Center Conversation: From a Steward’s Point of View (John Bornholdt)

This episode is part of our HISTORY OF MOTORSPORTS SERIES and is sponsored in part by: The International Motor Racing Research Center (IMRRC), The Society of Automotive Historians (SAH), The Watkins Glen Area Chamber of Commerce, and the Argetsinger Family – and was recorded in front of a live studio audience.

[00:00:00] Breakfix’s History of Motorsports series is brought to you in part by the International Motor Racing Research Center, as well as the Society of Automotive Historians, the Watkins Glen Area Chamber of Commerce, and the Argettsinger family. We’re happy to have you join us today for the center conversation from the steward’s point of view.

This series of talks covering a broad range of interests in motorsports is sponsored in part by a grant from the Watkins Glen Chamber of Commerce, and we are grateful for their support. John Bordholt, known familiarly as Johnny B. John was a race steward for more than 50 years starting in 1952 at Sebring.

He worked in race series ranging from the SCCA to Formula One. Currently, a member of the SCCA’s Professional Court of Appeals, Bornholt is one of only two people who have been honored with the Wolf Bonato, David Morell, and the SCCA Hall of Fame Awards. Pretty impressive. Back in 1951, BH Holt [00:01:00] was a spectator at open road races here in Watkins Glen and in Bridge Hampton, and started his officiating as a pit steward at Sebring in 1952.

Didn’t take him long. 51 to 52. Continuing there for the next 10 years, he joined the Fcca a’s Washington DC region in 1955, working as a pit steward at the first Marlboro Speedway race. He’s the founding regional executive of the South Jersey SCCA. Bornholt worked at virtually all races in the Vineland Speedway road course from 1958 on.

He was steward at the United States road racing championship races, then chairman of stewards for many Can Am, Trans Am, And formula 5, 000 races in the mid 1950s, he was a pit crew member of the triple a Eastern sprint team. Bornholtz was the American steward at us formula one races from 1970 through 1991.

He was series chief steward for the single seat five liter Can Am, and then spent 17 years as series chief steward for the Toyota [00:02:00] Atlantic series. He was also a judge for cart and champ car additionally, but wait, there’s more. Bornholt was briefly series chief steward for the Oldsmobile sports car race series.

He held various positions in SCCA club racing stewards organizations, including divisional executive steward and director of stewards. He also put in time as a flagger and chief timing and scoring during his career in racing. Bornholt worked for 45 years at RCA, becoming program manager of large radar projects, retiring in 1996.

Ladies and gentlemen. Johnny B.

I’d be, or I’d be standing up here as they did at a lot of driver’s meetings, cause you get better attention that way. I’d like this to be a talk. It’s not a presentation. And by the difference in my book is that a talk is for me to let you get as much information as you can absorb what we’re talking about, which means that you can ask questions [00:03:00] at any time.

And I like that because it makes it flow better and it’s more informative for you. A presentation to stand up, tell them what you told them, and leave. I’ve done hundreds of those in my business, and I don’t like them. That said, what are we going to talk about today? I looked around, and I thought around, and I thought, you know, there’s several things.

Most of us that go to races, we watch the cars go around, but we really don’t know what’s going on out there behind the scenes. And I thought I’d try and give you a peek into race organization, racing organizations, and particularly the stewards organization, because they’re the ones that can affect the outcome of the race.

As it is officially published over the last four or five or six weeks, I wrote a whole series of notes and I came here and I find out with my lousy macular degeneration, which is one reason why I’m not an operating steward anymore that I can’t read my own notes, but haven’t written them. I should know what’s in them.

Let’s start at the top. Automobile racing is a huge area to talk about. I’m going [00:04:00] to talk about the part of it. That has to do with what happens on track from the official’s viewpoint. I’m going to leave out of it, the whole aspects of the organizing of the event before the event, which is a whole world in itself, I’m going to leave out of it, the press I’m going to leave out of it, the driving side of it, because I’m not a driver.

And I’ve never purported to be one because I found out very early on that I was a lousy one. Which is why I’m an official. So let’s talk about the organizational side of it. First of all, in auto racing, in most of the world, there’s only one organization in each country that runs the auto races. United States, I believe is unique, or at least one of the few that has many organizations running automobile racing.

And not all of them are underneath the aegis of the international organization, the Federation International of the Automobile. The FIA. It sets the tone for racing for those clubs that belong to it. How did [00:05:00] this happen in America? How many people know what happened in 1955 in auto racing? Okay, for the rest of you, in 1955 at the Le Mans race, Pierre Levesque went into the crowd in the grandstands in front of the Mustard finish line because he ran in the back of another car.

And it’s controversial, I think, to this day, exactly what happened and how that happened. But the results are certainly not controversial. Upwards of 90 people were killed. God knows how many were injured. The race continued. The stewards decided that it had an impact on racing that you just can’t imagine.

In the United States up until that time, the American Automobile Association. Randall organized racing that amounted to anything. There were many, many other racing organizations in the United States, but they were outlawed. What does that mean? That means their drivers could not participate in AAA races, nor could they participate internationally.

The FIA recognized AAA and only [00:06:00] AAA. After 1955, when that happened, within days after it happened, AAA said, we’re out of here, boys, in automobile racing. America needed to have an organization representing itself for its international races, and so it formed the Automobile Competition Committee of the United States.

And ACUS in turn had membership of the major racing organizations and still does to this day. You have USAC, you have SECA, you have NASCAR, you have NHRA, AMSA, and you have others. The organization below that level is by each club. Each club then, NASCAR, SCCA, IndyCar, they sanction races, and when they sanction a race, they appoint the officials.

They appoint them, but they not originally name them. Often the names of the officials at a race are chosen by the local organization, submitted to the sanctioning body for approval, the [00:07:00] sanctioning body approves them, and then appoints them to the race. Amongst those officials at a race, you have various kinds of stewards and other specialties.

I’ll do the other specialties first because we’re not going to talk about them. We have tech, we have timing and scoring, we have registration, safety, and we have steward organizations, but they’re not the same as the ones I want to spend my time with. We have pit stewards, we have paddock stewards, we have safety stewards.

Their jobs are mainly. To assist drivers and entrance and to monitor the drivers and entrance and performance, the remaining stewards are fall into two categories, judicial ones and operational ones. The operational ones are your chief steward. And he goes by a lot of titles in SCCA club racing. He’s a chief steward, or he may be the series chief steward in IndyCar.

He’s known as the race director. I believe [00:08:00] in FIA now has a race director. It used to be that he was called the clerk of the course. In any case, those names mean he’s the boss once the racetrack and the organization of pre race from the race chairman or the sanctioning body or somebody tells him, okay, here’s who’s running.

Here’s what’s on the schedule. You do it. And so the chief steward’s job is to. Do it. He controls everybody that’s at the racetrack that weekend. He has some limited control. It depends on which organization. In IndyCar, he has a back of him, the judges. And I’ll talk about that in a moment. In NASCAR and in AAA racing before 1955 and in SCCA racing until sometime after 1955.

The chief steward has control period. If there’s any recourse that a contestant, and that means an entrant or a driver, has with what went on, he [00:09:00] has to go to a higher authority, which in NASCAR they appoint an appeals court. In AAA before 55 was the contest board, as it was in SCCA. In SCCA racing, we have the stewards of the meeting.

In FIA racing, we have the stewards of the meeting. And their job is only to To take on protests by somebody, some entrant as to what happened. They can accept the protest or they can reject it. And if they accept it, then they have a hearing and they adjudicate as to what happened. And if the people feel unhappy about that result, in the case of, I don’t know what it is today, but when I was with court, they can tell the chief judge, well, I, we don’t agree with your finding.

And he says, well, you got 48 hours. To cough up 25, 000 in a written reason why it should be appealed. And so it goes to appeal, if they accept it. That’s the general idea of how the organization works from the top down. When the race is over and the checkered flag falls, the chief steward [00:10:00] is out of a job.

Then the stewards take over again because, at least in SCCA and in ChampCar, which is the last pro racing I worked, contestants had a half hour from the time the checker fell to get a piece of paper, and in the case of ChampCar, 5, 000. protest fee and to protest something that they felt was incorrect that affected them.

That’s a key word in there, affected them. In the past years, we had protests in SCCA from amongst the officials. That’s no longer allowed in any organizations that I know. Written out of it by the rulebook, because the rulebook will spell out what exactly can be done. So there you have the overall organization of how a race is run.

Okay, you got stewards, and you got a chief steward, and you got a chairman of stewards, and you told me how they’re going to be appointed, and you kind of told me what they do. Tell me some other things about them. How do they get to be there? Stewards organizations have a decision to make. On [00:11:00] the makeup of the kind of people that they want to make stewards.

There was at one time, a very strong push that a steward had to be a driver. I was not, not long enough to qualify anyway. And several others were not, I believe Charlie Whiting, who’s race director for FIA for the last umpty ump years. I don’t believe Charlie was a racer. He might’ve been, but I don’t believe so.

So that criteria has been changed. However, it’s very, very important for the stewards, all of them, to have the driver’s viewpoint because that’s what you’re dealing with. You’re dealing with issues that happened on the racetrack. So, how do you get that? Well, in my case, I got it because I did a lot of flagging, I worked on a crew, and I was around the racing a lot, and I understood what was going on.

I learned a hell of a lot more about stewarding after I was one than before I was one, I can tell you that. Mainly what you can and can’t do and should and should not do. We’ll talk a little bit about that too. Now you’ve got some background on what do we expect from these guys? [00:12:00] Your judicial stewards are that they deal after the fact.

They don’t do anything until they get a protest. It used to be in the FIA, GCR, General Competition Regulations, that the stewards could replace the chief steward. I don’t believe that’s in there anymore. That’s certainly not in the FIA code. The code is the name for the regulations that the FIA uses to run their races.

Which brings up an interesting subject is how the code comes about. It’s written by people in the sanctioning body, almost always reviewed by the senior stewards in the organization, because they’re the ones that are going to have to work with it. And sometimes, it has input from the competitors themselves.

Right now, I know that the FIA has gone round and round and round and round on what they’re going to do about engines in, uh, I think it’s 2020. Involving the manufacturers in their decision making, which is the proper way to do it, I think. Now you’ve got The stewards there, you’ve got the chief steward, you’ve got a rule book sitting on the table.

[00:13:00] Issues come up. Now how do the stewards handle that? Well, the stewards have a hearing on a protest that’s been entered, and that has been handled properly, etc. And they call in the protestor, and they call in the protestee, and they have, or should have, already notified both parties when and where they’re going to meet, etc.

We do not allow, and when I say we do not for FIA, I’m talking about 1991 and previously because I’ve not been on a committee since, but I don’t think it’s changed. We do not allow what’s allowed in courts, in our court system, and that is cross examination. We call a person in, we ask him his questions, why he’s brought the matter up, why he thinks we ought to hear it, pertinent issues there are, we let him talk, and then we send him out of the room.

Thank you. We hear the protested party. We may call both back, we may not. Depends on what we’ve heard and what evidence has been presented. And then we make a decision. And we announce that decision. Sometimes it’s announced on the spot. [00:14:00] Sometimes we say, don’t come back but in 72 hours we’ll give you a letter that tells you what our results will.

And your appeal period starts at the time that you receive the letter. The protest hearing is an interesting, a really interesting experience. If you’re at all into how people interact and how people act, that’s a great place to learn. You get all kinds of people come in with all kinds of problems based on a rule book.

The whole world in racing revolves around that rule book, which then tells you what the philosophy should be. We follow the rule book. If it ain’t in a rule book, it doesn’t exist. I used to start driver’s meetings in Atlantic series at the first race, when we get a bunch of new guys come in, much of them usually young coming up the ladder.

And I’d say there’s three simple rules. Regarding the rulebook you follow it. You don’t like what’s in the rulebook go and get the rulebook changed But while you’re doing that the rulebook [00:15:00] exists as is written and follow it And if you can’t do one and you can’t do two get out of here. It’s that simple.

And why is it that simple? Well, if we didn’t have a rulebook I can tell you we’d have chaos. It’s difficult enough with a rulebook There are so many circumstances that can come up that affect the outcome of a competition. You can’t have it that I’ll judge it on the spot. Because then, at the next event, and the same thing happens, how does the contestant know that stewards or the judges are going to come up with the same findings on the same, exactly same circumstances?

The only way you can know is to have continuity. Two kinds of continuity. Continuity in officialdom, and if not in the person, at least in their training. And continuity and having a rule book that’s clear and says, you can do this and you can’t do that. One of the problems we have, I have it with a very, very good friend of mine.

And I won’t tell you who it is, who is excellent at writing rules, but damn poor at [00:16:00] enforcing them. In my book, you should not do that. Rule books should never have the word should, may, can. Rule books in my book should say must, shall, then you’ve got no question about whether or not. You’re asking people to sit down and make a decision.

A decision is based on the facts as they can find them. And if you make it equivocal, then you’re going to get different answers every time you have a meeting. Write the rule book and you won’t have that problem. You may have other ones, but you ain’t going to have that one. Let’s go back to the conquer.

I plan to do this talk. At first, to tell you about the overall organization of things and that kind of stuff, and then get into some specifics, and also tell a couple, I think, humorous situations at tracks that I was at, none of which has ever been published to my knowledge. But I think maybe this is a good time to get, because of this particular question, and because it deals with what we’re talking about, about rules, rules interpretation, rules preparation, [00:17:00] and that sort of thing.

We had a race on the west coast in Long Beach in Formula one, Colin Chapman, who in my humble opinion was probably one of the most brilliant automotive engineers that I was ever born. He was also your classic entrepreneur, which means that rule books don’t really exist. They’re sort of guidelines. He came out with his team, cars, and he also brought two new cars, the Lotus 88.

Now at that time, sliding skirts were legal, and they rested on the ground. Now why did they have live sliding skirts? Because they found out if they used sliding skirts made out of Lexan, which raised hell with the racetrack, but kept the air out from underneath the car, that the air pressure underneath the car was less than it was outside.

What’s that mean? That means whatever that pressure differential was, Existed for every square inch on the top of that car, including the tires and everything you could see looking down. And if that was four or five pounds across that number of square inches, you got a hell of a force when you were putting the brakes on or you were going through a [00:18:00] corner.

That means that the tires, which are the only four points that car touches the road, and their friction is going to go up by the amount of that force. But it’s not car weight. So the car is still the same light car that it was when it was sitting still, but now effectively it weighs 6, 000 pounds more.

And that means it gets huge traction. That means you get four or five Gs at very high speeds in some corners in Formula One, which means the car is essentially making right angle turns, which means you get through the corner faster. What’s that mean? Lap speed faster. Oh, I win. Now, the problem with that was.

The poor devil behind the steering wheel, because they had to put springs in there to allow the wheels to move up and down because the racetracks are not perfectly smooth, God knows. Every time the wheel hit one of those, it had to bump up and down. Well, it had to bump up and down at low speeds. Which, when the car was only getting a few pounds of pressure on, from aerodynamic effect, and at high speeds, when it might, as I [00:19:00] said, may have three tons pushing on it.

And so the springs were like virtually solid bars sitting there. Which meant that when the car hit a bump, bang, into the driver. So bad that they would come into the pits after qualifying complaining of vertigo. That’s a problem. And the FIA had the problem that they were in their own rules and in their organization, they can’t change the rule race to race.

So, what did Colin do? Brilliant, brilliant move. He said, we’ll design a car just like we’ve always designed a car. The springs are the same 8, 000 pounds springs they’ve always been. But, we’ll put the driver in a separate capsule. And we’ll put a set of springs between him and the car. And he won’t feel those shocks anymore, but the car will sit on the ground like it’s supposed to.

And he brought the car to Long Beach built that way. And Ferrari took one look at it and said, No, no, no, no, no, no, no. And I believe they were the ones that instigated, I don’t remember exactly, but I think they were the ones that instigated the protest that came to the Stewart. The chairman was John, rest his soul, John Korsman from Holland.

And we looked at the car, and we looked at the [00:20:00] rule book, and we looked at everything else, and we finally decided, No. Why did we say no? The rule book was quite clear to us, It said that the springing system, so and so and so and so. The book did not say the springing systems. And so we ruled no. Well, Cullen didn’t sit square with that one.

He immediately filed an appeal on the spot. And it went to the FIA appeals court and they upheld us. And they ruled that one letter made a difference in racing. The letter S. That’s an example of how some of those things get handled. Let me give another example of Colin Chapman. Bertie Martin was the clerk of the course.

Bertie was my mentor. He was the first president of SCCA Professional Racing. I’m sorry, he was the second one. Jim Kayser was the first. Bertie was the clerk of the course. Wally Reese from Ohio was assistant clerk of the course. In those days, the standing start allowed the teams to send their cars out of [00:21:00] the pits and go around the racetrack for a 15 minute period.

At the end of that 15 minute period, the pit gate was closed. The out gate was closed and cars in the pits at that time had to stay in the pits until they were rolled out to the grid, Reggazoni racing for Lotus at that time. Went out on his 15 minute tour, and either the pits didn’t notify him, I never know, I never found out why, he didn’t come in, but he didn’t come in, he stayed out, the pit gate wasn’t closed, he comes into the pits, nowhere near starting time yet, as I remember, it used to be about a half an hour window in between, he decides to go out of the pits again, Wally Reese is the assistant clerk, the court says, no, no, no, you don’t, puts his hand out, puts his foot out, Regazzoni runs over his foot, Calls up and tells Bertie what happened.

Bertie comes to us and said, what do you want to do about it? I looked over at John. I said, simple. I think, what do you think? He said, yeah, we find them 10, 000. That kind of a penalty action by the stewards did not require a hearing. It’s [00:22:00] the kind of thing that we could decide by their rule book. In Formula One, everything is done in writing.

If you have a new notice to the teams about something, it gets in writing. When it goes to each team, it’s carried around by hand, and the master copy, the goddard carries it around, gets a team manager to sign it, and that goes in the race record. So there’s no question after the race about, Oh no, I wasn’t told.

Kind of thing. We sent one down to Colan. A written record said you’ve been fined 10, 000 for Clay Rega’s only car number so and so. For going out of the pit gate after the pit gate was closed. Period. So Colan comes charging into the meeting. Raving and all that. Fine, 10, 000. Now this is back in the early 80s.

So 10, 000 was what? Three times what it is now? Whoa, whoa, how did you ever come up with 10, 000? And I looked at him and I said, he ran over Wally Reese’s foot. Wally Reese’s foot’s got five toes on it, it’s 2, 000 a toe. He looked at me, he burst out laughing and he walked out. [00:23:00] True story. Uh, let’s see, let’s get back on the track.

We were talking about stewards, we were talking about stewards training. I can talk about two organizations because I work for them. I work for CART and CHAMPCAR. I worked for them first as a chief steward when the Atlantic Series, which was owned by the greatest ra If you, if you, anybody in this audience gets a crazy idea you want to run a race series, you want to hire Vicki O’Connor.

She knows how to run a race series from start to finish, anything to do with it. The press, the publicity, the guarantee, the support, anything, she’s the lady. So I worked for CART. CART bought the promotion agency, which is Vicki O’Connor, and in doing so, they wanted to be also to be the sanctioning body, obviously, and so they made a deal with SCCA, who were the sanctioning body before, and so I became an employee, or a non paid employee of CART.

And then CART went bankrupt, [00:24:00] and the assets were bought by a group, called themselves ChampCAR. Atlantic ran underneath that until the last ChampCAR race, I believe, at Long Beach. I was with SCCA, obviously, I’m still a member, so I know how that’s done. SCCA runs a training program for stewards. I can remember when somebody like me, when I was an exec steward, would look around in the paddock and say, you know, that guy not only has a decent driver, but he’s got the right kind of mind to be a steward.

I think we ought to have him in a program. Walk up to him and take his arm and bend it up close to his collarbone and say, we need you. One of those guys sitting here, Ray Stone, that’s how it started. I don’t know how it works today because I haven’t been in that position. And then you went into the program as a steward in training.

You are allowed to sit in on stewards meetings, you are allowed to ask questions, but you weren’t allowed to vote. That may still be in place. And then it grew from there. They started to think, well, you know, we really ought to have a set of guidelines for the stewards, aside from the rule [00:25:00] book. The rule book tells you what and when and how to run competitions, but doesn’t tell you how to be a steward.

I can remember my predecessor as executive steward for all of SCCA. He was asked by the board of directors to prepare. a manual for the stewards, and he said, I can’t write a book about common sense. And that’s really the truth, because that’s what you’re supposed to be doing, using common sense. But common sense, it turns out, ain’t so common.

And so today we have a manual, we have training courses and that kind of thing. Has it made the stewarding any better? I couldn’t answer that question. You’d have to ask the competitors that have been around long enough whether it’s better today than it was before. In kart, the judges were picked by the management of kart.

When I was chief steward for the Atlantic said I was getting a little tired of sitting in the hot seat. I’d made enough mistakes that nobody had caught me yet. I didn’t want to make one and get caught, but I don’t want to walk away from the scene. I really love racing and I still do. Deeply. I don’t wanna be outta the race control and I don’t, I was in one last [00:26:00] week, but I wanna be involved.

And so they said, well, we’ll make you one of the judges. And their judges and our stewards in the meeting are very similar and their responsibilities in the way they act and that, except they have one thing that I think was brilliant. They have one judge at the racetrack, but they have two judges that are, he is in touch with by telephone.

