speeds were common, and accident rates soared as
drivers across the nation unleashed their newfound power.

While the Indianapolis professionals were running a series of 100mile races sanctioned by the American Automobile Association for
the national championship, the sports car set was competing on open
roads and airport runways converted for racing, with hay bales and
rubber cones to mark the corners. The oval-track pros were woolly,
intense young men racing for a living. The sports car drivers were
simon-pure amateurs competing on the English model, which
strictly forbade prize money. Theirs was a "gentleman's" sport. It was
believed that money would corrupt the atmosphere, although it was
an open secret that many wealthy sportsmen hired drivers with
under-the-table payments of hard cash.

While the gentlemen who ran sports cars were in fact as fiercely
competitive as the professionals in some respects, the generally lower
speeds and lesser horsepower of their cars (excepting a few ultra-fast
and exotic Maseratis and Ferraris that were reaching American
shores) made the competition much safer. While the professionals
labored on dusty, rutted dirt tracks and a few high-banked macadam
speedways, the amateurs played on natural road courses lined with
trees, telephone poles, ditches, and, in some cases, houses. Protection
involved a few hay bales laid around significant hazards and flagmen
to warn drivers of other cars. While off-road excursions were common, the low cornering speeds-generally in the 50-70 mph rangekept injuries to a minimum. This was in part God's grace, because
the drivers were as vulnerable as the professionals-at least those
driving open roadsters. Seat belts were required, but rollover protection was unknown. In fact, any suggestion of "roll bars" was rejected by all parties, based on the reasoning that the aesthetics of
the car would be ruined by such appendages. "We don't race our cars
upside down" was the standard response among the AAA professionals, and this mantra was repeated among the amateur ranks.