So they don’t have to pay for two guys sitting at the racetrack doing nothing except ogling girls and watching cars go by. Which is what the judge does nine times out of ten, maybe more than nine times out of ten. Very rare in professional racing at that level do you get protests. But when you get a race protest at that level, it’s not kidding around.

It’s something serious. Something that’s going to have an impact beyond that day. I remember Trans Am, I was a chairman of the stewards at a Trans Am, I believe at Lime Rock. Jim Hall came to me with a protest, and the protest had to do with the Ford team that was run by Bud Moore. I said to Jim, who by the way is another brilliant racing engineer, [00:27:00] besides being a pretty fast driver, I said, Jim, the FIA, in those days, Trans Am’s where FIA won full international races, and so they are required.

That each car that was entered by a manufacturer or a private entry affiliated with a factory have a book about that car with pictures of all the engine parts and pictures of the suspension systems and specification numbers and measurements and weights and God knows all what. And I said, Jim, you know that we’ve got a book on that Ford and you know that John Tomatis John, another God rest his soul, probably the best Czech guy I ever worked with, went over these cars and made sure that they were to that book.

And he said, yeah, I know that too, he said, but Chevy wants me to give a Ford a hard time. That happens occasionally, very occasionally. That reminds me of something though. Let me tell you about two things having to do with the rules. The first one is a Concord Agreement was mentioned earlier. I got a call from Paris, the headquarters of [00:28:00] FIA, in my office one day, not too long before a Long Beach Formula One race, and I was asked to share a meeting of all the entrants at Long Beach to straighten out something in the rules.

And at that time anyway, the Concord Agreement required that every team agree to a change before it could be made. 100%. I don’t know whether that’s true. When I worked at RCA, I used to, towards my end, I would sit in on the negotiations with the government, our government or foreign government, when we sold them a radar system.

And I’d sit in there and when the contract was signed, I didn’t sign it. The contracting officer signed it for the government and our contracts guy would sign it for a company. But I’d be right there at his elbow because it was either me or one of my people that was going to have to live with it, sign the last page and date it and all that kind of stuff.

Not the Concord agreement. The Concord agreement is signed and dated on every page. Okay. I’d never seen that done before. Anyway, they asked me to do it. And so I said, okay. And I call up Christopher Robin Pook, who was at that time, the major domo for [00:29:00] Long Beach now it’s Jim McAleon. Really neat guy. Chris is an interesting one to work with.

He’s a brilliant guy. He said, I’ll set you up in a meeting in the mayor’s office. There’s a nice, big, long table. So I went back to Paris and I told them what arrangements had been made and they let the teams know. I go up to about, oh, 10, 15 minutes early to the meeting and I walk in the room and there’s two guys sitting on the opposite side.

I can see them like they’re sitting there in front of me. They’re sitting there towards the back of it from me, and I’m up at the head of it. And they’re yelling at one another, and one of them is standing over there with his finger pointing at the other one. And I had a copy of the rule book, which at that time is yellow.

Picked it up and slammed it down on the top of the table. Got their attention, they both turned around and I said, From this moment on, no team talks to no team without they come to me. You talk to me, I’ll talk to the other team. Understand? And they understood. And this is before the meeting even started.

So, the meeting starts, and we went on for hours. I don’t [00:30:00] remember what paragraph of the rule book we were dealing with. I have no idea as I sit up here. But I sure remember how it ended. At the end of the meeting, I said, okay, I think I hear an a total agreement. Am I correct? We have 100 percent unanimous Agreement on what we’ve talked about here.

If we need to, I’ll reread it because I had just read what I thought was, was, and it was silence. And then this curly blonde haired guy sits up one of the other sides of the table and it was Marco Piccinini. And he was the manager at that time for Scuderia Ferrari. And he said, and I think I can quote from memory.

And by the way, he was a trained lawyer. I believe he’s a JD from Columbia university, impeccable English. He said, well. If the others all agree, Ferrari disagrees. And I looked at that, and I thought, I had a hell with it. I said, meeting’s just over, and I called Paris and [00:31:00] said, you gotta get yourself another boy.

I couldn’t do it. That’s a true story. There had been a race at Monza, Italian Grand Prix, we’re going to bring me your daughter Italia. At that time, the drivers on their warm up lap was a different requirement than it is today. And, Ricardo Patrici was a first time driver in Formula One. I believe he was with Alfa Romeo, if I’m not mistaken.

He came up to the grid at speed, before the green flag had fell, which was legal. And the green flag fell and he moved up several rows. Well, Things happened at the back of the grid and a couple cars collided on a start and one of them was hit hard and that was Ronnie Peterson. Ronnie died in that accident.

The driver’s next race was Watkins Glen. The drivers unanimously wrote a letter to the FIA and to Mal Currie, I believe. The drivers unanimously stated that if Ricardo Patrici was in that race, they were out of it. Now, if you were the promoter, and you had a [00:32:00] rookie, on one hand, and you had 20 some in those days, 26, 28, other cars on the other hand, that ain’t a hell of a lot of a decision to make, and he made that, and so, they notified Patrese he couldn’t run.

Patrese ran into New York and he hired three lawyers from New York. I can still see them, young guys, and they were top talent from one of the big law firms in New York. You know, multi hundreds of dollars per hour, including travel time. Only one thing wrong, they didn’t know a damn thing about motor racing.

And they showed up, court hearing was held here. And the courthouse called the judge in off the golf course, I believe, which didn’t make him very happy because they had entered an injunction against the promoter for disallowing the entry of Ricardo Patrici. Judge notified Malcolm that we’re going to have a hearing at some time in the afternoon.

I believe it was on Friday, but I’m not sure of that. Maybe it might have been on the Thursday before, but in any event, he notified us and we went into the courthouse. I can still remember, I walked out, I got in the car coming in with Mal and the tractor. [00:33:00] Ownership at that time was the Franzisi family, and one of their members was there, and I’m sitting in the car, and I go, Oh, shoot, I didn’t bring a rule book.

And I said, Mal, do you have a rule book? And he said, yeah. I said, let me have it, because I knew as soon as I got in there, the judge was going to ask me, What’s your role? And then he’s going to ask me about the rule book, and then he’s going to ask me for it. So sure enough, I get in there, and he asked me, and I said, please, your honor, I have essentially the same role at the racetrack.

that you do here in court. I’m the chairman of the stewards for this event, the chief judge, if you will. And he looked at me and he said, I see you have a rule book. May I have it? And I, I bit my tongue because I was going to say, no, I can’t give it to you. It’s my, it’s not mine. And then I thought, don’t play judicial with the judge.

And I said, yes, sir. And I gave him, he gave it back. He made a very, very important ruling. That’s held up in racing a lot of times since. And another case that I was involved in, I won’t go into because it’s germane. He said, in effect, to the appellant in this case [00:34:00] for betraysing, that they had not applied themselves to the remedies within the sport.

And therefore, the court Would not have jurisdiction, which meant that anything that happens at the racetrack gets settled at the racetrack. And that’s held up in other courts in other places. Well, it was legal precedent. That happened at Watkins Glen. When I was out of that courtroom, I was done as far as that issue was concerned.

Who’s in race control? That’s an interesting question. Depends on the racetrack. Depends on the race. Professional racing, pretty much the same. I’ve been in 24s at Daytona, which I don’t really know who sanctions that. I would guess it’s probably IMSA. Does anybody know how IMSA was formed? This is complete aside from this, but it might be interesting because we’re all racing fans.

IMSA, way back when, there was a tremendous fight within SCCA over whether they would allow professional drivers. In SCCA, in the early days when I first joined, you had to be an amateur. If you were a professional racing driver, in [00:35:00] any event, any kind, from dirt track in Podunk, Kansas to anything, you were not allowed to be an amateur.

to be an SCCA driver. They didn’t want to race against pros. Jim Kazer came along and saw that the future of racing was on road racing, in his opinion. He said, we need to change the club’s bylaws and rules and that, and he did allow for that. There was a tremendous fight over that. And John Bishop was on the amateur only, club only.

And the fight went on, and John went to the Board of Directors, and I have this from Bertie Morton, went to the Board of Directors, at those times, they were Board of Governors, and said, either he goes, or I go. Because, at that time, Kaiser reported to him. The Board of Governors said to him, come back in the morning.

And Bertie told me, whenever they said that, that meant goodbye. And he did come back in the morning, and yes it did. And so John got fired. You read your magazine’s sports cards from that day, it’ll talk about how he left the organization. Well, that’s the truth of it. And so, at that [00:36:00] time, SCCA was a powerhouse.

A K& M. was rivaling Formula One when I was associated with it. And this is in the time of the K& M Unlimiteds. We had a 100, 000 purse, and it was more than some Formula One races at the time. We had all the names in the world in the K& M. And there was a fledgling outfit that ran pseudo stock cars down South called NASCAR.

And it was USAC that ran all the Ovals, including 500. USAC and SEC had their battles, and we did, over who’s going to run road racing, but that battle had been ended. We kind of saw eye to eye about things, and NASCAR said, whoops, them is one, and them is two, and me is one. And I’m going to go into ACUS meetings with a lost position before I start.

And lo and behold, John Bishop gets fired. Aha! What I ought to do. This is Bill France Sr., his former racing organization, for road racing, because NASCAR didn’t have anything approaching that. I’ll fund it, I’ll keep it going, and [00:37:00] what I really want it for is I’ll make it an independent organization, apply to a sanctioning agreement from ACUS, and now I got two votes.

And that’s how that happened. And John Bishop was the director for many years. I was the guy that wrote the paperwork that nominated Jim Kaser for the SCCA Hall of Fame. And that’s how I found some of this stuff out. I didn’t know it. This was going on way above my pay grade. Final Selection Committee in the Hall of Fame approved Kaser to be one of the people selected for the Hall of Fame.

Also being nominated from another group was the only guy that I know of that was ever formally tossed out of SCCA from the Midwest. And why was he tossed out? Because Larry Dent got word. that SCCA behind the scenes was negotiating with USAC for a joint operation of all professional road racing in North America.

I’m sorry, in the United States. And that negotiation was held by two people from SCCA and two people from USAC. And the [00:38:00] two people from SCCA did not include the Chairman of the Board of Governors. One was Jim Kaser, and I’ve forgotten who the other one was. The Board of Governors knew nothing about this.

Larry Dent somehow got word of what was going on and he blew the whistle on him. He blew it in a way such that he wasn’t involved and he didn’t, certainly blew it in a way that whoever was leaking it to him was not involved. And it was a tremendous sure invite. And, and he had said some, he said some things and written some things that he shouldn’t have, and so the Board of Governors voted him out of the club.

To this day, you can look in the records and he wasn’t voted outta the club, but at the time he was. He was later allowed back in after making suitable apologies to certain people. And he and Jim Kayser now, 50 years later, are going to be sitting on the same panel of selectees to the Hall of Fame. And I wanted to be in Las Vegas to see those two meet for the first time in 50 years.

Because he blew Kayser’s job. Kayser was done after that. [00:39:00] Unfortunately, Jim died before he got to sit on the stage at Las Vegas. That has nothing to do with stewards, but I thought it’s interesting. Let me give you some racing situations. I asked Bill Green when he asked me if I do this, how long, who’s the audience?

He said, well, a racing enthusiast. And I go, okay, that takes care of that. How long? He said, well, Bill Davidson talked about two hours. I said, well, yeah, but he’s a pro. And so I wrote these notes hoping that I could go through them. I can’t read them, but I hope that I could get through them in a reasonably short time.

So, I’ll tell you about some of the things that happened along the way that I think you might find interesting. None of them, to my knowledge, were ever published. A couple of them are humorous. John Korismit, God rest his soul, from Holland. was for several years the chairman of the stewards at Formula One races throughout the world.

Which I thought was an excellent idea. He was a great guy, understood racing, he was a lot older than I am. He had a fundamental feeling for what’s right in racing. [00:40:00] And he was a stickler, a stickler to do by the rules. One of the rules is, for the stewards, is that the stewards shall, but not the clerk of the course, come to think of it.

I never thought of that. The stewards shall do a tour of the course before the green flag is shown at any session at a Formula One race. That’s practice, qualifying, if there’s a warm up, and a race. So here we are, and I don’t remember, but I kinda think it was Phoenix, one of the two years at Phoenix we were in a race, and we’re going around and waving to the flag stations we go by, and I look up ahead, and here the flag station people are lined up at the edge of the track, except the first one is mooning us.

And the next one is a woman, and she’s got her braless shirt up. And the next one, I don’t know whether it’s male or female, you can’t tell from the back, is, is mooning us, and so on. Well John sees it in about a millisecond after I see it, and he [00:41:00] erupts. BORTLED! What in the world is going on here? What are you doing?

What are you doing? I’m the American steward, so who else is he going to yell to? And I’m sitting right next to him, and in the back seat of the pace car, and uh, his big smile. And I said, John, they’re singing a song to us. And he said, I said, look at it! Rump titty, rump titty, rump, rump, rump. True.

I’ll tell a story I wasn’t planning on telling. I was executive steward, I think, three times up here. Ray Stone is here, Ray and I go back years and years and years. He was executive steward after me, I think, for the New England division. And Floyd Stone, his father, was my predecessor. And Floyd did something that bothered the Board of Governors.

And so they decided that he’s not going to get the job again. Maybe Ray knows why. So they came to me, and I was his deputy for Area 2, which is south of here. [00:42:00] They asked me if I would take it over. If I’d be exec for the following year. I said under one condition that Floyd is my deputy for area one, which is up here.

And they hemmed and hawed and said, well, okay, so I was. Well, the PS to that was I did something they didn’t like and they fired me and he went back in. I don’t know if you know that story. Anyway, and then I got out again a third time, sometime later, I don’t remember. Normal circumstances. I was exec steward up here.

I didn’t mention this. You know, you have a pace car. Well, who drives a pace car nowadays? It’s required that he’d be a driver. And that’s a real good requirement because. You drive the track, you ought to drive it the way the guys are going to drive it. People are going to be following you, uh, even though they’ve been out in practice and qualifying.

It doesn’t matter. You don’t want to look sloppy out there. Secondly, he has a feel for the track, and it’s just a damn good idea. Almost always, he has his shotgun, and the shotgun’s got a radio, and the radio is in contact with the chief steward. So that’s a normal situation. Well, a nice [00:43:00] perk is to allow people to ride in the pace car on the pace laps.

So, we’re at Watkins Glen and it’s a six hour race, and I’m, I think I was chairman that year too. And, I’m walking by Pace Cars in Pitland, I’m walking on, used to be called a paddock club, overlooked the lead in to the uphill right hander. And in those days, the lead in to it, Had been chicaned. Francois was killed on that turn, hitting the guardrail and let drivers left.

And so they paved super bump strips in the racetrack to make a chicane going up there. That’s part of the story. So here I am, I’m walking over to paddock club to get lunch, fat, dumb, and happy cause in a six hour race, nothing ever happens. So they’re not going to need me. I left word with the tower where I was going to be in case something did happen, but nothing’s going to happen.

And I go buy the pace car. Yeah. And Morrow Decker was sitting in shotgun. That’s important. I forgot who the driver was, but the driver said to me, I’m stuck here for six hours and I’m hungry and you ain’t doing [00:44:00] anything. I know you stewards. Cause he’s another one at that time. And he said, I got to get some lunch.

Would you drive the pace car? You know, nothing’s going to happen in the six hours. So I said, stupidly, yeah, yeah, I’ll take it. So I got by it, never driven the car before. It was a Datsun five speed manual should never do in a pace car. Cause you got other things to be doing other than doing this. So I’m sitting there, I didn’t get through lunch period.

Pace car roll! Pace car roll! So, okay, well, we go. Well, I go out of the pits. And I can remember, there were nine 35s that were in the front at the race at that time. Turbo Porsche. What, 600, 700 horsepower, I guess they had. They didn’t like going slow. Well, neither did I, but I found out that in 4th and 5th gears, this car wouldn’t do more than 65 miles an hour if you whistled Dixie.

And I’m sitting in there now, starting to row, row, row, row, and I go up, turn around a 90, and I’m still feeling around it, and I suddenly realize, we’re in a chicane, boom, boom, boom, boom, [00:45:00] boom. Okay. And go around. And go up the street and I can’t get this thing going uphill to go over 65. The nine 30 fives are going, yeah, I past the window and back and they’re giving me the message.

I’ve received it, but I ain’t doing anything about it. We were running a long course. We come around, go down and down around, and I’m fiddling with this thing and I damn near. Hit the BMW that it was the course of the all course which is sitting square in the middle of the racetrack About that time. I look over in my shotgun Morrow and he’s white with what’s been going on I screamed at him.

I said you tell control to fix whatever they gotta fix, but get me out of here We made one more lap and we came in I swore never Never drive a pace car, especially when you haven’t driven one before. Found out later on the car had been borrowed from Bridgehampton. Hadn’t been run for two years. It hadn’t been serviced.

It hadn’t been anything. It was lucky it ran. [00:46:00] So, sometime later, I’m down at Nazareth. Well, you know it’s a road course that runs only to the left. Cause it runs uphill and downhill, and it’s got more than four turns to it. So, they were running a Super V race. Roger E. Andy was the series chief for it, and he had a Scirocco that VW supplied.

As the pace car, and I don’t know what happened, but he asked me to drive the pace car, and I don’t remember the circumstances of it, but I got in this stupid thing. I have to remember what happened up here. I hadn’t driven it again, and I’ve come to find out it’s a turbo ed Scirocco, which I didn’t, which was not a car that they built.

And the throttle on this thing had two positions, full on and nothing. And on that oval, that’s not the kind of thing you want to be fooling around with. That was the last pace car I ever drove. Little Al answer. Little Al come up out of midgets and sprint cars. When he came into, must have been Super V at that time, he had the reputation of [00:47:00] passing yellows and reds in his pro racing.

And he was just a kid at the time. And then George Cousins was the president of SCCA Pro Racing. He called me up and asked me to go to Riverside. And be the chairman of the stewards, and in particular, keep an eye on Little Al in the Superview race. Sure enough, he passed out of yellow. I didn’t black flag him or do anything, but I announced that there was a 500 fine.

I don’t know if anybody here was ever at Riverside, but the control was at the outside of the track, at the top of the stands, and the concession stands were on the inside in the paddock. So at lunchtime, I Went on downstairs, and I’m walking down, and there’s this chunky, blonde haired guy walking towards me from the other side.

I didn’t pay any attention to it. It was quite a walk. But as the longer I walked, the longer I realized, this guy is not looking at the stands, he’s not looking at anything, he’s looking at me. Finally, we get within yelling distance to one another, and he said, Are you the Chief Steward? And I said, Yes. And he starts in about the 500 fine.

And he goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on [00:48:00] and on and on. And finally he runs out of breath and he says to me, you didn’t say anything. And I said to him, The next thing I say is, this is a thousand, and he did the same thing. He burst out laughing. That was Rick Gallus. I’d never met him before.

Rick was Little Al’s sponsor for a number of years. We got to be good friends. Great guy to work with. Before we came up here, We looked at a video called Circuit. I’m in it, okay? It was a movie made about one year in K& M 2, the 5 liter single seater K& M, about Danny Sullivan, primarily. It was about following the exploits of Danny Sullivan.

And I’m in it in the beginning, when the credits are rolling. I’m holding a driver’s meeting at Mosport. When the movie came out, they sent me a complimentary copy. And I watched it. And I learned more about what happened in the Can Am that I never knew. And I was the series chief steward. Things were happening on the track and in the paddock I never heard about.

We had a race, an Atlantic race [00:49:00] at Mosport. We always did standing starts, which I love, by the way, for a lot of reasons. People think, oh, aren’t they dangerous? No, I think they’re safer than rolling starts. We had a start, and not too long, like maybe lap two or so, I got a call from the pits that number so and so jumped the start.

I black flagged him, made him do a pit through. When all was said and done, it turned out that it was not car numbers so and so, it was pit start position numbers so and so. But it hadn’t been announced to me that way. I had presumed that it was car numbers so and so. We made two rule changes after that.

One very significant and one operational. The operational one was the judges at the start, which you have for standing starts, they are to always say car number or always say one or the other. For me, it was car number because that’s what I deal with is car numbers. The other rule was much more significant.

We made a rule change. If anything had happened on a racetrack like that, where you were going to affect the [00:50:00] competition, you let the team know that at that point, that there’d been an infraction and that you were going to inflict a penalty. And they had an option of taking that penalty now or a 30 second penalty after the race was over.

And we had opportunity to talk about it and look into it. And that was, I think, a very significant change in favor of the competitor. Because there’s a lot of times. The chief steward makes decisions based on what other people are telling him, and he comes to find out that that ain’t the way it was sold, especially passing under the yellow flag.

That’s a very contentious issue. Where does this zone start? I know what the rule book says. I’ve also been a flagger and ain’t easy to judge and you may misjudge it. There’s a big thing going on in SCCA right now about in the rule book getting changed on pass under the yellow. And where does it start and where does it stop?

FIA has a very simple rule. It starts at the first station before the incident, and ends at the first station after the incident. That’s a flag station. You look across the track, is he in front of him or isn’t he? Simple, black or [00:51:00] white. SCCA can’t do that, and they were honest enough to admit why. Cause they don’t man all the stations all the times.

And some of the stations that are the first station after the incident are pretty damn far away and you don’t want to map the situation of trying to maintain it all the way through. People ask me, what’s the difference between pro racing and club racing? Obviously they’re similar, but there’s some fundamental differences, very fundamental that affect the way in which you look at things in club racing.

Everything has to do with the participants, the drivers. The entrance, mechanics, the flag workers, everybody who’s doing something that weekend, that’s a club member. They’re all involved. That’s not the case in pro racing. In pro racing, everything has to do with the drivers, and the entrance, and the spectators.

And the TV and the press and the promoter. Don’t forget the sponsors. Good Lord. Don’t forget the sponsors. You wouldn’t be there if they weren’t there. And [00:52:00] so that’s a philosophical difference that you’d sometimes have to break. FIA has a very, at least when I was in it, had a very interesting attitude towards those things.

They recognized that there’s going to be conflicts between those two kinds of approaches to things. And what they said was there’s the sporting side of the issues and there’s the commercial side of the issues and they have to be balanced, one can’t. Totally overruled the other one. I like that. Now you look at racing today, I think NASCAR is all hardest over on the commercial side, club racing is the opposite.

It’s all the way over on the sporting side. And I think that’s properly so because that’s what it’s for. It’s for the people that are there to have fun at the races. There are some other differences in that you didn’t get as many driver to driver protests, another major differences in pro racing, you got the same officials at every race.

This year, maybe every race for the next egg and n number of years contestants. know [00:53:00] the officials, mostly by first name, and know how they operate, and know what to expect from them. In club racing, they’re almost always different, a very little overlap. Club racing attempts to solve part of that problem with a red book, which is, I think, unique to Northeast Division, which is, there’s a book that goes to every race and goes to the chief steward, and it has, uh, There’s notes in it from the previous race, Chief Steward, and the previous and the previous and the previous.

So that he can get some idea of what went on from the Chief Steward’s viewpoint at previous events. I don’t know if they still do that or not. I have not and will not sit in a chair. I was invited to sit in a chair last weekend and I said three things. I said, been there, done that, no. I think that was pretty emphatic.

Funny situation. George Falmer, Dirty George, to those of us know, familiar, neat guy, great race driver, had a very bad accident. Totally out of his control. I never talked to George about it. [00:54:00] At Laguna and the backstretch is a famous. Corkscrew turn, which is sharply downhill with a pair of turns at the same time.

Following the corkscrew is a short straight, sort of like the 90 to the uphill here. About the same, but downhill, so you can accelerate pretty quick. And then a left hand turn, and another straight, and then a right, and then a left in front of the pits. George came out of the corkscrew, and accelerated, and accelerated, and accelerated!

And accelerated. He never backed off. He hit the bank. He went over the heads of the crowd. Went over the tops of the safety vehicles, bang, he ended up side because that was a hill like that. He was in the hospital for quite a while. He came back to see us, but not race the following year at Charlotte. We ran the Can Am single seater, five liters at Charlotte motor speedway using the infield track and most of the oval two years in a row.

Okay. With the NASCAR 600. I can tell you the last thing in the world you want to [00:55:00] be is a chief steward of a support race for the 600 cause there ain’t no time on anything on anybody’s part for you get lost. We really wish you weren’t here. Now that I got that off my chest, George is there. Visiting, in the infield, in the paddock area.

Somehow, WBT TV, which is the big station in Charlotte, got word that he’d come back. And so they sent a cameraman out to interview him. So here’s George, and here’s the cameraman, and the announcer, and the cameraman’s assistant. In those days, they had a battery pack with the cameraman. Unbeknownst to the announcer and the camera man and the camera man’s battery man, standing in back of them, but facing George, was Dallas Heiser Dunn.

Johnny Dunn ran K& M. Well, Johnny Dunn ran K& M, but he also had a business called Guns Goodies. He sold racing parts out of Miami, Florida. Dallas wore a t shirt with Guns [00:56:00] Goodies. Dallas never wore a bra. And when she had her badge made by SCCA to get into the racetrack, it was not from here up, it was from here down.

You got the picture? She’s back at the two camera guy. She is standing there, slowly raising her George is looking at the The announcer is asking perfectly legitimate questions, and getting weird looks out of George, and very slow answers. I happen to be staying alongside Dallas Cole quits when she got her effect on him.

That’s a true story. These are all true stories. I said that reminded me, Laguna, after you got all through going down the hill, you came out on the pit straight. In those days, The beginning of it, which was a 90 degree turn, was carved out of a hill, so you didn’t need a guardrail. You had two miles of dirt in front of you.

The last lap of [00:57:00] the featured Can Am five liter race, Danny Sullivan took the lead, somewhere in the back stretch, maybe at the corkscrew, maybe at that turn, and promptly went off course into the wall at, I think it’s turn nine, just before the finish line, just before the checkered flag. Well, it’s a race.

And in fact, he stayed there, so he’s one of the last finishers. They got him up on the stand after the race was over, and people are still wandering around leaving. And they asked Danny, Danny, what happened? Danny said, damn racetrack didn’t go where I was driving. You know, he’s, I think, the only man that ever spun and won at Indianapolis.

Just spinning at Indianapolis is a scary thought in itself. You talk about steward’s hearings. I was here at the Glenn, a Formula V race years ago, when Formula V was the event. The Seatta of today. The Formula Ford of 10 or 15 years ago. You weren’t a real competitive Formula V driver unless you had tire [00:58:00] tracks on your helmet.

I mean, that kind of thing. I’m up in race control. This kid comes running up to me, ranting and raving, and I get him out on the back porch. And I said, what’s your problem? He said, I want you to do so and so and so and so and so. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I said, first of all, I don’t have any actions called into me that weren’t me doing any actions.

So this is a problem you have with your competitor, which means that you, I’m going to have to write a protest and you’re going to have to bring that protest to me with any data that you have that supports your position and 25. And he says to me, I don’t have $25. I’ve got a, a tire gauge and, and an infrared thing to use.

Measure tire temperatures. I said, son, I’m running a race, not a hawk shop. Go find $25 and go bring it up. So he goes away. When he comes back, he hands me a five and 20 singles. It’s obvious he’s gone around to talk to people. So he’s driving the white car. What’s the protest about? He’s driving a white car [00:59:00] on the opening lap, leaving the start rolling start.

He gets hit in the back by the black car and forced off the course. He never gets to the 90. He never gets to run his race. I want that guy in that black car banned for the rest of this year. I want him. I said, thank you very much. We’ll hear it. So we hear him and he tells us the same story. So we call the guy in a black car and tell him what happened.

We read him the protest and he says, Hey, I never hit him. In fact, I could have hit him. I think he missed the shift or something. I never saw him after the start. He was back there someplace when I got to the 90. Okay, how do we solve this one? Well, it happened within view of the 90. Let’s call the flag captain in.

The flag captain comes in and said, no. Black car never hit the white car. Black car was far in advance of him before they even got anywhere near the corner. Hmm. Then we get a guy comes in and says, well, I was witnessed that I was in the red car right behind him. I saw it all. And that black car, obviously he’d been sent in by [01:00:00] the black car.

The black car never had anything to do with it. And anyone in there would tirade about how dangerous Formula V was turning out to be with all these accidents that were happening at every racetrack. And these guys can get away, but nobody ever does anything about it, and he does it week after week. If you’re ever a steward, you hear those stories.

And we let him run on, and we finally said thank you, and he was the driver of the red car. And so we called the flag station back in for some reason or other, and we asked them, well, who did hit the guy in the white car? Well, the guy in the red car.

Another difference between pro racing and club racing, that that reminds me of. In club racing, almost always, you’re using the flag stations for your eyes. Why? Because they’re going to tell you what’s happening out on the racetrack. In pro racing, most of the time, you’ve got cameras. Road America, the last time I was there, they had their communications, data, and TV on On fiber optics [01:01:00] and they had the cameras on the corners remotely controllable from race control.

So God bless whoever put that in the race chief could go and look at the corner in question to see, for example, where is the car sitting? So do I need to stop the race? Do I need to put out all course yellow? Do I need to go local yellow or what? And that camera is focused on the corner when you’re not moving around.

And it’s recorded. And you got on a tape from every corner what went on. Boy, I gotta tell you, the club guys never had that luxury. You could solve some protests and hearing matters and that kind of stuff like that. Which is why a lot of them never happen. Because the guys driving the cars know they’re under somebody’s eyes.

But the camera angle isn’t great. And sometimes you could equivocate about, you know, did it see it right or didn’t see it? And I used to say, boy, what I want There’s a camera, God’s eye in the sky, directly above the track, and high enough [01:02:00] up, so I don’t have to worry about angles or anything, and then I can tell what’s really happened on there.

Did he move over on him? Did he turn in on him before? Did he move over on him and say he moved on me? On me? This kind of thing. Did he really break Jackham? Those things do happen, you know. But I found out something very interesting. You watch TV and you watch, up until recently anyway, you watch the National Football League and you notice that all the cameras, you never, ever see a shot from directly above.

Because the teams all agreed that they would not allow camera shots from directly above because it might reveal some secrets on formations that they don’t want. And I thought, that’s not interesting. That has nothing to do with automobile racing, but it’s interesting. It’s interesting. Let them talk. I think more drivers have talked themselves in their penalties than they realize.

If you let them talk and let them talk, they’ll say things that they should never have talked. In racing, we do not allow them to bring anybody in as their counsel. They have to appear. In person, represent themselves, and that’s [01:03:00] it. They can bring people in as additional witnesses, but only the witness comes in alone.

Hey, no connivance in front of me, thank you. I didn’t have it on my list, but here at Watkins Glen, there was a six hour race, and the rule was it was five over the wall on the pits on stops, and six was not allowed. And I don’t remember whether that included the team manager or not. Anyway, there was a rule, and the Alfa Romeo team violated the rule.

They had one or two guys over that should have been over. He was also later the design engineer for Ferrari. I sent somebody down to tell him, you know, one more time on that. We gave him a break and there’ll be a penalty. And he told the pit guy that he didn’t speak English. You know, no speakers, na na na na na na na, don’t understand what you’re telling me, na na na.

He was a big guy, as I remember. The big guy told me that. I said to him, tell him the next time it’s 25, 000. And he told him that, and he said, gee, he suddenly understood English. That’s a true story. Who’s in race control? Most of the pro [01:04:00] races, and the only real pro races I ran were kart and champ car events.

You had the race director, you had an operational chief steward, and there was a flag marshal alongside of him. There was a lady, or guy, recorder, recording what was being said. Beside which, an actual recorder, recording everything that was said on the phone network. There was also the chief of safety and cart safety was a number one to work with.

That’s why, what’s his name was alive. He got his legs severed in an oval in Germany. And if they hadn’t gotten to him as quickly and as thoroughly and as efficiently as that, he’d have been dead door nail. These guys were great. And their chief was a really neat, laid back, quiet guy. You never knew he was there, but he was the boss.

Run Romney. Boy, they were great to work with. Which brings me back to another story. Another rule change. In Atlantics, when we first started, we ran virtually club rules. And as time went on, and things we learned, we decided to have our own [01:05:00] rules. And one of them was, we never put out any vehicle on the racetrack, other than racecars, without the course being under Full course yellow and a pace car.

And why at Lime Rock, we had a car off course and a car getting towed from off the back, the front of the field came around. And it came in as the one wrecker is crossing the track to get to the car that’s off course and the other wrecker that’s towing the car is crossing the track to go into the pits.

And that put the lead cars everywhere, but on the racetrack. Nobody got hurt, and no cars got trashed. How? I’ll never know. But when that was over, I said, that’s it. From now on, nobody goes on that racetrack except race cars. If they do, it’s all course yellow. It’s that simple. And yeah, I know, I don’t like all course yellows.

It messes up the competition. But we’re gonna do it that way, and we did. The interesting thought is, some racing organizations, and I’ll leave them via anonymous, I have [01:06:00] something called a competition yellow. And what that means is that, oh my god, he’s running away with the race. There’s dirt on the back stretcher.

It’s going to cause somebody to crash. I need a yellow flag all over. Okay, or an oval pollens, yellow, yellow, yellow. Let me talk a little bit about road courses and ovals. They are a world apart from every possible aspect. You can run an oval with a handful of people. You only need a few people out on the course, you need the normal complement in the pits in the paddock, but that’s not many.

And a couple up in race control and that’s it. On a road course you gotta have people out on the stations. The rule in racing, I hope, is still. that every flag station must be able to see the preceding and succeeding station at all times. And that’s a good rule because if they can’t, something could happen in between and they wouldn’t know it.

And you wouldn’t be able to warn the drivers on the course, and you wouldn’t be able to call for safety if somebody needed it. You have to be able to see from station to station. You have [01:07:00] to have those stations manned that you can see. And if you can’t see them, you’ll have to man them. I had two unfavored tracks, two tracks that I hated to work at for various reasons.

Top of the list by miles was Nazareth. That was the most dangerous damn place I’d ever been. Because of the layout of the track. It was fast. Think the lap speed for cars on there? I think their lap times was in the 160, 180 range for a mile, and it wasn’t a mile. I can remember Dennis Eade, one of the team managers in Atlantic, there for the first time when we ran Atlantic’s there, coming to me and saying, how long is this racetrack?

I said, it’s announced as a mile. He said, maybe announced as a mile, but it must be around the outside of the top of the stands. He said, I know from my gearing, how far it is. That brings me to Pocono. Pocono for a different reason. The racetrack was built. Hi, this one has some of the same problems. I don’t know what this elevation above sea level here is.

Pocono is up about 2, 000, 2, 100 feet. I happen to know there’s a little hill on the back. That’s [01:08:00] the highest point in Eastern Pennsylvania. And we hams used to use that for a radio contest, but that’s another old story. The problem with that is if the tracks at 2, 150. And the cloud ceiling is at 2100. You ain’t gonna run no race, cause you can’t see from here to the next guy.

We had a national race. Bob Tullius and somebody else, don’t think it was Paul Newman, but it might have been, were running for the national championship. That race was gonna decide it. And that damn cloud bank rolled in. Got a call from one of the stations. I’ve lost station so and so, but I can see so and so.

Okay, I can keep going. I’ve lost station so and so, but I can, I can see so and so. Okay, How many laps we got to go? And I ran it the last lap when one station could not see another station. After that was over, I said, you know, that was nuts. I’m never gonna do that again. Which brings another story to mind.

Tullius and Newman, who, I don’t know if you guys know this, they were great friends, but [01:09:00] terrible competitors on the track. And Paul was a very good driver. And both of them were malevolent in their thinking. We get to mid Ohio, and after the cars are paddocked on Friday, and get in on Saturday, and it was a National, alongside Tullius’s car, spanking white, garbage truck, and a With black number 44s on both sides, printed back 44s backwards.

Now, there’s a story behind that. Why the backwards 44? Bob’s first race at Marlborough, he had his girlfriend put the numbers on. She put them on wrong. She put them on backwards and he won the race. And so he said, that’s my lucky number. And so his, if you remember, he always raced the 44 with the backwards numbers.

Well, right after that was the runoffs down at Road Atlanta, which were a week long. Coming in, I expected something between them. And sure enough, here comes this Piper Cub or Arrow Oronco. One of, something of that size. Puttin across the sky with this great big flag in back [01:10:00] of it. Bobby called Mommy. I didn’t even have to ask what’s that all about.

What I wanted to find out is what was behind it. They had been talking and Tullius had made the mistake of saying it to Newman. That’s not the kind of thing I would say to my mother. And so, that went on all week, and I don’t remember what they were. I kept a record of them. And then, that racetrack, I drove home after the races were home.

800 miles. I left the damned notebook with my briefcase at the racetrack, and I lost it. Of all the funny things, it would have made a wonderful article, magazine article. Nobody else, the press guys, weren’t into most of it. Come Sunday morning, and the warm up. I’m looking at it at race control, down into the paddock.

Here comes Georgia Highway Patrol with the light going, you know, the Tijuana taxi bit to Newman’s car. And two burly cops get out to his paddock area and put him in the back seat. And I thought, whoa. Paul Newman, famous actor, the American [01:11:00] icon. And he’s being arrested at a racetrack that I’m chief steward at?

What the devil has that about? And then about five minutes later, he comes back in police car and the door opens up and Newman gets out and he’s shaking hands with the cops. And I thought, now, there is a real story. And so I find out later on, this is the end of it, that they’d been put up to it. And the charge that they charged him with that allowed them to effect an arrest was that he had unpaid debts.

He owed Tullius 50 bucks on a debt from a bar someplace. Well standin up there with us. Was the captain of the blimp, the Goodyear blimp. And this is the beginning on Sunday and he’s not aloft yet. I’m thinking one of those two clowns is going to get in touch with him. And I don’t know which one, but I’m sure they’re going to do something.

So I turned to him and I, and I didn’t know him from Adam, but I know who he was. I said, are you in on this? So either one of them, and you know, that kind of discussion. And he [01:12:00] looked at me real serious. He says, do you know? What the market is for an unemployed limb captain.

Anyway, that would have made a great story. One of my philosophies, if I was chairman and probably if I was a chair, one of the stewards was really never to question. A chief steward’s judgment on those kinds of matters in which he had zero time to make a call. Should I put out an all course yellow or a yellow?

For a couple reasons. First of all, you don’t know what information he was acting upon. And secondly, you weren’t sitting in the chair at the time. Carr very wisely put in their rule book, many of the decisions of the chief steward or race director are non protestable. It’s like, first base, or the umpire, behind the plate, he may be bow legged and blind, but whatever he calls, that’s the way Charlie it is.

Live with it. SCCA rightly so, however, in [01:13:00] club racing, does not say that. And the reason is, they recognize that sometimes, they have circumstances, Where the Chief Steward shouldn’t have done what he did, either because poor judgment on his part, which can occasionally happen, or he had bad information that he should have had, meaning that it was available to him, but he didn’t take it, kind of thing.

So, SECA, and it’s writing the club rules, said, no, no, no. The Chief Steward has no authority that’s non protestable. And he can’t declare himself non protestable, too. They thought of that. The philosophy there, again, is different in operating one and operating the other. Let me tell you a tough one, Vancouver, which by the way was a site of a track performance kind of change.

After Vancouver cart race a number of years ago, cart ruled that no flag station personnel are allowed on the racetrack at any time the cars are on the course, period. The only personnel allowed on a racetrack where cars are on the track [01:14:00] are the cart safety people. The reason for that was a very good one.

Two guys went out to help move a car and they got hit by another race car and they didn’t make it. And I can tell you, you don’t want to be the chief steward to have that happen. I had one fatality as a chief steward. It happened very early in my career. It happened in the Vineland Speedway. It was a minor club race.

It wasn’t anything. It was just guys out having fun, almost next to track days where you can almost run what you’re running. Off the street, Barry Fearon, I’ll never forget his name though, I get put in a grave. Was running, he was running last, plopping around at the back of the field. Couldn’t have been having too much fun.

Something happened, I don’t know what. He turned turtle. We had a roll bar and he had helmets in those days. I go back to before roll bars. I’ve witnessed races when we didn’t have helmets, when we didn’t have safety belts. When you race with a cloth cap on your head, crazy. Barry died of a depressed skull fracture because he borrowed that damn helmet from somebody else and it was four [01:15:00] sizes too big.

Bunch of bad stories there, isn’t there? My story is I don’t let guys plop around. If they’re markedly off race speed, they come in. If it’s pro race, I call the team. I say, Hey, you got to do something. You need to bring them in and fix them or you bring them in and park them. But he ain’t running that way.

He’s not going to win any money. He’s not going to please anybody. And he could kill somebody because something could happen. Somebody could run over him kind of thing. And club racing, you think about it and you think about it and you think about it, but I will black flag. I don’t anymore. I would have black flag somebody because they’re just not a good situation.

And pro racing nowadays. They have communications between the chief steward and the team and the car. You can communicate in collaboration. You don’t have that guys come up with a car going to run it this weekend. It’s almost like in the days when you drove your. TC to the track and took the windshield off and then that kind of thing, took the back seat out.

And so the communications gap between the chief steward and the driver is huge. [01:16:00] While he’s on the track, the only way he communicated through the flag stations. And you think about that, there’s a hell of a difference. Between Chief Steward and being able to tell the crew chief, Hey, your guy, we think he’s leaking oil, you bring him in.

Or he’s dragging something. Or you can even, in some cases, talk directly to the driver. I can tell you flat off, Club Racing Steward is a hell of a sight harder to do than Pro Racing. Pro Racing is a snap by comparison. And besides what you know everybody in Pro Racing, or most everybody, in Club Racing, you don’t know who you’re dealing with.

And what would the appropriate response would be? The only time in my life I’ve been bounced from a racetrack, Jackie Stewart, that Jackie Stewart. Can Am original Can Am in which you could run, almost run what you brung kind of thing, Tony Dean from England won the only time a small ball car won a Can Am race was in the pouring rain.

And I believe it was Atlanta that he won. He won it in a 908 Porsche. That’s a flat eight version of the [01:17:00] 906. Was originally designed as a hill climb car and he won it. The next race was mid Ohio. In those days, the pit straight went underneath the bridge, made a left hand turn on the 90 turn and on the outside of that turn, I can tell you how far, four feet off the pavement.

With a bunch of oak trees, Tony Dean on the Thursday driver’s practice day, hit those oak trees with his 908 Porsche. God love us, he hit it, back of him, tore the car in half, and he walked away. Well, Stewart was driving for Haas at that time, and he was driving a Lola T260, which I’m told was one of, Bromley’s not top of the drawer board designs.

And I’m also told that he was being paid 25, 000 to appear. The implication being that he would drive it. Stewart got word of the accident, saw the trees, and immediately had a press conference before Friday, before I even got there, on how dangerous the racetrack was. Well, Wally Reece, that same Wally Reece I talked about earlier, [01:18:00] was Exec.

Steward, SENDIV, the Central Division, at the time. And in those days, the Exec. Steward and the Division did track inspections. I did the track inspection the year that the Blue Tunnel was created. That’s a story I’m not going to talk about. Anyway, Wally had approved the racetrack. And it was a piece of paper that stood in race control that said he had approved the racetrack for racing.

And so I said that to Stuart when I found out he had. The owner of the track was a hard headed Dutchman like me, by the first name Les. I said, you know, you’re killing the spectators by putting that kind of thing in the public press. Which it was. That the track is dangerous. It’s dangerous. There’s some that’ll show up and a lot won’t.

And he said, well, it’s, I said, I don’t think it is, but I’ll talk to Les. So I went to Les and I talked to him and Les, I said he was hardheaded, said, I have an approved racetrack. You have no authority to tell me to do anything. I said, no, I don’t. I said, I do have authority though to talk common sense, and I do have authority to [01:19:00] talk money.

I said, you know, you could buy. For 5 a bale, hay bales, because I buy them for that money, for my daughter’s horse. And you could put those hay bales in front of those trees, and you still wouldn’t put them on the track, but you would have done something to alleviate a now known problem. We talked a little bit.

He didn’t budge that far. Oh, and then Stuart had another press conference after I left. So I went home that night. I came in on the next morning, not knowing what the heck I was going to do. Lo and behold, those trees had been leveled off with the ground. You would never know the trees had been there.

They’d been cut off the night that I was gone. And boy, that was a whew! For me. And so I held a press conference and I said, what have you done? Jackie had to have another, we wound up each old and free. I don’t remember all the circumstances. That was one of the few press conferences in racing that I ever had.

That’s where I got to meet Jackie Stewart in person because I went to him after each, the first, the second and third of his, and to learn to call him Jackie. At [01:20:00] that point, he was not sir. At that point, he’s a nice guy. He’s a great guy. He really was on the right kick racing in those days. Dangerous as hell and it need not have been we did all kinds of stupid stuff when you look back at it It was a book written by the sports editor of the New York Times Caught the cruel sport and it talked about racing and how dangerous it was and how needless it was I can remember when after the Indy race was over and the first three cars the first three finishes You might not see one of them two years later I mean now that’s stupid when you think of it, but that’s the way it was And by the way, on Monday after the race, Bertie Martin, my boss, President of Pro Racing by that time, called me up and said, You’re not allowed in mid Ohio anymore.

Won’t let you come in the racetrack. I said, Well, that’s one less race. Anyway, then the track sold to, uh, Jim Truman. A total gentleman. Great businessman. Great guy. Drove two liter car. Drove him very, very well. I got to know him because he raced in the [01:21:00] two liter class in the, in the Can Am. There were certain people that ran racetracks that I would work my damns not to have to deal with.

And there were certain racetrack people that I would make it a point to go to see first when I got in the area because they were fun to work with. Mal Currie here was one of them. And Les Richter was the other one. Les ran Riverside as general manager. And then he became, I think, director of racing for NASCAR.

But before that, he was a football player. And when you shook hands with Les Richter, you knew you’d shook hands. His hand was the size of my foot. He was the only football player in National Football League history in which he alone was traded for a total nother team. Go look your history up and you’ll find that’s true.

And yet he’s not in the Hall of Fame. And he was like five times on the winning team? All time linebacker, I believe, or tackle or linebacker, one or the other. And that was politics, pure politics. And let me tell you, there’s politics on halls of fame. And now I know [01:22:00] I was on part of one for three years.

Shouldn’t be that way. But then I remember my favorite statement, get more than two people together and you got politics. I’ll tell one more story. Phoenix racetrack, not the Grand Prix track, the oval with a kink in the back, like Trenton used to have. I’m running a 50 lap race. Rule book says, the race shall end when the checkered flag is flown.

If the checkered flag is flown before the scheduled distance, it is still a race. If the checkered flag is flown after the scheduled distance, the race finish will be deemed as the order of finish on the scheduled distance, not the checkered flag. That was the rule then. 50 lap race. I’m Chief Steward. I’m listing.

I always let the starter and the chief of timing and scoring talk because one or the other of them Better be in agreement with the other one and I’m hearing [01:23:00] 40 laps. No, it’s 39 41 laps. No, it’s 30. It’s 40 Don’t you guys do this to me. And so we ran a 51 lap race. And of course, the lead changed in that last lap.

The 51st lap. And I had to tell the guy that was the winner at the 51st lap, No, you’re second. You were second when you crossed the start finish line on the 50th lap. Two more things. You go to racetracks and you hear so many miles per hour, so many miles per hour. That’s nonsense. Pay attention to time.

Time is the whole game. Even the 500 race. When you’re sitting in the pit, I’ve never worked a race of 500. I’ve never been to the 500, but I can tell you I’ve worked a lot of old races and it’s always the same thing. They don’t measure your speed. They measure your time. And then, the press goes to [01:24:00] work and announces what the speed was.

That’s a press thing. And you think, well why is he telling me all this? Because when you watch a race, and you see a guy going into a corner, and they’re about that far apart, and then they go down a straightaway, and they’re that far apart, and you think, geez, he’s got MB. No, he doesn’t. It’s the lap time, dummy.

There were a 10th of a second apart here and there a 10th of a second apart over here, but a 10th of a second at 36 miles an hour, ain’t very far. A 10th of a second at 140, you better believe it’s pretty far. And, you know, it’s that kind of thing. It’s the timing, and where it’s timed. Timing stand at Road America used to be at the bottom of the, straightaway leading past the pits at turn 13.

Inside, almost a half a mile away from the finish line. I’d have teams come roaring up to me, My guy got so and so timed, your official time is all wrong. Where did you time him? Whoa, time not right here at the finish line. Go read your rule book, [01:25:00] or your, uh, your supplementaries for this race. Why? Because that’s a fit not, no it ain’t.

Go read it. Timing is done down at station 13. That’s where the timing’s done. And that’s the timing we use to set the grid. You time them up here. That don’t mean a thing. Their time’s different. The timing is different because the guy doesn’t drive the whole racetrack the same speed for different people.

So, it’s time. Let me tell you something. There’s two things that I learned at my age. And that is, take care of your legs. When I was a kid, the athletes always said, take care of your legs, take care of your legs. And I, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Take care of your legs, believe me. For me, it’s the first thing to go and it’s the last thing you want to go.

Because without them, you ain’t going to get very far. And the second thing is take care of your eyes. I have macular degeneration and I can’t read a newspaper. I can’t read a car number. So that’s why I am a steward. Well, I think I bored you guys long enough.[01:26:00]

I got another one for you. Last weekend, I was invited to go down to the driver’s meeting at the Trans Am at New Jersey motor sports park. And by the way, if you’ve never been there and JMP should go, there’s two racetracks at that one location. Both of them are great racetracks. Anyway, I got invited down by Terry Dale.

The Operating Chief, Wally Dollenbach Jr. is the Chief Steward for the Trans Am. And I come down and be at their drivers meeting. And be their race marshal. I asked, driver meeting, okay, I’ll come in and say hello, you know, that kind of thing. And, a race marshal? I’ve never been a race marshal. What’s he have to do?

Nothing. I’m qualified. I went to the drivers meeting and as I was walking over to the microphone, they applauded. And I said, boy, that’s a first. I never got applauded at a driver’s meeting in my life. Anyway, thank you very much. I appreciate the opportunity to share some [01:27:00] fun I’ve had. Racing is people. And boy, that is a truth.

I have friends today that I don’t think I saw at a racetrack 30 years ago that I’m still in touch with. End of preaching.

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[00:00:00] BreakFix’s History of Motorsports series is brought to you in part by the International Motor Racing Research Center, as well as the Society of Automotive Historians, the Watkins Glen Area Chamber of Commerce, and the Argettsinger family. My name is Tom Wiedemann, and I’m Executive Director at the Motor Racing Research Center.

Today we’re going to learn about the exciting 50 years of Formula One racing at the Canadian Grand Prix, and we have three speakers with years of stories to tell. In order of appearance, we’re honored to be hearing from George Webster, Lionel Birnbaum, and Tim Meadow. So let me start with George. George was a Canadian Automobile Sports Club appointee to the Stewards Committee for the Grand Prix races during the most part years of the early Montreal years.

He was Chief Steward, chairing the Committee of Race Stewards from 1977 through 1980. He has attended 71 Formula One Grand Prix. George is a retired high school teacher from Oakville, [00:01:00] Ontario. He’s been working part time as motor sports writer and photographer since the mid 1970s. And he has covered road racing.

NASCAR, kart, and Formula One racing for the publications, including Autosports Canada, PRN Ignition, National Speed Sport News, and the website goracing. com. So, ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming our speakers, and we’ll start with George. So this year, we’re marking the 50th anniversary of the first Grand Prix of Canada.

That was held at Mosport in 1967. There’d been a race every year, this would have been the 51st running. But it’s actually only the 48th running because it was canceled three times in 19 75, 19 87 and 2009. Cancellation has been threatened two other times that I know of 2004 when the federal law prohibited tobacco sponsorship in the cars completely prohibited it.

And in 2017, this year, the organizers at Montreal had promised to do about $18 million worth of upgrades and had apparently done none of them. [00:02:00] And so that the race was under question. Now they. have been given a postponement for two years. 2019, they’re supposed to do those, that 18 million improvements.

So this year, the Canadian Post Office recognized the 50th anniversary of the commemorative set of stamps, honoring five GP winners, Jackie Stewart, Gilles Villeneuve, Erickson, Michael Schumacher, and Lewis Hamilton. All with the exception of Gilles, they were multiple winners of the Grand Prix. I think there would have been more appropriate subjects for them to recognize the Canadian Grand Prix, but I guess this is what they thought would sell.

So, I attended the first Grand Prix at Mosport in 67, and I was at the 48th running, uh, two weeks ago. I attended all eight GPs at Mosport, the next six in Montreal, and a few more since then. In all, I have attended over 70 Grand Prix, here and in Europe. Despite its European origins and identity, the Formula One Grand Prix of Canada has always been, without question, the premier auto racing event in Canada.

And there’s no other annual sporting event of any kind in Canada that has such an international reach. What might it [00:03:00] be? The Grey Cup? The Stanley Cup? The Brier? Only Canadians would know what that is, that’s curling. As for other race events in Canada, nearly all the other major… Auto racing events are visiting rounds of American based series.

By contrast, here in the United States, there are many annual race events which tend to overshadow the USGP, such as the Indy 500, the Daytona 500, 24 Hours of Daytona, and so on. 1967, 50 years ago. What do we remember? Well, here’s some things that come to my mind. It was Canada’s centennial year. We all remember Expo 67, which was staged in Montreal and on two islands.

Île Notre Dame, where the Grand Prix is held, was built as an artificial island completely. The other one was Île Saint Helens, was partly built. I’m from Toronto. The Maple Leafs won Stanley Cup that year. Ronald Reagan inaugurated as governor of California. That’s a long time ago. Probably remember that there were race rides that year in Detroit and many other U.

S. cities. The Beatles released their album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Band. In the movies we had Dustin Hoffman and The Graduate, Clint Eastman, and the movie A [00:04:00] Festival of Dollars. On television it was The Smothers Brothers. On Broadway it was Cabaret, and Hair was still off Broadway. But in our context, perhaps more significantly, was the movie Grand Prix was released late in 1966.

It was in Cinerama, which is like IMAX. Today, and it featured amazing in car racing footage, unlike anything we’d ever seen before. And it introduced the general public to Grand Prix racing, the circuits, the cars, the drivers. Some fictional and some real. So when the Grand Prix came to Motorsport in 1967, there was already a ready built, well informed fan base in place.

Pretty sports cars and their more humble economy sedans were very popular, and we lusted for the more expensive makes like Porsche, Jaguar, Mercedes. This was the foundation of the so called sports car movement in Canada as well as here. The number of sports car clubs in the 50s was exploding. The Canadian Automobile Sport Clubs, or CAC, was a federation formed of member clubs across the country, especially in Ontario and Quebec.

So CAC affiliated clubs had organized sports car races on the runways of former World War II air training [00:05:00] bases beginning in the early 1950s. There were at least five different airfield circuits that operated in Ontario in the pre most sport era. We got our news from magazines like Canada Track and Traffic and Road and Track.

Even though their long lead times meant that the racing news was pretty stale by the time we read about it. There were weekly papers like Competition Press and Motoring News, but few Canadians read either one of those. Companies like Castrol, Shell, and BP produced racing films, which the clubs borrowed to show at their meetings, and there was very limited television coverage of car racing at that time.

So the recent invasion of the Indy 500 by F1 stars, like Jack Graven, Clark, Gurney, Graham Hill, and Jackie Stewart, had given these drivers much more visibility. As we knew a lot about the recent history of sports car racing in Formula One, but we may not have been too up to date on the recent events of the current season.

With the large immigrant population, especially in Toronto, Montreal, we had a built in fan base of post war arrivals from Britain, Germany, and especially Italy. Watkins Dunn have been putting on the USGP here. Since 1961, and most sport, there have been professional races since its beginning in [00:06:00] 1961. The Players 200 and the Sports Car Canadian Grand Prix, and at San Jovita’s, we called it then, they also ran professional sports car races.

In 1966, both those circuits hosted rounds of the first year of the Can Am Series. Gerald Donaldson, who has become Canada’s premier Formula One rider, wrote a definitive history of the early years of the Canadian Grand Prix, and I found this book to be a valuable resource. The photos I’m using today have been scanned from contemporary publications.

Many of those photos are credited to Lionel, who you’re going to hear from next. And I know he’s going to be using some of the same photos I’m using in his presentation. And thanks to Bill Green for the use of his program collection, which I’ve made good use of. By 1967, we were ready to welcome a proper Formula One Grand Prix to Canada.

Early in the decade, there had been a couple unsuccessful attempts to get a Formula One race in Canada. One to be a championship event, and one to be a championship round. But those attempts failed. The 1967 event was approved as a one off event in recognition of our centennial year. Both Georgette wanted the event, but it went to Mosport.[00:07:00]

So here’s the starting lineup for the 67 race. There were 18 entries. There were two Canadians and two Americans in addition to Dan Gurney. That is, only 14 Formula One regulars, and few of those had proper three liter engines, as allowed by 1966 rules. The new Dulles 49, with the new Cosworth Ford DFB engine, had won the poll and the race in its inaugural race.

The Dutch GP a few weeks earlier. This engine was to revolutionize and dominate Formula One racing for the next several years. But I doubt many people at Motorsport had any concept of how significant this engine was, even though these Lotus cars proved to be the fastest to qualify. That’s the point I was making about the fact we got our news from Road and Track, which is much so years old sometimes.

The other potential winner was the Brabham Repco, the champion car from the previous year. It’s a light car with a reliable stock block V8 engine. Others like Ferrari, Maserati, and BRM had gone down the wrong track building big, heavy, and often unreliable engines. The rest of the car, the entries in the main were using bored out engine from the previous 1.

5 litre rules, trying to run in a 3 litre class, [00:08:00] or from the even older 2. 5 litre rules that ended in 1960. So here’s the starting grid. The two lotuses who are on the front row to the left there are out of frame. That’s Denny Holmes, Brabham, Repco in the front there. It was a rainy day, started in the rain, note the spray.

Also note that Clark is already three, four car lengths out ahead of everybody else. With Hill behind him and Holm off to the side there. Later in the race, here’s some more spray. That’s Gurney leading the eventual winner, Jack Brabham. Gurney ended up lapped down, so this is probably taken at the point when he was being lapped.

The two Lotus cars were the fastest, but they had troubles in this race. Notably, the ignition shorted out when the rain came down. And the Brabhams, who were on good gears, had a better pace when the surface was wet. Second half of the race, the rain came down quite heavily. And Lois’s were done for. Most of the drivers made pit stops to try to get dry goggles.

Only Jack Brabham had a relatively uneventful day. He cruised home to win by a margin of more than a full minute over his teammate Danny Holm. The only other driver to finish all 90 laps. [00:09:00] Journey was third, a lap down. There were 12 finishers, 5 DNFs. The two Brablins ended up winning, even though we consider them to be kind of underclass cars.

They had won the championship the previous year. They were to go on to win the championship in 67 as well. Best result for a Canadian driver went to Alpeze, who only completed 47 laps. Alpeze gets a lot of bad press. I remember Alpeze from when I got started in the late, latter part of the 50s. And in Ontario, he was a really well respected driver.

He drove MGA, MGA Twin Cam, MGB, Lotus 23, and was a successful driver. People tend to think he was over his head with his car. It was a car that had an old four cylinder Climax engine. I don’t think it was well prepared, and I think he just had a lot of bad luck. But it’s unfortunate because LPs, his name is mud when it comes to Formula One.

So it may not have been a classic race by any measure, but it was our Grand Prix. And it was our first F1 Grand Prix, and that makes [00:10:00] it iconic in the history of Canadian motorsport. Bob Hanna was one of the key figures, among many, in making this event a success. And he continued to play a key role as CESC’s Executive Director until its unfortunate demise in 1987.

He’s sort of Candace Cameron Argensinger. Cameron, of course, had many different important roles in the development of sports car racing in the U. S. here in Formula 1. And Bob was there right through 287. When CSE was booted, and he lost that role. Fortunately, he landed on his feet with another role. I’m gonna skip from there to Mont Tremblant and do the two years together.

Vinyl’s more familiar with these years than I am. Key thing was, up until then… CAC was not an ASN in its own right, only had the right as a affiliate of the RAC in Britain. And that’s why the racing colors were green, like Britain’s. There was a problem for Britain to get a second Grand Prix, even if it was in another continent.

So after the 1967 event, the FIA granted CAC full ASN status and the right to stage an annual Grand [00:11:00] Prix. And incidentally, at the same time, CAC changed its racing colors from green with white stripes to red with a white stripe. Racing colors kind of went out of style in those days. A lot of people aren’t even aware of that.

In this era of rapprochement between English and French communities in Canada, a decision was made to alternate the Grand Prix between Quebec and Ontario. That was happening in Britain between Brandon Satch and Silverstone, for example. So here’s the first race at Saint Jovit. Hosted the first Can Am race of all Can Am races in 1966.

Notice that they recycled the artwork from the year before. And the official name down at the bottom there is Surpix Mont Tremblant Saint Jovit. It had limited space in the paddock and the pits and limited vantage spots for the spectators. More importantly, it had a two lane road coming up from Montreal.

Jackie Eakes was driving for Ferrari that year. He crashed in practice and broke his leg. Our Prime Minister, Pierre Tudor, was a very popular Prime Minister, flew in by helicopter. I think that was exciting in itself. He waved the flag to start the race and he stayed engaged. to the end of the race. He [00:12:00] presented as a real fan.

Rint started from the pole in a Brabham Repco, but Chris Amon led the first 72 laps in his Ferrari. This is the only time when the cars had the high wings in Canada. And the 1967 champion, Denny Holm, starting from the third row, was the winner in McLaren Ford. I’m going to skip a year of Ford 1970, after a year back in most Ford.

where they put the picture of the new Tyrrell Ford double aught one. It was much anticipated, although nobody had ever seen one on a racetrack, on the cover. George Eaton, who is a sign of the Eaton department store family, the most important department store chain in Canada by far, bought a ride with BRM for a season and a bit, but he had limited success.

He finished 10th tier at St. Gervais, and that was his best ever result. By the way, Lance Stroll’s ninth place in this year’s Canadian GP was the best result ever for a Canadian driver, other than the two Villeneuves, Gilles and Jacques. Stewart in the Tyrrell showed up at the race, he qualified the pole he led for the first 31 laps, and he was motoring off into the [00:13:00] distance, says Donaldson.

On lap 32, he retired with a broken front stub axle. Remember, this was the great new car. The next two races here at the Glen and at the Mexican Grand Prix, he retired as well. There’s Ekes, 1980. He inherited the lead after Stewart retired, he’d run the race by 15 second margin over a Regazzoni and the other Ferrari.

Chris Amon in a March was the only other driver to finish in the lead lap. A year in between, 69, and then we jumped to 71 through 77 at Mosport. So this is the 69 interstitial race at Mosport. Jackie Eakes won the pole in his Bram Ford, while Jackie Stewart was fourth fastest in his Macra car with a Ford engine.

Eakes led from the start, but Stewart had caught him by the fifth lap, and he took the lead. After that, Eakes hounded Stewart, and on lap 33 of the 90 lap race, Eakes made an impossible move to duck inside Stewart, coming over the crest into the second turn. If you know most sport at all, that’s it. It’s the trickiest possible corner, and nobody should try to make this [00:14:00] maneuver, coming over the crest into two.

They collided, Stewart spun off and out of the race, but Ekes kept on going. Not a very popular guy. He won the race by a margin of 36 seconds over Jack Brabham in the other Brabham car. Rint in a Lotus was the only other driver to finish in the lead lap. So after this, the GP returned to St. Gervais in 70, and then it came back to Movesport.

in 71. Notice that the players still like recycling the artwork. And also notice the name, Players Grand Prix Canada. To me that’s significant because that’s not English, it’s not French. In French it would be Grand Prix du Canada Players. But it should be Grand Prix du Canada. And in English they call it Grand Prix of Canada to try to have the parallelism.

So I think this was an attempt to just fudge over that. 71, my biggest memory, was something I never saw. I was down at corner 5. There was a driver named Wayne Kelly who was, I guess, from the Ottawa area, who was a very popular driver and was, looked destined for stardom, and at least was in Canada. He was killed in an on track accident during the [00:15:00] Formula Ford race when he came over the crest between corners 1 and 2, ran into an ambulance, parked on the track, and was killed instantly.

When I questioned, do we really need these full course yellows on a road course, this instant would be one of the major… arguments early on to say, we’ve got to do something. Something is full course yellow. I hate those full course yellows on a road course, but I think this Wayne Kelly incident was one of the ones that is in the history of that.

So there was a long delay under Ontario law. The coroner had to be dispatched and he had to do whatever he does. By the time we were ready to start the Grand Prix, it started raining. So then they had a delay over that, but over two hours before the race got started. Wasn’t such a big problem in the pre television days.

By lap 60 of the 80 laps, the rain had turned to fog and darkness. So the race was flagged off after just 64 laps. Stewart and Peterson had shared the lead, but Stewart led the final 33 laps to take the checker. Peterson was second in a march, while Mark Donohue was third. Here’s my friend George Eaton again.

Finished 15th, and it was his last race with [00:16:00] BRM. And kind of his last race ever. By this time, he’d pretty well run through his inheritance, I believe. The department store, by the way, is long since defunct. It’s not just George Eaton that’s lost out, but he’d used his inheritance in racing. Maybe it was a good idea, because I guess the rest of the family just lost it through bankruptcy of the company.

472. Back at MoSport, CAC made the decision not to return to San Gervino as originally planned. It had been proved to be an unviable business proposition. Not enough spectators could get up that two lane road on race day. From my perspective, which was as a member of the National Executive, I see that that decision was essentially a CAC decision, even though most people try to place the blame elsewhere.

Ultimately, CAC just pulled the plug and said. We have lost a pile of money, whether players bailed them out or whether they had to bail themselves out. But CASC was on the hook for a huge amount of money and never went back to San Jovi. So CASC found a permanent home at Mosport and came [00:17:00] back in 72.

Publication was produced, I guess after the event. This is a driver’s meeting and I find it interesting partly ’cause I recognize most of the people, not just the drivers, but friends of mine are in that picture as well. This is at the foot of the tower as you go into the control towers. Anybody who wandered along could kind of cozy up at the back and listen in to the driver’s meeting.

So this race was also delayed by Fog Peterson led Stewart had start. Stewart had started from the second row, but after just three laps, he got passed for the lead and drove off in the distance that he won the race. Peterson continued to drive in his dramatic style, but he collided with Graham Hill, who he was laughing, and ended his day.

Peter Revson, who was a rookie that year in Formula One, finished second in the Yardley McLaren. In those days, you know, you didn’t have these half a second or three second gaps. Forty eight seconds back to second place. Aholm was third, also in McLaren. 1973. Interesting year. It was wet at the start, and I was sitting in the grandstand across from the pits as a spectator.

And the thing that struck [00:18:00] me most of all was this guy who started on the fourth row, dropped the flag and he’s gone, right into the first corner. I think he led into the first corner, Nicky Lauda, in his, I think his second year in Formula 1, first year with BRM. He did a lot better with DRM than George Eaton did.

Part of it had to do with the fact that they were on Firestone tires and a lot of the others were on Goodyears, and the Firestone rain tires seemed to be superior. In the wake of some serious accidents which had been inadequate rescue procedures, for example, the Roger Williamson fatality at Zandvoort earlier that year, the responsible officials had been talking about using a full course yellow in a Grand Prix for some time, and they had actually made a test run at an earlier event.

But this time it actually came to pass. Schecter and Saveir tried to run side by side down into turn two. Remember that with Eeks and Stewart? And Savert was crashed out of the race, check to continue. This was Savert’s final race. Watkins Glen people know this. 1973, Savert here was killed in practice. So he never [00:19:00] started the race here.

But this accident with the service vehicles that were out partially blocked the track, so they called out Effie Weitz’s in the pace car. Unfortunately, in that era of handmade lap charts, no one was quite sure who the leader was after most of the cars had pitted to change off their rain tires. So they told Eppie to pick up Houghton Ganley, a little while ago they thought he was the leader, I think he was a lap down.

So he came out in the middle of the lap. If the pace car comes out in the middle of the pack, the guys who were in front come around and make up a lap, and the people who were behind are trapped. So Fittipaldi was trapped behind Ganley, and these other guys go brrrrrrrr, and they come around. But the key people, who were the race control people, weren’t sure or didn’t know how to fix it.

After the pace car was called in, the racing resumed, confusion continued. So, here’s the scoreboard at lap 80, at the race. That’s Fittipaldi, number one. Number two is Ganley. Number three is Revson. Number four is Beltwaz. Understandably, Colin Chapman thought his guy had won the race. He runs out in the [00:20:00] track, throws his hat up in the air, but there was no checker.

Stardew Way, standing there, standing there. Finally, this group of Ganley, Halewood, Revson, and Hunt come around, and out comes the checker. And so they ushered these three guys, Fittipaldi, Rebson, and Oliver, to the podium, and they stood there with bemused expressions on their face, and the trophy was handed to Rebson, and they finally got a new Maple Leaf trophy there.

So, in the hours that followed, the lab scorers were able to recheck their work using the tapes that had been marked with the car numbers as they passed. It takes a few moments before the information written on the tapes is transferred to the actual lab chart. But it is an accurate, if a little bit slow, method.

So in the end, after they went through some hours of double checking, triple checking, they verified that Reveson was the race winner, Fittipaldi was second, and Oliver third. So it appears that when they took them to the podium, they already had a pretty good, rough version of this hand lap chart based on the tapes.

I think there’s about a maximum delay [00:21:00] in that process of about a lap. So they knew, but nobody was going to believe them until they went. Spent hours doing it. Deltas was fourth, and Ganley was sixth. So it’s no surprise that in F1 they got cold feet about the pace car. This is 73, and it wasn’t until 93 that they finally came back and established what we now know as the safety car procedure.

And of course, computerized lap scoring had been established for a long time by then. So you have, we all know now that the lap score, as soon as the car crosses the line, sometimes, I find it confusing, sometimes they are updating halfway around the lap. So, 1974, this is significant in that we have Andretti in a Parnelli, American made car, and Donahue in a Penske, another American car.

There’s the podium with Fittipaldi, the winner, Peterson and, uh, Reconzoni. He left here tied in championship points with Reconzoni, who had finished in second place. Fittipaldi finished fourth here two weeks later, but that was good enough to give him the title. 1975 is, nothing happened, but everything [00:22:00] happened.

And the iconic points in the history of the Canadian Grand Prix, this is one of the big ones. So there was no Grand Prix. Bernie Ecclestone, who had come in as the owner of the Brabham team, had talked to all the garages, that’s everybody, basically everybody but Ferrari, into having him negotiate a collective agreement on their behalf.

He was starting to turn the screw. He was involved in negotiations with both Moorsport and Watkins Glen. In August of 75. He set a deadline. This is Bernie’s stuff. There’s a deadline. That’s it. No compromises. I don’t know what was going on, but the most board people dithered a little bit and didn’t meet the midnight deadline.

Malcurry saw what was going to happen and decided he would accept Bernie’s terms. So he accepted Bernie’s terms. Most board people got up the next morning and Bernie said, Well, there’s going to be a Grand Prix at Watkins Glen and there’s not going to be a Grand Prix at most boards. Tough. I think that’s exactly what Bernie wanted.

Because he only lost one date off the calendar, but he had an object lesson that stood for every other Grand Prix organizer he was negotiating with. [00:23:00] Do what I say, or you’re screwed. I’m not going to compromise. Anybody else would have said, they’d come in the next morning and said, Sorry, we, we were confused.

We’ll sign now. Where do I sign? If you’re buying a car, you come in the next day, and you said, Yeah, I decided that was the price you’re, where do I sign? He would have said, Yeah, fine, you got a car. Bernie said, Screw you. Because Mosport was committed to run the date, and they advertised it, and they had all the sport races organized, they still ran the race, whether it’s the Grand Prix, and they call it the Grand Prix.

Terrible weather. One of the worst days of weather I’ve seen for a race event. So, we get to 76. At the start, Peterson is leading Hunt, but notice that they’ve got the low air box, and not the high air box. Hunt took the lead on the 9th lap, and basically drove home. General Donaldson wrote, Hunt won in convincing style.

But there was a great interest in Nicky Lauda, the leader of the World Championship. in only his second race after his near fatal Nürburgring crash. He finished 8th between Carlos Pace, who had a wild entanglement with Clay Ragazzoni in front of the pits, three laps from the end [00:24:00] of the race. So I was one of the stewards for that event, and Bernie decided he was going to protest that Ragazzoni had caused that crash, and hurt his driver’s chances, and so on.

Ragazzoni only spoke Italian in the meeting. So we had to translate everything, but he sometimes would forget and answer before the question was translated. So, anyway, we ruled that this was a racing incident, but… It’s a pretty common occurrence that he came in the corner 10 and you over cook it. It gets loose and you go wham, straight into the pit wall or almost into it.

Bobby Rahall had a really big crash there in the Can Am Cup. Anyway, we said, no, we’re not going to play your game, Bernie. You deal with that. It had something to do also, I think, with who was contracted who the following years. So, 77 was the final year at MoSport. Labatt’s had already made the decision to go to another venue the following year.

Aside from that, I don’t think there would have ever been another Grand Prix at Mostport after 77, even if they hadn’t already made the decision. Because on Friday, Ian Ashley took off the back straight, and I think he got about as high as the ceiling before he [00:25:00] landed. He landed, hit the top of the television tower.

Turned out that the rescue procedures… were solely lacking. Big point they made was that they had promised they would have a helicopter ambulance on site and they didn’t. You know, you got a couple marshals. Marshals are not trained to deal with an incident like that. You know, they’re not expected to deal with that.

But basically they went in there with hacksaws and their team, their crew rescued them. Terrible, terrible. People were really, really upset that. So, that was enough. So the next day, Yoke and Moss, coming out of 1 up here, overcooks it, hits guardrail, guardrail falls over. They look at the posts and they’re rotten.

I think that probably the driver’s back of the garage was in. Are we gonna run? Are we gonna pack it in now? So there was a lot, a lot of talk. I’ve read a couple different reports of how this transpired. What I do know, cause I was in the tower, from my vantage point in the tower, I do know that the clerk of the course, Paul Cook, agreed to a request to drive James Hunt around the [00:26:00] track and he interviewed Marshalls.

What are your qualifications? What is your experience? As if that had something to do with James Hunt. I was livid. I was livid. As far as I’m concerned, Paul Cook should have said to him, The FIA has inspected this course and approved it. If you have a beef, talk to the FIA. You can’t wait to talk to the FIA, talk to the stewards.

But… The fallout would have been that the track would never have been approved again for an F1 course. Little known fact, and I was in the tower, and I was in the tower during lunch hour when there was hardly anybody there. The telephone communication system was, I say, unreliable in my notes. It was out.

There was no communication system. But the whole of lunch hour, from the time we stopped, whatever we were doing, before lunch, to about 15 minutes before the green for the Formula One race, we had no telephone communications. I was the chief steward, and so I was rehearsing my lines to say, there will be no race.

You will not drop the green flag. Fortunately, I think it’s fortunate, I didn’t have to do that. I think everybody dropped the ball, not [00:27:00] including the FIA. I don’t think they should have approved it. If the course was that bad, they shouldn’t have approved it. And they should have an inspector there for the race.

On the bright side, Gilles Villeneuve had been signed with McLaren. And he went to Silverstone in 77 in the end of June, July. And he had a really good run. Really excellent run. He finished 11th, but had he not pitted because he thought his car was overheating, he probably would have finished 7th. Really excellent run.

Better than Jokerman, his teammate at that time. He had a contract. McLaren had also tested Patrick Tambay, who was a good driver. They went with Tambay for whatever reason. So here’s Villeneuve, just out of luck, just beach. So Chris Amon, who had been responsible for the Dallara Wolf Formula One car in 77 the same year, he called up Enzo Ferrari, who he worked with, who he’d driven for.

And said, hire Villeneuve. And they did. They hired him. With a full time contract as of 78. So when they got to Canada in 77, they had a third car for him. This was his debut with Ferrari. Right there, that 21 car. [00:28:00] Lauda had clinched the championship the week before here, and he was going to go to another team.

He was going to go to Brabham. As I understand it, they unceremoniously fired his mechanic here. Because he was going with him to Brabham, So Ferrari, before they left the track here, said Forget it, you’re done. So Lauda was totally pissed, and he said, I’m not, I’m done. That’s it. And he says, and on top of that, I’m not gonna run, you’re running three cars, you’re not gonna provide proper support.

I think that was just bullshit. But anyway, he said that. You’re running three cars, I’m not gonna run them if you’re running three cars. So he didn’t show up. Ferrari tried to protest Lauda because he had been entered in the event and then withdrawn without giving enough notice. Well, the team owner can’t protest his own driver.

I don’t think that’s possible. Anyway, that’s what we thought. We couldn’t see any way that Ferrari could protest Lauda because Ferrari was the entrant, not Lauda. They were really protesting themselves. So we just said, forget that. Villeneuve was running about ninth. He spun off an oil and turned ninth, and he retired.

He had finished [00:29:00] 11th in the McLaren at Silverstone. This is 77. Okay, that marshal on the ground, his name is Ernie Strong. So I was in the tower, Hunt was coming around, trying to catch Andretti, who was leading. He came up past Moss, I still can’t quite figure out, I think Moss was a lap down, but he finished in the lead lap, so I don’t know how that happened.

Anyway, he came by to go by Moss, and there was a miscommunication about which side he should have gone on, and he got knocked off, he hit the guardrail pretty heavily, and was kind of trapped in. He had to leave a shoe behind to get out. Ernie went, pull him out. Hunt is out. He’s presumably a bit dazed if he’s been, that had much impact.

And he starts to walk towards the truck. Eddie Marshall’s trained to know that driver might be confused when he gets out of the car. You’ve got to really kind of watch that they don’t do something stupid. When they start to walk towards the track, you’re going to restrain them. And if that doesn’t work, you’re going to restrain them a bit stronger.

Ernie goes to stop them from walking towards the track. I now know, from reading the biographies, that Hunt is tremendously volatile. So he just [00:30:00] swings. Tremendous haymen here. Knocks Ernie strong to the ground. Flattened to the ground. As stewards, after the race we dealt with it, Hunt was long gone, but we unanimously agreed to give him the maximum fine.

It wasn’t much, it was a thousand Swiss francs, which was kind of a joke now. That’s the worst we could do to him. We were really upset about it. So anyways, it turned out Andretti was leading 78 of the laps, but he stopped for lack of oil pressure. Jody Schechter, who was driving this Wolf car, which was running in Canadian livery.

Walter Wolf’s, uh, Austrian who made a lot of money hauling materials at Expo 67. So we were pretty happy that a Canadian car had won that race. Schechter had won twice before in that car. Even though he had seven retirements that year, he finished second behind Lauda in the championship standings. So, if I’d bought a program that year, which I didn’t, I would have discovered this graphic in the program, which said, next year’s race is at Toronto’s Exhibition Place.

That’s where the Indy, now called Honda Indy, is held. And it’s more or less the layout. So that was Labatt’s plan, was they were going to go to Toronto, and they were going to [00:31:00] have it there. There’d been an earlier plan to do that by a different promoter, and the people from Most Board had raised so much hell that they got the locals all riled up, and they convinced the councillors to vote it down.

So they come back here about five years later, and they want to run their own race, the Grand Prix. Well, most people remembered all those horror stories that had been told, and they convinced their councillors to turn it down. The story goes, the next day, Jean Drapeau, Montreal’s mayor, got on the phone to LeMats and said, Well, let’s go to Montreal.

Now, there’s a lot of legend in that. But, no question, it went to Montreal. It’s the same circuit, two different names, obviously it became Gilles Villeneuve after his death, and it’s still there this year. And it looks like it’s going to be there for quite a while, despite the little glitches. The contract with, now called F1 Group, Formula One Group, has been extended to 2029, and between the three levels of government, a promise of 100 million, which sounds like a lot, but in the way over that many years, 15 years, it’s actually not that much.

Here’s the site. of Expo 67. And [00:32:00] that’s where they built the track. Most of the buildings, if not all of them, are still there. The track portion that… This is the rowing basin back here. This is where the pits are now. This is kind of a lake that’s still there. This building is now the casino. That was the French Pavilion.

This was the Quebec Pavilion. It’s now been seemingly converted to be an extension of the casino. Pretty well everything else you see, with the exception of the U. S. Pavilion, this dome, and the bridge itself, is gone. Anyway, the track came along here, it went back up around this lake, and it came back along here.

under this bridge, deked like that, came up around, these buildings were pretty well gone, and then came around, back like that. So Roger Perk, he was a CASC officer and he was commissioned to find a location of the new circuit, and the obvious choice was Ile Notre Dame, and that’s an artificial island built for Expo 67.

This whole island here was artificial. So it was used also for Expo 67 and the 76 Olympics for the rowing. This location has proven to be an ideal one for the Canadian Grand [00:33:00] Prix. And even though I’m not a big admirer of Roger Peart, I think this is a major achievement on his part, and I think that we can all be proud of his achievement and congratulate him for it.

78. Andretti had won the championship that year with the Revolutionary Ground Effects Lotus 79. I meant to say this earlier, but the Cosworth engine made the 70s the greatest period in Formula 1 because everybody had the same engine, it was competitive, and even though there were a couple other engines.

The Cosworth engine was a winning engine, so many teams were very closely matched and there were lots of different winners. Ground effects was the next revolution. Lotus came up with it first, Andretti won in 79, and he’d already won the championship by then. However, you may also remember that when Andretti won the championship, he won it after Ronnie Peterson died as a result of an accident at Mons in the preceding race.

Andretti became immediately the champion, because Peterson was no longer a competitor. They got Jean Pierre Gerrier to drive the Peterson car, and he put it right in the front row with Jody Schechter there. [00:34:00] But here’s Gilles. This is his first year, full year with Ferrari. He’s in the second row, the third fastest car.

And Andretti, his car never ran properly. He’s way back. Gerrier and Schechter come firing off the front row, number 12 in the middle, the next row back, there’s Villeneuve. Jones got ahead of Gerrier, but he had a slow puncture, which moved Gerrier up to the lead. Schechter was in second, Villeneuve was third.

Mid race, Villeneuve passed Schechter to take second. That was like the second coming, when he got into second place. Huge roar. Jerry continued, was dominant, but he retired with an oil link and it left Bill Newb in no opposition. He continued to take his first career win in his home race ahead of Schechter with Royderman running third.

Nobody cares that if Jerry hadn’t dropped out that he would have won. Bill Newb won the race, the greatest Canadian racing hero ever, engraved in stone forever. I just say in my notes, and the crowd went wild. It was unbelievable. It was unbelievable. Before he came around the next time, on the Kulaf Lab, that fence was [00:35:00] down.

Totally down. And the crowd was coming straight out on the edge of the track. They knew the car was still on the track. They came out to the edge of the track. So there’s the results. The only one that counts is Villeneuve won. That’s it. We don’t care about anything else. Here’s my picture, which shows Gilles, the Prime Minister, and the man in the hat, who’s sort of responsible for it all, Jean Drapeau, the Mayor of Montreal.

Very controversially, all of these. He’d made Expo 67 happen. The Olympics end this race. Outsiders from outside Montreal thought, Oh, what, how much money is spent? How much of my money has gone into this? In Olympic Stadium, they took 30 years to pay for, and so on. But I think in Montreal, he was always a beloved figure.

He said that Expo 67 can no more lose money than I can get pregnant. Well, it lost money big time. Here’s the magazine I was writing for, Autosport Canada, and it’s a composite picture. But to me, that kind of represents the iconic form of the Canadian Grand Prix. of the [00:36:00] 78th Grand Prix of Villeneuve, Montreal, U.

S. Dome, the skyline in the background. This is sort of the impression that’s imprinted. Pete Lyons wrote in the magazine he was writing for the day, the Disney esque victory of Villeneuve must have cemented the future of the GP in the minds of Quebecois for many years to come. How true. So the development of the circuit on Ile d’Octodame was the right track in the right place.

Right up against the city. Despite changing ideas of what F1 track should be like, this track has aged well over the years, and Montreal has become a destination city for F1 fans. And with Gilles popular win in 78 and his success in subsequent years, although he never won the championship, of course, he has indeed made the Grand Prix of Montreal a great piece of Canadian heritage.

And this… 78 Race is the iconic Canadian Grand Prix. Jumping ahead this to 87, there was no race in 87. This had to do with conflict over sponsorship. [00:37:00] Lava had been the sponsor and signed a contract with C A S C. Somebody else had signed a contract with Molson. Bernie wanted to go with Molson ’cause there was more money I think.

So he refused to bring the cars to Montreal when there was Le Mans sponsorship. There was no race. There was a race in 88 under Molson sponsorship. Some other good came from this. CAC was disenfranchised, and a new ASN was created. We have an ASN that’s basically Bernie’s puppet. No other really fair way of explaining it.

ASN we have, Roger Pert is the chair, pardon my impotency towards him, is basically Bernie’s puppet. And a man by the name of Terry Lovell, who wrote a book called Bernie’s Game, he says, the FIA arranged the setting up of what was effectively his own Bernie’s. National Sporting Authority. And nothing has changed.

I don’t think even with Bernie retiring from Formula One management, I think he still controls the ASM. I won’t say any more for fear of being accused of libel. I could say some more libelous things than that. A good part of us was Bernie got what he [00:38:00] wanted, and he wanted to have a race in Montreal. And he wanted to make a lot of money out of it, and so everybody’s happy but me.

And the CSE loyalists. One of the things that we did get, they moved the pits. So, during 87, when there was no race going on, they built the new pit complex, which was a much better location. The only problem with that was the pit exit came out kind of awkwardly in the middle of that straight, which was a bad idea.

I don’t know quite how that happened. Those are the years that I was most involved. I, my involvement. Really, after Gilles was killed, it was Formula One, for a number of reasons, became much less. There’s been a lot of history since then. That’s my version of it. And I’m going to introduce Lionel, who’s going to come up and take over for me.

This episode is brought to you in part by the International Motor Racing Research Center. Its charter is to collect, share, and preserve the history of motorsports, spanning continents, eras, and race series. The center’s collection embodies the speed, [00:39:00] drama, and camaraderie of amateur and professional motor racing throughout the world.

The Center welcomes serious researchers and casual fans alike to share stories of race drivers, race series, and race cars captured on their shelves and walls and brought to life through a regular calendar of public lectures and special events. To learn more about the Center, visit www. racingarchives.

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For more information about the SAH, visit www. autohistory. org.

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[00:00:00] BreakFix’s History of Motorsports series is brought to you in part by the International Motor Racing Research Center, as well as the Society of Automotive Historians, the Watkins Glen Area Chamber of Commerce, and the Argettsinger family. My name is Tom Wiedemann, and I’m Executive Director at the Motor Racing Research Center.

Today we’re going to learn about the exciting 50 years of Formula One racing at the Canadian Grand Prix. In order of appearance, we’re honored to be hearing from Lionel Birnbaum and Tim Meadow. Lionel is a self taught photojournalist of Ottawa, and he began attending motorsports events in the late 1950s.

He was widely published in most major racing magazines and papers in Canada. Road and Track, Car and Driver, and Competition Press in the U. S., Autosport and Motorsport, and many other hardcover, softcover racing books, including both of Pete Lyon’s Can Am books. He recently self published The [00:01:00] Golden Years of Motorsports.

In Eastern Canada and the USA, a photographic journey from the late 1950s to the 1980s. It contains more than 2, 100 photos. Thank you, George, for an excellent presentation. And I would like to thank Glenda Gephardt and Tom Wiedemann of the IMRRC for inviting me to be a panelist on this prestigious discussion group celebrating 50 years of the Canadian Grand Prix.

And I mentioned George’s excellent presentation. As he indicated, many of the photos used in his discussion were photos taken by yours truly, and published in Jerry Donaldson’s excellent book, The Grand Prix of Canada, that covers the years 1967 to 1983. In fact, I’m very proud that of the 162 photos in the book, 50 were mine.

I became interested in cars in the mid 1950s. With the emphasis [00:02:00] on sports cars and racing. Road Track, Car Driver, and Competition Press were the Bibles in those days. And I still have more than 50 years of each of Road Track and Car Driver, much to the chagrin of my wife, Melanie, in the audience. Born in Montreal, my developing passion in sports cars led me to the sports car clubs, and specifically the Montreal MG Car Club, as it was the most focused on organizing races.

Not being able to afford to race, I quickly realized the next best thing to be in the thick of things was to become a racing journalist and photographer. It got me into the pits, as well as right up to the edge of the pavement of the track. Pure heaven, and I didn’t have to pay for an entry ticket. After several years of writing letters to racing newspapers and magazines, a few editors began to say yes, and some of my photos and reports were eventually [00:03:00] published.

My career as a racing journalist and photographer was launched. However, this led to my next epiphany. That although I loved the sport, the cars, the people, and the travel involved in racing, the chances of earning a living from the sport were very slim. I therefore became a professional accountant, and it solved two problems at once.

Namely, I could earn a steady, decent living, and also afford to indulge my passion. Born in Montreal and having lived there for 36 years, I was acutely aware of the constant rivalry between Montreal and Toronto, or, more broadly, the provinces of Quebec and Ontario. Whether it was our NHL hockey teams, pro football teams, Major League Baseball teams, and of course, sports car racing and the tracks.

Once they took to a sport, the French Canadians of the province of Quebec were very passionate about it, [00:04:00] and the relevant excellent stars that they developed. This year we’re marking the 50th anniversary of Formula 1 in Canada, and the first one having taken place in 1967. That year was also the 100th anniversary, or centennial, of the founding of Canada as a nation.

The 1967 celebrations of that milestone included Expo 67, the World’s Fair in Montreal that George mentioned many times, wall to wall festivals, parties, and unbridled joy and happiness throughout the city of Montreal. What a stark contrast to today’s world. Mosport is located about 60 miles east of Toronto, and was built in 1961, quickly became the leading purpose built road racing track in Canada.

In 64, it was Montreal’s turn, and the construction of Le Circuit Mont Tremblant, situated amongst the beautiful ski hills in [00:05:00] the Laurentian Mountains, was built 90 miles north of Montreal. The 67th Centennial, as it approached, the topic in the sports card clubs and CASC, the Canadian governing body of the sport, was to get on the calendar of the World Championship, or F1.

What better time to have the first F1 in Canada than in its centennial year? The lobbying and politicking between Mosport and Mont Tremblant was fierce, and eventually the FIA granted the first ever Canadian Grand Prix for F1 cars to Mosport in 1967. Mont Tremblant would get the race the following year, and in theory the two tracks would hold the Grand Prix in alternate years.

Reality and many factors soon set in, which George covered quite well. And unfortunately, Mont Tremblant and Mosport faded out of the picture. This was the [00:06:00] beginning years of my career as a photojournalist for racing and cars. A good friend of mine in Montreal was a chap called Bob McGregor. If not the first, possibly one of the very first to have a network show that went right across the country in Canada on radio.

It was 30 minutes of sports car racing and news and car road testing every Monday at about 6. 30 Monday night. He would have correspondents from throughout Canada, the States, and Europe reporting on all the major events. Bob, he called up Rolls Royce in Montreal one day and said, I’d like to do a road test of your car.

Can I get one? Somehow they foolishly agreed. And that particular weekend, much to the chagrin of Rolls Royce, they didn’t realize the car would be going to Watkins Glen for its U. S. Grand Prix. About 50 miles out of Montreal, Bob invited me along for the [00:07:00] ride, and I said, sure, why not? Bob got tired of driving it.

He said, this is a pile of crap. Lionel, why don’t you take the wheel? Sure, thank you. And I drove the rest of the way to the Glen. And as we’re coming down Highway 14 from Geneva, I pulled over the side of the road. I said, Bob, I want you to get into the back seat on the passenger side. No, Lionel, I’m not.

Bob, do it. He listened to me. He didn’t know what I was going to come up with, but it was going to be some fun. The Glenn Motor Court, as probably most of you know, is on the hill coming into town here in the Glenn and was one of the centers of F1 racing throughout the years. The teams would book it this year for next year, completely sold out a year in advance.

I drove up in the driveway of the entrance to the Glenn Motor Court. Jumped out of the car of gorgeous, gorgeous burgundy with the tan leather interior and went around to the rear [00:08:00] door, opened it for Bob to get out. For those of you that know it, there’s a little bit of a driveway that comes in right at the front door of the office.

And immediately next to it is a great big picture window of the office. Naturally this car got a bit of attention as we rolled up and my role of getting out and opening the door for Bob sort of enhanced it a bit. And he went into the office and said, I would like a room for tonight. Plain dumb that the Grand Prix was on that weekend.

They fell over themselves apologizing that the place was full. They must have spent over an hour on the phone calling every available hotel, motel, B& B within a hundred miles of here. And eventually found a place for us. We then drove into town. Found a parking spot on Franklin Street, which was amazing.

Parked the car, and Bob took his tape recorder out, standing beside the car, doing radio interviews, and for some reason, the only people interviewed were [00:09:00] these very cute, young looking girls. Thank you, Rolls Royce. From there, this is the aerial view of Mosport in 1973 at the Can Am, and you can see basically the outline of the track.

And this is the Mont Tremblant aerial view, the actual inaugural Can Am in 66. Now, there’s an interesting story to this aerial view. The promoters hired a helicopter for the press to take them up and take aerial views of the track. The pilot tried to be very obliging and took off the passenger door of the helicopter.

As we lifted off, I’d never been in a helicopter in my life, but I said, wow, this is fantastic. He went around the track a few times, and we were talking back and forth. He kept asking me where would I like to take the pictures from, where to shoot, how to position the helicopter. And he got to the end of the track, and just hovered at the hairpin at the end, and tilted the [00:10:00] helicopter a good 30 degrees, so I could take my picture.

I was holding on to the frame of the doorless opening with one hand, my two feet braced against the dead pedals, and clicking away with the camera with my free hand. I’m very fortunate, I don’t have a fear of heights. This is Graham Hill, spun out in the wet, got out of the car, and started pushing it down the track, jumped in, and somehow got it restarted.

An event in the rain that you’ll never see today. The drivers in those days were very approachable. You could go up to the drivers, whether you’re pressed or not. Nobody was a prima donna. This was an image right here in Watkins Glen at the old pits. Joe Bonnier on the left, Roy Salvadori on the right. And they were having a casual game of cards in between qualifying and practice and whatever.

1960. 61, the card game continues. You’d never see [00:11:00] this today. John Surtees became one of my favorite people in motor racing. In 1965, John had a horrendous accident in a Lola T70, the pre Can Am car at Mosport. It was life threatening. Miraculously, he recovered before the Formula One season started in 1966.

And the inaugural Can Am at Mont Tremblant was September of 66, a year after this horrendous accident. I was out, as usual, around the track shooting. My then wife was on top of the control tower at Mont Tremblant for VIP spectators and was standing next to another lady during this practice session and qualifying and she just said, not knowing who this person was, Isn’t it wonderful to see John back in a car again?

The other lady turned to her and said, Thank you. And my former wife [00:12:00] didn’t know what to take from that and said, what do you mean? Well, I’m Pat Surtees. The rest of the afternoon, they conversed back and forth. And at the end of the afternoon, when I got back from shooting on the track, I came back to the pit area.

Met my former wife there. And she said, I want you to meet somebody. That somebody turned out to be John Surtees. He was the most humble man. The most ferocious man behind the wheel. And yet, he was a complete gentleman. And from that point on, every race that I went to that he was at, I made a point of going to say hello to him.

Whether it was a Can Am, whether it was a Formula One, or anything else. Fast forward to 1987. My new wife, who’s in the audience, And I decided we’re taking a vacation trip to England. About a week or two weeks before that, it was one of these London show tours that you bought a week’s package and everything was arranged.

But we were gonna add on [00:13:00] about ten days prior to that week of just touring around the countryside. I called up John. I said, You probably don’t remember me. I’m sure you see hundreds, if not thousands, of press people and photographers over the year. But I was at Mont Tremblant, Mosport, and Watkins Glen.

Spoke to you quite often. We’re coming over to England for a vacation. If it’s at all possible, I’d love to stop by, have a cup of tea with you and my wife. And no photography, no story, no interviews, nothing. Just a personal chat. He said, by all means, give me a call when you land here and I’ll tell you what’s going on for my day.

An overnight flight from Montreal. We landed about 5 or 6 o’clock in the morning, got our rental car. Fell asleep in a parking lot somewhere and about 9 o’clock woke up and I called John. We’ve arrived, we’re here, we’re at the airport. I’m tied up till 4 o’clock, he said, but please come by then and he gave me the directions.

John lived [00:14:00] on a spectacular estate just out of London. I believe it was about 90 acres in total. All kinds of ponds with swans in them. And just an incredible, incredible place. He welcomed us as a real gentleman. We had a lovely chat. He said, would you like to see some of my toys? Of course. And he took me over to one of the buildings beside his home that had, I don’t know, about a dozen varieties of Ferrari.

And I was just drooling all over every one of them. And then he said, oh, let’s go to the next building, open the door, and here’s all his world championship motorcycles. I was absolutely blown away that this man, this god in racing, would welcome me so openly and treat me so beautifully. We went back to the house, and he explained that the oldest part of the house was from the 13th century, and the newer wing was from the 15th century.

He would love [00:15:00] to have us stay overnight, but the guest suite is being renovated. But please come back when you’re through your touring outside of London. Before you go to London, we’ll invite you for dinner. I thanked him profusely. I said, absolutely, we would do that. And he said, by the way, I’ve arranged, since I couldn’t put you folks up here tonight, there’s an inn down the road, the Henry VIII Inn, a bed and breakfast.

We got there, the place was amazing. Again, I thanked him profusely. We were ushered into the Anne Boleyn room, one of the eight wives, I guess. Everything was wall to wall red velvet. It was mind blowing. Went down for breakfast the next morning, had a lovely English breakfast. And we were ready to check out.

I went down to the front desk. I said, I’d like to settle my bill. Oh, that’s quite alright, Mr. Birnbaum. Mr. Sirtis has taken care of this. My jaw dropped to the floor. I just couldn’t believe his hospitality. I don’t claim or pretend to be a [00:16:00] media star, but this was just overwhelming. We went and did our thing for the next 10 days, came back, called up John.

I said, we’re through touring and if you’d like we could come by. You suggested the possibility of dinner. He says, yes, we have it all arranged. Please come by. His formal dining room must have been 50 to 75 feet long without exaggeration. Longer, almost as long as the entire auditorium. And the table was the full length.

He had set one place for himself and his new wife, Jane, who happened to be the nurse that nursed him through his recovery of the accident at Mosport. He was set up at the far end of the table and had Melanie and I set up at this end of the table. We all had a great laugh out of that. And then he moved the two play settings down and we had a wonderful dinner.

Wonderful chat back and forth. I was just overwhelmed. And this is the kind of driver and superstar in motorsport [00:17:00] that I don’t think exists today. These were truly the golden years. He was amazing. As a professional accountant, I am acutely aware that at the end of the day, dollars and the economics greatly impact each and every endeavor, and eventually drive the direction of its development, no matter what it is.

This fundamental concept was certainly true in our beloved sport a half century ago, and still today. Notwithstanding all the enthusiasm for Mosport and Mont Tremblant, as the years unfolded, it became apparent that neither of those tracks were financially viable, nor could they meet the rapidly escalating costs of a Grand Prix weekend.

Fortunately for us all, the municipal, provincial, and federal politicians, Montreal, the province of Quebec, and the federal people in Canada, miraculously agreed on one thing and the Canadian Grand Prix found a permanent home in Montreal in [00:18:00] 1978. It is still held there today and will be into the foreseeable future.

It has been reported that well over a hundred thousand spectators pay to see the race on race day in Montreal and the week long activities that go on and the parties and all the closed streets events in downtown Montreal Generate some 90 million dollars for the city’s economy. Numbers that neither Mosport nor Mont Tremblant could ever match.

So I’m getting into some of the drivers in Canada, the manufacturers, the teams. A gentleman in Montreal called Peter Broker, who sold and manufactured performance exhaust systems for sports cars and sedans in the late 50s, early 60s, called the Stebro exhaust system. And he built a Formula Junior called the Stebro Formula Junior.

In those days, the Formula Junior specs [00:19:00] were very close to the F1 of that season. And he did whatever mods he had to do, entered it here at Watkins Glen, was accepted. So really, this is the first Canadian built Formula One car that ever raced. The next gentleman is Peter Ryan. His father had a hotel, a ski resort, in the Mont Tremblant area way before the track was built.

His father was from Philadelphia, Joe Ryan, an American. Peter was born in the States, but grew up in the Mont Tremblant area. He was a downhill ski champion. And was incredibly fast, won many Canadian championships. And the year that the Olympics came up, there was a great controversy as to whether he could enter the Olympics as a Canadian or an American.

Eventually he didn’t race in the Olympics and he turned to cars, fortunately for us. So Peter, in the early [00:20:00] 60s, he had a Porsche 550 RS as his first toy that he drove around the twisties in Mont Tremblant. And the skiing helped him to feel whatever was under him that was on the edge of adhesion. and developed his control and his talent of the car enormously from that skiing exercise.

He had the Porsche RS, then he got an RS60. He had a tremendous dice with Roger Penske at Lime Rock. Roger then had a Birdcage Maserati, and they had a tremendous dice the entire race. Roger won it, Peter was second. Roger invited Peter into the car for the flag victory lap. The sportsmanship was fantastic in those days.

Peter then got a Lotus 19, came to Mosport before there was a Formula One, but they called it the Canadian Grand Prix. Sterling Moss was there in a similar Lotus 19. I believe the first year they called it a [00:21:00] Lotus Monte Carlo. Pedro Rodriguez had a three liter Ferrari, a V12, and there was a number of other international stars.

Peter won the race, beating Moss, put on an enormous show. His talent was fantastic. Colin Chapman heard about it, and signed him up to have a season in Europe in the Formula Junior Lotus Series. That was just the developing stages for Formula One. Things went awry, and long story short, in one of the races at Reims in France, Peter was killed in that car.

He would have been one of the first Canadian superstars, without a doubt, but we lost him before we had a chance. The other people that have competed or been in Formula One, Bill Brack in the high back wing car, I believe it was the Lotus, competed three times in the Canadian Grand Prix, and they were all rent a rides.

Epi Weets was a rent a ride in one of the years, and under the [00:22:00] auspices of Team Canada. Al Pease, that George mentioned, had a ride in Formula One, and didn’t show too well. George Eaton, he bought a ride with BRM, and he didn’t show too much in his various years. Phil Villeneuve’s brother, Jacques, not his son, and he tried on, I think it was two occasions, in the Arrows, to qualify for the F1 in Montreal, and he just wasn’t fast enough.

But he did try. The last race at Mosport in 1977, and George mentioned this, Jody Schechter won it in the Wolf. Walter Wolf, who was originally from Austria, made a fortune with oil drilling equipment before he moved to Montreal, became a car enthusiast that went on to building his own car. He bought up 60 percent of the Williams team [00:23:00] that year, and the team that James Hunt was involved with was going out of business, so he bought up the assets of that, and that became the basis of the Wolf team.

Here we are in Montreal, Jill in the Ferrari and the wolf behind, and I believe that’s Kiki Rosberg, whose son, Nico, won the World Championship last year. Jill Villeneuve in his younger days, very personable, very down to earth individual. He started his career on snowmobiles and snowmobile racing. And like Peter Ryan, he felt the edge of adhesion and control.

On ice and snow, and that brought him into four wheels. He started with a Formula Ford, and he immediately began winning races. Moved up to Formula Atlantic. He was fearless. Nobody would push him off the track. Nobody would gain an inch on him if he could avoid it. And he went on to bigger and better things and [00:24:00] eventually Formula One.

Jody and Joe were teammates for Ferrari. They were the best of friends. Jody referred to him at his funeral in the eulogy as one of the fastest racing driver in the history of motorsport. He was absolutely adored in Quebec. He grew up in Montreal, or just east of Montreal, in Bircherville. The next year in Montreal, Alan Jones won the race, and they had a fantastic race.

There was no trying to push anybody off the track. Good, clean racing, wheel to wheel racing. Alan won it, and he wanted to hold Jill’s hand up to say he deserves a lot of the applause as well. Great friendship, great sportsmanship. Gilles never gave up, never quit. He would just keep going, he’d beat the hell out of a car, he’d extract the absolute best you could ever get out of a car, and this is what made him such an amazing driver.

And young Jacques, his son, that later got [00:25:00] into Formula One and actually won the World Championship. Of the 40, 000 images I have in my historic collection, this, without a doubt, is my absolute favorite. Gilles winning, his hands up, the flag, the banner. The crowd behind and I must admit that I had a bit of a, an input into how the picture was put together.

I went to the flag marshal about five or ten laps from the end and it looked like Joe was pretty certainly going to win it. I said, look, don’t start waving the flag when he’s a half mile down the track. I want you to time it so that you just about hit him over the head with the checkered flag as he crosses the finish line.

I went down about a couple of hundred feet from the finish line, got right up at the guardrail, pushed people out of the way, I didn’t give a damn. I was gonna get this picture. It’s my absolute favorite, it’s been on magazine covers, it’s in my book. It just tells the whole story. And now we’ll go to just some wrap up [00:26:00] pictures.

A very early portrait of Jim Clark. Phenomenal racer. You could see the difference in the helmets, the face goggles. The so called driving suit. I don’t even know if it was fireproof in those days. This is about 1960 or 61. Here is Bruce McLaren in one of his early races. This is an overhead of Jackie Stewart in the BRM.

And this was technically called an H 16, I believe was the designation. A 16 cylinder motor. This was a race at Mont Tremblant, one of the double winged, split in the middle and flexible, and that’s the smaller front wing. And this was the only split wing in the rear, I believe. The strut went right down to the suspension member on both sides, whereas the other ones would go straight to the frame.

And what that did, as the rear suspension on one side moved, half of the rear wing could move in the same [00:27:00] direction. The double wing cars and the high wings were gone the next year, but for the techies, I guess they love that kind of picture. Jackie Stewart in his earlier days, in his famous cap. Jackie Ickx winning the event at Mont Tremblant.

Denny Youn. This was the start of one of the races at Mosport. I forgot to mention that with Jill. I happen to be up in the press room. and was watching as they came around this almost 90 degree turn onto the pit straight. Joe was in a Formula Atlantic pre F1 days, and he lost it. And as Sterling Moss said, you don’t know if you’re going fast enough until you lose control of the car, and then you’d know you’ve gone over the line.

Joe would test that just about every race, every day. He lost it coming around onto the pit straight. This was not a wall at that time. It was just a barrier dividing the track from what was the pit just behind it. And I looked down at the track, and Joe [00:28:00] came around, did a complete 360, and was backing into the barrier, dividing the track from the pits.

And I was looking down at him, and I saw his hand grab the shift leader. Before he stopped rolling backwards, he had it in first gear, he glanced down the track to see if anybody was coming, let the clutch out, and went screaming down the track. I don’t think that entire episode lasted two to three seconds, but it’s been burned in my memory ever since.

What he could have done, and the timing, was just phenomenal. Colin Chapman on the left, and Ken Tyrell chatting in the pits very casually. Two superstars, very well known people. Roger Penske and Mark Donnie. What an amazing pair that just had the most incredible marriage in terms of the driver, the car, the team owner, and what they could do together.

Then we have the first and only six wheel car ever to race, the Tyrrell. I believe that was [00:29:00] Patrick Depay at Mosport. He’s just coming into the pit lane. James Hunt, I was experimenting with some very tight close up shots as they whizzed by, and panning with the camera, even with the good speeds of the lens in those days.

Sometimes I was on with the focus, and sometimes I wasn’t, more often than not. But this time I was on and it’s a beautiful picture. Nicky Lauda in the Ferrari. Alan Jones in the Williams. But that’s one of the enormous sculptures that was on the site in Montreal at Expo 67. And was there for a long time.

I’m not sure if it’s still there or not. 79 in Montreal. Alan Jones won the race. And went on the victory lap with the flag. This is a picture I enjoy, not because he wrecked the car, but Rene Arnoux and the Renault Elf stuffed it into the guardrail, got out and started walking away, and I just caught that expression on his face.

Oh my goodness, what have [00:30:00] I done? My French is lousy. Unfortunately, this picture doesn’t show everything, except the drag strip that’s going down pit lane at Mont Tremblant, and it says, Happy Motoring. And that is my presentation. Thank you. Applause

And now, I’ll introduce Tim, and it’s his turn. Okay, turning to Tim. Tim was a pit and paddock marshal as well as a flagger for four years of mass sport. He then worked as a flagger at every station in Montreal until his last race in 2012. Overall, he has worked at 65 Formula One races in Canada or the United States, including the first United States Grand Prix at Austin in 2012.

Since I came back from Germany in 1967, I’ve flagged for the first Canadian Grand Prix. I went up intentionally just as a spectator because I’d only got back into the United States the [00:31:00] Friday before. So, I missed the U. S. Grand Prix that year because I was mustering out at Fort Dix. I got up to Canada and bumped into the paddock marshals.

The one in charge knew me from Europe and invited me to be a paddock marshal for the weekend. Sure, why not? At that time, they were called Perry’s Merry Men, and I got to look after the Ferrari team for the weekend. Good start. Didn’t know anything about that part of racing. At that time, I was… I’d driven race go karts when I was a kid, and did a lot of high speed stuff in Germany.

But I had the opportunity to get involved. The following year, they’d gone to St. Gervais, did Perry’s Merry Men for that one again. But in the meantime, I’d become a flagger in the U. S. I did two years as a paddock marshal, and then I flagged all the rest of the races at Mosport. I actually [00:32:00] flagged every station at Mosport, too, in different categories.

In F1, I worked Station 2, the day the Ernie Strong and James Hunt thing happened. And Station 2 3 is where it happened. James Hunt was upset because he had been punted off. He didn’t go off on his own, he was helped. And James wanted to punch out the helper. And that’s when Ernie Strong tried to grab him and prevent him from doing that.

James just came around and knocked Ernie down and I kind of just chuckled. I said, Ernie, you weren’t paying attention. Ha, ha, ha. That turn is a blind, hellish turn. You go through two and drop down. You go into no man’s land. And in six hour racing up there, there had been a few fatal accidents where somebody went over the hump, went all the way out to the guardrail, [00:33:00] which was almost 150 yards away, and still got killed.

I’ve been involved in an awful lot of that type of thing in my years. In the early era of racing that we’re talking about the most part, we were losing two drivers and two flaggers every year. And that was basically all of the late, late 60s, early 70s, all the way through almost to the end of the 70s.

That ratio was keeping up throughout the world, you know, I mean, it was a dangerous game. But I still loved it. Maybe I’m not all here, but taking risks, doing that type of danger, is the only reason I wanted to work Formula 1. And it’s the only reason I’ve done 65 Formula 1 Grands Prix as a flagger. Two is a paddock marshal.

One is an intelligent observer. Somebody that’s helping corporate. That wasn’t in Canada. After [00:34:00] Mosport, we went to Montreal. I don’t remember when these bibs started, but I have 10, 11, 12, and I know I’ve got a lot more, but they’re not stored in any particular order. All the ones I brought, these are Canadian.

The reason we got these, those numbers, the TV camera can pick them up. Very easily. So if you do something bad, you’re never coming back. And you might even be fined or kicked out of Canada. We had one flagger that picked up a piece of a car at an accident scene. Wasn’t a valuable piece. Wasn’t worth anything.

But he was asked to leave Canada and never come back. Heh heh heh. These bibs serve a purpose. And it’s not what you’d think. You know, Sitting here, I realized, Even though this is an aerated fabric, it looks, They’re hot! Now that I think about it, I remember that from wearing them. No matter how good your, uh, Flag [00:35:00] suit was, and, Of course I flagged with full Nomex, That’s hot.

But you put this on and it’s even hotter. I did every race in Montreal up through 2013, except for the one year that the two Canadian governing bodies couldn’t get along, and they decided that they were going to hire flaggers of them off the street in Montreal, and all of us real flaggers. Got a free grandstand seat at the grandstands that had just been built inside the hairpin.

Those grandstands are now, you know, people have to order the tickets a year in advance or more to get them. Because that’s a very valuable seat. The ones around the outside, they’re valuable, but nothing like the one on the inside. The only people in that set of the grandstands were QRFA flaggers. The people that normally would have been flagging.

The Formula One [00:36:00] drivers. were well aware of the situation, so they would only rely on the blue flagging that was being done from the grandstands in that turn. The rest of the track, they just took it easy that year. They weren’t going to make any mistakes, they weren’t going to do anything that would risk getting hurt, because they knew there was nobody looking after them.

D. D. Perroni was still the head of the GPDA at that time. And he stopped in the morning warm up and got out of his car and came over and stood and waved to the flaggers in the grandstands. Because he knew that’s where we were. He just wanted us to know that he knew we were there and he was going to pay attention to us.

It was a good feeling. Formula One drivers are far and away the most observant to work with. These bibs, some of them are chief deputy post or chief post. But this is blue flag marshal. [00:37:00] That’s actually the most important flagger in the business. The chief post is important because he’s running the station.

But the blue flagger is the one who saves the driver’s life. He’s the first one to go to a crash. We see it coming, developing, we know it’s gonna happen right there. Because… We’re the ones looking into the driver’s eyes as they’re coming into our turn. Where most everybody else in the turn is panning, watching traffic go by.

We’re concentrating on the eyes of the cars coming at us, and the cars behind them. And we’re listening, so we know where every car is. A good blue flagger knows where every car is on a racetrack all the time. There are a lot of blind turns, especially at Montreal. 4A, 5, 6, 7 complex. Coming down at the back straight, it’s where, uh, there’s been several accidents over the years.

You will only get to see the car that you’re gonna blue flag for 4. 3 seconds. In [00:38:00] that amount of time, you have to know where the car is that just came out of 4, or is by 4A, that’s enough faster to where he’s going to lap this guy coming into 6. So you don’t have much time to do this. You don’t really see the cars.

You have to hear them. You have to know who’s who. And when they start pit cycle, you have to pick up on all the pit cycles. Luckily, now, they do give the Blue Flagger, uh, radio. When they first started giving Blue Flagger’s information, they would say, Blue Flag 18. We don’t know car numbers, you can’t see car numbers on the Formula One cars up until two years ago, they finally put numbers on the front of the car, to where you can actually see the number.

We just know the helmets and the car. We get a cheat sheet, which has a picture of every car and every helmet. And we memorize that. Because there’s only 22 cars. [00:39:00] We can handle 22. Alright, the Gerrier race that Villeneuve won, that was fairly a dry race. The next year was an awfully wet race. And Gerrier was driving for Ligier.

and ran away and hid. We were still running on the original, the first track, before they changed and put the, uh, casino in. When they put the casino in, two turns changed drastically. There was a chicane at the beginning of it, the elevation changed up to where the casino was, and then the drop down and the right hand turn after that were gone.

They were really the two nicest turns on the track. Artful turn, going up a hill, down, and they were gone because of the casino. Jerry A. did that race, the whole race, in a pouring rainstorm. It was still September, October, so it was cold, [00:40:00] like 43 degrees. It was really neat because I was working that station, which at that time was, the hook at the bottom was station 3, because the old start finish used to be where 12 is now.

They had one year where they had an endurance race. I’ve never gone up for the NASCAR ones they ran there, but they were in the wet. You know, watching it on TV, they were great races. Because NASCAR doesn’t race in the rain, and they proved they could. But, I’ve worked every station at Montreal. As you go through most of those turns, it’s a chicane to a straightaway, chicane to a straightaway, chicane to a straightaway.

The speeds coming into the last turn before start finish, if you watch it on TV, what the car is doing when he makes up his mind to go in the pits or stay on the race course, they’re at 182 miles an hour. They make that chicane at 65. [00:41:00] If they want to go in the pits, they can go straight into the pits at 98.

Until they get past the speed drop point, where they have to be down to 75, which is race day speed in the pits. Earlier, on Friday and Saturday, pit speed is like 35 or 40, depends on how they set it. They program the car so the driver just pushes a button that he’s going into the pit. When he pushes that button, it almost turns the engine backwards to stop it.

The driver doesn’t have to use much brakes. It just stops itself. The fuel filler comes up when they were doing fueling. Soon as he hit that button, down the car goes, and up comes the door. Now, of course, they’re back to real racing where they run the full race on 57 gallons of gas. As opposed to when they were refueling, they never carried more than 35 at the most.

You know, that’s extra weight. But you [00:42:00] think about them today. They start the race with 57 gallons of fuel. 57 times 8. By the end of the race, that car has lost 300 pounds. So that’s why the fastest laps are always set. Right near the end, and who’s gonna do it? Kimi Raikkonen always does it. He’s the best at waiting till the car is light to get the maximum out of it.

But he almost always sets the fastest lap of a race. He doesn’t win any races because he’s not allowed to. He’s the number two man on the team. And that’s Formula 1. Let’s see, what else do we know about Mossport? I’ve been there for several bad accidents. You don’t like to think about, but it comes up every once in a while.

Somebody wants to talk about an accident that happened at the start. I’m well versed in it. Didier Perroni was the bullsetter. And Riccardo Pellevi was the unfortunate who was dead last on the grid. And [00:43:00] couldn’t see the waved hands from Peroni. Blew his clutch on the start, and he’s waving his hand.

Everybody else could see it, but the person way at the back tried to follow. That shut us down for an hour and a half. Those type of things happen in racing. But anymore, it’s, you know, it’s been a long time. The day that… Senna was killed. I was working one of the last nationals at Bridgehampton. We had, I think, four last nationals at Bridgehampton before it finally stopped.

That was Formula One’s last real fatal until two years ago, when the guy ran into the cherry picker that was out moving a vehicle. And they were under a full course caution when he did it. He obviously forgot where he was or what was going on. And it’s too bad, we lost a good young man. We have to be there within 12 seconds.

If the car’s on fire, you’ve only got 12 seconds to save his life. That fire suit is only good for 12 seconds in a [00:44:00] 57 gallon fuel tank. Gasoline burns pretty hot. At least we can see it. Unlike Indy cars, where you can’t see the flame, there you can only look for white driver suits that turn brown. Or you look for the heat wave.

Then you know things are bad. But, as Sterling Moss said over here one year when we had the legend speak, he said, racing is too safe today. People don’t realize how dangerous it really is. And as someone who’s been very close to the danger all these years and picked up too many pieces, I still love the sport, and I love it the way it is meant to be.

And I’m sure some of you have some questions. I’m trying to remember the year in Montreal that Bobby Rahal drove and it had an incident on Friday and damaged his car. The team had a car that was an older car on display downtown in a [00:45:00] shopping mall or a hotel lobby, and they had to go get it. And he raced that car.

They worked all night. I didn’t have to go bail him out, so it wasn’t my problem. I was probably there. I think I’ve heard the story now that you mention it, but I have no idea what was behind it. Did he race twice there or just once? Maybe it’s 79. Definitely once. Yeah. Again, I’m hazy on the… It was with Walter Wolf.

78, because the results I showed… Yeah. 10 on the field there. Yeah, it was one of those two years, but the car was damaged heavily, and they had a display car in, uh, I think it was a hotel lobby, and they had to go get it, and truck it out to the track, and change the motor, and put a transmission in it, and they worked all night to get him to qualify.

It was on display at the museum, 80 miles up the river. So they had to run to the museum and grab it. What do you think of the updates? Mossport, last couple years. Guardrails, moving the meeting center over the wall. You know, the other side of the track. The extension of the pit lane, moving [00:46:00] the victory lane circle.

As you mentioned, the control tower is now on the outside of the last turn. The presentations are way off at the end of the paddock near turn one. Turn two. That goes down and drops off Camber and continues up the hill if you get through that part of it has a huge runoff now. The S is coming into the final 90 degree onto the pit straight has been opened up tremendously for people that don’t survive the S.

There have been a number of… Paul came around the S’s, and it’s a left hander before you do the right hander onto the pit straight. His back end came around, and he was 90 degrees faced to the guardrail, right where the tunnel was. And I have a picture, it was way out of focus, but I have this little tiny image going straight up in the air as it was launching.

The car went over the guardrail and landed upside down. He survived with, I think, a broken arm. But [00:47:00] that tunnel is now widened to two cars wide. It used to be one, and there was one way traffic at that time. My comment, for the first part of your question, the new ownership built new buildings on the outfield side.

It’s primarily for hospitality. Decided that they would make one of the rooms function as a media room. And I know this is inside baseball, but for you and I, it’s a disaster. You can’t see anything, hardly at all. The PA people are there, they can’t see anything. If you’re going to report on the race other than just off the television screens, you have to get across the little bridge, over into the paddock.

The podium is another half mile away. It’s just a disaster. I’ll not give it any other adjective. I think as a hospitality thing, probably good. But whoever designed that didn’t have a clue when it came to dealing with MIDI. But that’s inside baseball. That’s you and me. I listened to my answer about where the car came from.

when Ray Hall had the practice crash. I think I’m mistaken. It wouldn’t have been a [00:48:00] wolf car in Villanova’s museum. I’ll get back to you. Did any of you either have, uh, conversations at all with Mark Donahue through the years? Many times. Mark used to teach driver’s school for us up here with the Glenn Region SCCA.

He was our open wheel instructor. And so I had a lot of talk with him at various times. I had talk with him at Seneca Lodge over breakfast a couple of times. He was a very knowledgeable, nice engineer. He didn’t understand my theory of full cantilever suspension when I told Tim Mayer how to do it, and he built a car and put Mark in it, and Mark says, Oh, that’s too complicated.

We don’t have time to figure that out. And that was Mark’s only drive for McLaren at Mossport. 71. Yeah, but he didn’t understand the full cantilever suspension, so he put back on the old… There were a lot of people who were confused about the developments of the suspension. The [00:49:00] Lola was a disaster, which was also because of its suspension.

But, I’m the one who gave it to Tim Mayer. It sounds like we could really go on for hours, and we’re going to, but let me… Thank these wonderful gentlemen for a terrific presentation. Thank you. And invite you all to join us back over at the research center where our staff member, Sam Baker, has prepared some refreshments for you and these guys will be available for more questions.

Thanks very much.

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This episode is part of our HISTORY OF MOTORSPORTS SERIES and is sponsored in part by: The International Motor Racing Research Center (IMRRC), The Society of Automotive Historians (SAH), The Watkins Glen Area Chamber of Commerce, and the Argetsinger Family – and was recorded in front of a live studio audience.

[00:00:00] BreakFix’s History of Motorsports series is brought to you in part by the International Motor Racing Research Center, as well as the Society of Automotive Historians, the Watkins Glen Area Chamber of Commerce, and the Argettsinger family. Well, my name is Kip Sider. For those who may not know, I’m the Visitor Services Outreach Coordinator for the International Motor Racing Research Center.

And I want to welcome you all here. Thank you for taking a little time out of your afternoon to come visit us as we talk about open wheel madness. Before we get going, I have several people I need to thank on this. First of all, and foremost of all, are our two speakers, Mr. Herb Anistore and Stephen Bubb.

When we were considering putting this program together, I emailed Lenny Sammons from Area Auto Racing News and asked him what we were projecting to do and who might I get that would be experts in their field. And Mr. Sammons immediately suggested Herb and Steve. We are very happy and very honored to have them here today.

I am personally fascinated at both of the things they’re going to talk about. Herb is talking [00:01:00] about board track racing, which I have been fascinated about for a number of years. And Steven’s going to talk about sprint car and open wheel racing in the twenties and thirties and some guy named Al Capone and what he had to do with racing.

And that was the hook that got me psyched on his talk as well. So I certainly want to thank both Herb and Steven for coming here. Herb, I’m going to invite you up now, so settle back and relax, and Herb, come on up. Kip, thank you, uh, gee, a nice crowd, and it’s an honor to be here because I know the people who’ve been before me and the people who are involved in this organization, and it’s something I never really would have ever expected, so thank you all for coming.

I hope we have some fun this afternoon. This is something that I’m interested in. Kip has asked me to talk a little bit about myself. We live in Vineland, New Jersey. I was a school teacher for 25 years, taught health and physical education, and for much of that time while I was doing that, I was also working at the local newspaper in Vineland.

I was a sports writer, and the last two years I was a daily [00:02:00] columnist, which means I went into the office every night and I sat and looked at that screen for two or three hours before I wrote anything, which had to be printed the next day, so that, that was always a lot of fun. As far as automobile racing goes, I got involved as a kid going to the Vineland Speedway, which was in our community.

It started out as a dirt track, then it became asphalt track. My family wasn’t really racing fans. Before I was old enough to drive, my dad would take me to the races because he knew I liked the racing. Then when I got old enough to drive, I was a drag racer, became an official at the track, was a starter with flags.

I’m that old. Our track closed. My racing got involved with more with what you could see on TV, reading National Speed Sport news, articles like that. I got involved with Lenny. I’ve been writing for about 40 years, area auto racing news. I was also a contributing editor for 20 years with stock car racing.

I worked for Jimmy Horton when he was doing his modified racing. He still is. I was 11 years. I worked on [00:03:00] that crew did tires crew set up car involvement and things like that. I’m really interested in the history of automobile racing. It’s just so interesting to find out how we got to where we are. Board track racing is part of that.

Before I go into what I’m going to speak about today, which is really more of an overview, because there’s so much you can talk about in all this, I want to point out this painting. This was done by Joe Henning, and he’s a motorsports illustrator, and the man in the white car is Frank Lockhart, and that’s a rear wheel drive Miller, and the front wheel drive Miller is Peter DiPaolo.

When I asked the people who had this painting if I could use it, they had no question about it. They thought this would be a terrific idea, and that’s why I left the logo, which you can see, is the American Hot Rod Foundation. American Hot Rod Foundation is an organization much like this. They deal with old time auto racing.

And the history of the sport, board tracks a little bit, mostly with hot rodding. It’s not a bad [00:04:00] idea if you’re interested one time and you’re sitting at your computer to just type in American Hot Rod Foundation and see what they have to offer. I think you’re here today because you enjoy this kind of thing.

And that’s a nice activity to get involved. Velodrome is a French term meaning bicycle racetrack. And this is what became very popular in Europe. People racing bicycles on these oval board tracks eventually came over to this country, and there were velodromes throughout. Bicycle racing was very popular at the end of the 1890s and early 1900s.

Many of the early automobile racers were bicycle racers. The Wright brothers were bicycle racers. So if we’re going to race bicycles on a wooden track, well, motorcycles aren’t that much bigger. So let’s try them and they did that too. Those people really did things that were just unimaginable.

Motorcycles and velodromes were raced with the throttle wired full force. So they’re going around full force with no brakes. A lot of [00:05:00] accidents, a lot of people were killed, but this is what they did and people continued to do that. Someone thought, well, if we have bicycles and motorcycles, maybe we could have automobiles on a wooden track.

The first track that was ever built. For automobile racing with a wooden base was the Playa del Rey in Venice, California. It was a one mile track 1910 and it was in Los Angeles and it was designed by Fred Moskowitz and built by Jack Prince. Jack Prince was a bicycle champion, came to this country to build these race tracks for motorcycles and bicycles and Moskowitz and Prince put this track together.

This was a one mile track banked 30 degrees. Moskowitz was really excited about this, but Howard Marmon, who had the Marmon Automobile Company, said, You know, this is okay, but these guys aren’t going to do that good. And Moskowitz said, 5, 000 bet that they would go over 100 miles an hour. Now 5, 000, as we [00:06:00] see, is about 133, 000 today, so this wasn’t a small wager.

And he lost that bet by less than one mile an hour. The car that went the fastest at that time was Barney Oldfield, but this was the first track. There were 24 of them from 1910 through 1931. The second track was built in Oakland. This was where Jack Prince’s headquarters was, and it was in 1911. It was a half mile track.

You can see there were also three other half mile tracks that were built late in the 1920s. These tracks were wonderful board tracks for the racers, but they never had a triple A national championship race. That was always on a track that was a mile or longer. These four other tracks in Oakland, Akron, Bridgeport, and Woodbridge were more like a local weekly track.

They had regular races, sometimes they had special events. Sometimes they were run monthly, depending on the popularity [00:07:00] of the races. They were more of a local flavor, other than the rest of the tracks which we’ll see, which were all National Championship tracks. You see, from 1910, it took until 1915 for the next track to be built.

That was in Chicago, was a two mile track. Tacoma was a two mile track and Omaha, then Des Moines. So you had four tracks within one year that developed into something that became a national championship circuit. All of these tracks were run for a variety of years with a variety of winners. And the history of all these tracks, we could spend hours on.

But we want to talk a little bit more about the overall nature of board track racing. And in doing that, here is what the coverage was in the newspapers of the first board track races. Now, Playa Del Rey, This was a week long activity. It had a wide variety of things that took place. Notice the headlines.

They were running this [00:08:00] mile track in about 37, 38 seconds. But notice the cars that were being raced. These cars were basically the cars that were by the manufacturers, and they were just stripped down. They had wooden wheels. Tires sometimes were solid tires. They weren’t all necessarily rubber tires. But look at the coverage that was given.

To what was taking place. Here’s the Marmon Pier in the top corner. That was driven by Ray Haroon. You can see the other vehicles in there. How heavy they are. Imagine going 90, 95 miles an hour in something like that. And this is what these folks were doing. Notice the Michelin tire ad. Michelin was a great supporter of automobile racing.

In fact, it was one of the leading automobile racing tires at the time. The Fiat ad on the side here. talking about Ralph De Palma and Caleb Bragg. They were two of the drivers that were Fiat racers and what they talked about when the Fiat and the power of the race car, and then the records that were being set [00:09:00] this first week of racing board track in California had a variety of things.

There were races of maybe five laps going on. There were challenge races. They had a wide variety of engine sizes, so that someone would race. We’re going to try and set a record for a 100 cubic inch engine. We’re going to try an engine that’s 300 cubic inches. Things like that. And this went on for that week.

1910, the Playa del Rey. Notice the people standing outside the track. Notice that the track wall is perpendicular to the ground. Not perpendicular to the racetrack. In the early tracks, this caused a lot of problems. Cars would go into that and just go over the top. They wouldn’t necessarily come back in.

But you see how these cars were? There were two man cars. There were one man cars. Notice the gas tanks. Just regular gas tank that was in the automobile before they stripped the body panels away. Here is more coverage. This is Ray Haroon [00:10:00] driving his Marmin. He won a 100 mile race. Hello Los Angeles Herald, this was a front page story.

This was April 10th, it was in early April when the track opened. In June 1910, here was an article by the New York Times comparing the board track in California with the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, which had only been open since 1909. How the comparison of the two, what could be done to the automobile industry, because automobile racing at that time was really a development.

of the automobile industry. This is how people tested their cars. There was no test track. They were racing on fairgrounds. They were racing point to point from city to city, or a city would lay out a course and they would race around that. And there was questions about the board tracks getting bigger and more popular and things like that.

New York Times at the time was the newspaper of record. Here’s another photograph, Beverly Hills racetrack. This was 1920 to [00:11:00] 1924. Notice what it looked like when it was in operation. That’s Santa Monica Boulevard and Wilshire Boulevard. Where the big red dot is is the approximate location of the racetrack.

The racetrack actually came back beyond where the red roofed houses are. You can see the size of this. This was a two mile track. This was in 1920, and this was the first track that used Searle’s Spiral. Easement curve. This actually was used by railroads to make it easier for trains to go around the curve.

Let’s say you had a curve on your track. First turn was 1, 500 feet around. Let’s just use that for numbers. Easement curve would, every 500 feet, it would shorten for a little bit the radius on that curve, so it would be easier to turn the car through the turn. Then when you got through it, it would go the other way.

And Art Pillsbury used this with Jack [00:12:00] Prince. This is when they first became partners. Pillsbury believed this was his way for the cars to go around these tracks at the high speeds that they were going. And he also said an ideal board racing track would allow a car to go around without turning the wheel at all.

When we drive on the highway, you’re going around the curve. You’re going to turn the wheel a little bit, little bit this way. You would just hold your hand steady and the car would go around. What made it so possible for these cars to go very, very fast for their time. Imagine now how many people realize that where they once lived was a racetrack.

I don’t think many people would 2019 picture of Santa Monica and Wilshire Boulevard. Board tracks were easy to construct because it was framing a house, effectively. You had long, 18, 20 foot, sometimes longer, pieces of wood that were put down on a frame. And in other photographs, you’ll see the [00:13:00] outside of how it looked.

And you just needed a lot of men with a lot of nails and a lot of hammers. The Atlantic City Motor Speedway was a mile and a half. They built it start to finish with 700 men, and all they did was just pound nails. The tracks approximately on the straightaway were from 40 to 60 feet wide. Turns were 70, 75 feet wide.

They used millions of board feet. They used whatever they could to bring the product into the area where it was being built. From heavy trucks to horse drawn wagons, because remember, this was the early part of the 20th century. You see the steep nature of the board track. This is a turn, and it looks much like someone when they’re going up the roof of a house sometimes.

It’s really pretty effective. They went up rather quickly when they were built. The only problem with wood out in the weather is unless you do something to preserve it, you’re going to have some problems, and there were no tracts effectively that used any kind of wood preservative. Most of the [00:14:00] wood was pine wood like you’d use in a house construction.

Some tried harder woods, but that didn’t necessarily work either. And you can see the damage to this board track. What would happen during the races when something broke, which did, it would sit from underneath. Peter Palo one time said the most interesting thing he experienced as a board track racer was the head of someone popping up in the hole to see where he had to fix the track.

This is a picture of the Laurel Speedway, which was also known as the Baltimore Washington Speedway. This is opening day, July 11th, 1925. You can see in the far corner the, uh, banking and how that looks, and the massive size on acres of ground these tracks were. But the thing that impressed me most about this picture, and look at all the straw hats, there were not very many women that were in the grandstand and wherever area this was taken.

This was one of the more popular tracks, and as I pointed out here, you went to the races to see [00:15:00] things, but you also saw things besides racing cars. Frequently airplane demonstrations, because in the early and the late teens, it was a new item. They had balloon races, daytime fireworks, bands that were there.

My uncle and my grandmother and grandfather went to the track in the Atlantic City Motor Speedway. And my dad said that he remembered all the people that were there. There were 85, 000 or so at the time he went, and all the cars. And they had an interesting race besides the automobile race. They had what they called an ambulance race.

They had half a dozen race car drivers, a half a dozen ambulances. A half a dozen doctors and a half a dozen orderlies. And on the backstretch of the Atlantic City Motor Speedway, they had six dummies that were supposed to be injured people or someone who were needed medical care. And the idea of the race was to see who could get to the dummy first and get back to the starting line and that was going to be the [00:16:00] winner.

They also had stock car races at these and we’ll talk about this later. My father said, because he became a doctor, that was something he remembered from the race, other than all the excitement of that. But this is just a general good look at an opening day at a board track speedway. Notice all the people in the infield.

Notice all the people in the grandstand. Ticket prices were a dollar. Up to 10, 12, which again, we’re talking about times in the 20s and so you could say a dollar in the 20s is worth about 15 today. So it was a good chunk of your money, but the people had a good time and the board tracks attracted a lot of attention.

Here again is the board track in at Baltimore, Washington. Notice the extreme banking of the speedway, the cars, millers down on the lower picture going into the first turn. Fields of races had anywhere 15, maybe 20 were the top number in the entry. But you can see on the outside [00:17:00] of this lower picture what some of the support structure was.

All wood. There were two tracks that didn’t have a wood base. The Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn. That was a metal base, and the other was the Tacoma track, which was actually built in the ground. This was a mile and a quarter track, and because of the nature of board track racing, speed was the thing that was involved, pit stops, and so those weren’t really expected.

If you had a pit stop, you were not going to race for first place. This was a 45 degree banking in this track, and that’s generally what the banking was in these bigger tracks. Here is the Tacoma track, and what’s interesting about this track, as I said, is this track was built in the ground. You can see in the picture on the right here, they built the banking.

You can see the dirt. They put the boards in the ground. And then they filled it with asphalt. Notice the two race cars on the bottom here. You can barely pick it out, but they have a screen in front of their radiator because the asphalt and gravel didn’t do [00:18:00] anything but come up and bang into the cars.

In fact, there were frequent tire explosions. The drivers were injured. Notice they’re two man cars. Tacoma, to compensate for this, placed high winning prizes so they would get all the top drivers. But of all the tracks that were national championship tracks, this was the one that was most disliked by the racers.

In fact, one of the comments was at the time, board track racing is really not that much fun because the tracks are not good. And then there’s Tacoma. The other thing that’s interesting about the Tacoma track is, notice that it’s not a round track or it’s not an oval track. It was built on the land that was available, much like the Darlington Speedway has the two different curves.

But the other thing that’s interesting about this track, it’s one of the very few that is even recognized today as having been there. There’s a historical marker in the center of the track. picture that shows where the Tacoma track was. What is located [00:19:00] where Tacoma is now is a community college. These are the people who I would say are probably the most famous people to come out of the board track era.

Jack Prince over on the left. You can see he was a big, strong man. Most of the big, rugged guys, because the race on big bicycles, they weren’t the three pound machines that are available now. Jack Prince was from 1910 to 1927 involved in just about all the tracks. Although when Art Pillsbury joined him in 1920, the whole nature of the board track development changed just because of that spiral easement curve.

The interesting thing also about Art, after he designed all these board tracks, he also became a top ranked official in the American Automobile Association’s, uh, racing situation. He was the West Coast supervisor for a long time, and he had important roles at the Indianapolis 500. The bottom four people are four men who did a lot for [00:20:00] board track racing, especially in the second part in the 20s, because most of the cars were Miller’s or Duesenberg’s.

Harry Miller, of course, was a famous person before he even got involved in racing because he manufactured carburetors. Here’s an ad for a Miller carburetor. Dario Resta, Johnny Aiton, and Eddie Rickenbacker all used the Miller Carburetor, and that was a popular carburetor used by lots of people in lots of different things, not only in automobile racing, but in make your car better.

One of the things that was interesting, the research of this era, there were a lot of aftermarket companies that were making things to make the automobile that the people were driving daily a better automobile. Lower picture shows Harry Miller with one of his Miller engines. They were straight A. He was involved with the Puget Grand Prix car before he got involved in racing on a full time scale.

The maintenance of that car and the Puget had a lot to do [00:21:00] with the development of the Miller engines and also the Offenhauser engine, which you see on the right here. Interesting thing about Harry Miller is his shop foreman was Fred H. Offenhauser, who became the man who developed the Offenhauser racing engine.

It’s also another Fred Offenhauser, Fred C. Fred C. was Fred H. ‘s nephew. And they worked together, but they didn’t like each other very much. They had problems working together, but they did. And Fred C. was a pretty decent machinist, so Fred H. caped him around. Fred C. went in the Navy and World War II. And after he got out of the Navy, he saw it.

Well, I don’t want to work for my uncle again. I’m going to start my own business. He’s the man that developed the Offenhauser speed equipment. The stuff you see, the valve covers, the intake manifolds, this, that, and the other. They had problems with the name. One thought the other shouldn’t be using the name.

So each one sued the other. Took this to court, and they sued because [00:22:00] they wanted the exclusive right to use the name Offenhauser. Well, the judge, I guess this must have been a fun time too, having two people yell about the same thing. The judge decided they could both use the name Offenhauser because it was their name.

However, legally, the judge ruled that the only thing that could be called an offie Is the four cylinder racing engine. So if you hear I got off the head covers, actually they’re often Hauser ed covers. They can’t use the name. The other thing about the, uh, off the engine is that Leo Goosen from the time he began working with Harry Miller right up until his death, and he passed away in 1974.

He did a great deal with automobile racing engines. He was the one when George Sally decided he wanted to have the lay down engine in his 1957 Indianapolis car. He’s the one that redesigned that so the oil would flow properly because it was 18 degrees from being [00:23:00] flat. An outstanding gentleman and Harry Miller thought enough of Leo Goosen to tell him In 1925, you’ve done outstanding work for my company.

I appreciate everything you do. This year, I’m going to pay you a dollar an hour. That was a high, high rate for him. And at that time, that was about 15 an hour in today’s money. So those are people, and of course, the Duesenbergs are interesting. Because they were in automobile racing, actually, to sell automobiles.

They made their racing cars because the Duesenbergs were sold to people only as rolling chassis. If you wanted a Duesenberg, you would buy the Duesenberg rolling chassis, then take it to a body man, and he would make it. for you. Here’s a example at the top left of Eddie Hearn, who was a Duesenberg racer.

And if you can see the ad, it tells about the engine, how powerful it is because they’re selling the engine. They’re [00:24:00] selling. The Duesenberg Model J, the lower part, talks about the frame and the engine. And you would buy Duesenbergs for 8, 500, then take it to a coach builder who would complete your car. In the time that the Model J Duesenberg was being sold.

8, 500 was about 125, 000 in today’s money. That’s just for the chassis, tires, wheels, running gear. Then you take it to the coach builder and he would charge you at least that much or even more. It’s possible that these cars together were worth a quarter of a million dollars in. The late 1920s. There you see Duesenberg Model A chassis.

That’s what the ads were all talking about. The top picture there is of Peter DiPaolo’s 1925 Indianapolis 500 winner. That was a Duesenberg and the difference between Duesenberg Racing and Duesenberg Motors is all the [00:25:00] Duesenberg engines were fashioned by the Lycoming machine and they were designed by the Duesenbergs.

But they didn’t have an engine manufacturing situation like Miller did. I mentioned E. L. Cord in the back, in the end of that sentence there. E. L. Cord bought the Duesenberg company in the late 1920s. And he developed the Duesenberg as part of the, uh, companies that he owned. And there’s that straight eight Duesenberg logo, which was very famous at the time.

This is maybe the most interesting car that ever raced on a board track. See, Hal Scott Aviation Motors. This was a man who developed aviation engines in race cars, not in airplanes. And you see, it looks really like a giant go kart. And he raced it at least one time, I’ve been able to find, in April 1912, on the half mile Oakland track.

So it was just an unusual thing, but it was also a very fast car. It was one of the first to ever go 60 miles an hour, which at the time was really going [00:26:00] something. Just the kind of things during the early years of board track racing that you would see. These next few pictures are just to give you an idea of some of the cars that are raced.

Caleb Bragg is the man who beat Barney Ofield in that first race at Playa del Rey. But he was considered a novice driver because he wasn’t professional in his racing, he was a novice. And he actually took the place of Ralph De Palma, who was supposed to race against Oldfield. But there was something wrong with De Palma’s Fiat, so he substituted and he beat the famous Barney Oldfield.

Barney, of course, was a bicycle racer before he became an automobile racer. Also notice that these were both chain drive automobiles. And that Blitzen Benz, that was the world speed record holder at the time. Now we’re going a little later. This is 1916, a DeLage from France. There’s a Hudson. These, again, were cars that were stripped down, racing bodies put on, and they [00:27:00] used them as race cars and used them to test the vehicles that were being built by Hudson and DeLage.

Here’s a Stutz Bearcat and an early Duesenberg. Imagine, I’d say, going 100 miles an hour and something like that. With no safety belts. Nothing safety wise at all except what was built into the race car. Another thing that was interesting doing research on board track racing was the artwork and how the things were designed, the race programs.

And so this is a 1915 souvenir program at Sheepshead Bay. Just a beautiful painting. Look at some of the cars in the pictures below. These were standard automobiles that had been converted. They were all two man cars with a variety of engines. And again, note the guardrail perpendicular to the ground, not perpendicular to the race course.

Now we’re getting into some of the more famous names. This is Lewis Chevrolet. This is a red Buick Bug. We forget a lot about, uh, [00:28:00] people back then that there were colors for these cars. And this was a beautiful red car. Buick’s the oldest active name in the American automobile industry. And this is a car that Lewis Chevrolet raced on board tracks and so.

Just a pretty car. And it was something, again, you see, uh, very basic and a lot to handle. And in the bottom, you see the Frontenacs, which were the cars that the Chevrolets built. We talk about the Fronties and the Fronty Fords. We talk about them. In research, I found these Fronty cars were sometimes called Chevrolet cars, even though Chevrolet was no longer involved with General Motors.

But so famous, they were recognized as such, and there had board track victories in these. And again, these were two man cars that were done because that’s the way the AAA had their ruling for that time. High speeds, 115, 120 miles an hour as we see. 622 cubic inches. It’s a big engine to produce just 58 horsepower, isn’t [00:29:00] it?

This is the racing car that Harry Miller ever built, called the Golden Submarine. He and Barney Oldfield built it, as Bob Berman, who we mentioned before, was their great friend. And Bob had a Peugeot, and Bob was racing in the Corona race in California in 1916. When off the track, he was killed. His riding mechanic was killed.

Several other people were serious injuries because it was a road race and something happened to the car. And you’re standing a couple of feet away from the racing surface or the highway, because that’s, there just wasn’t any thought to anything. So they thought, how can we do something to protect the driver?

Harry Miller and Barney Oldfield put their heads together and they thought, well, if we build something that can enclose the driver and put. something over the top and that’s just what they did. As it points out here, this is the first racing car with a roll cage and it’s the first all electrically welded steel frame [00:30:00] automobile ever produced in this country.

This was a gold car, that’s why they called it the Golden Submarine. Harry Miller built a four cylinder engine. It was a two man car and you got in it and out the door. The exhaust pipe, however, From this design of the car went through the car between the driver and the passenger. Barney Oldfield raced this car quite a bit.

He did, however, flip into the infield lake at Lakewood Speedway in Atlanta, and that brought about picture number two. He almost drowned in that thing. So they cut everything away but the front of the bodywork, and he’s racing around in a vehicle that looks like that. With some success. And after he quit racing that car in 1908, the engine still ran very well.

And he liked the way that performed. He made this into the old field special Roscoe Sorrell’s riding mechanic, Waldo Stein. And this was the first car that was the Miller brand at the Indianapolis motor speedway. [00:31:00] This is Ralph De Palma, very famous, very popular. One thousands of races, supposedly. Steven’s going to talk a little bit more about Ralph De Palma.

How he could win a thousand races? Well, you figure races of one mile, one lap, because it was a challenge race. So you beat so and so, you won. That’s how that happened. But anyway, he was an excellent racer. And this is an automobile that’s built on the Packard chassis, but it was built by Packard because they were interested in airplane engines prior to World War I.

But they didn’t want to go through the expense of testing the airplane engine in an airplane. So they tested it in a racing car. They made a 299 or 300 cubic inch V 12 and they tested this engine for several years. And this is the engine that became the Liberty V 12 engine in World War II and it eventually powered the P 51, which was one of the outstanding airplanes of the Second World [00:32:00] War.

The other interesting thing about this particular car is we think, well, they didn’t have the Indianapolis 500 during the World War I and sometimes people say, well, there was no automobile racing during World War I. There actually was. There just was no national champion. There was no Indianapolis 500 because the 500 depended a lot on the European cars coming over.

So they raced quite a bit during the World War I years. But while they were doing that, Ralph DePalma was actually a captain in the United States Army, working on the development of this engine for airplane use. And Jesse Vincent was his manager at Packard. He was a colonel in this same unit, Wright Field in Ohio, working on the development of this engine during World War I.

Which became the World War II engine. There was racing and there was quite a lot of racing everywhere except Indianapolis. This is Lewis Chevrolet’s business. The [00:33:00] Frontenac Lewis and Arthur and Gaston Chevrolet were very famous automobile racers. This particular car is showing Gaston Chevrolet and it’s in his Monroe.

The Monroe race cars were green. The Frontenac race cars were the exact same race car, except they were red. So a Fronty and a Monroe were the same cars, just different colors. And Gaston Chevrolet was a very popular racer, very good racer. He was also posthumously Team 20 AAA champion because he was killed in an accident at Beverly Hills Speedway.

But you can see the board track, he’s there, see the wider panels on the infield and the racing 2x4s which were put on their end is what the race cars raced on. The front and ax cylinder heads were very popular on the Ford Model T and also you can see the advertisement talking about the fronty cylinder heads for other models.

Application Chevrolet, whippets, things [00:34:00] like that. These were again, part of the large number of people making aftermarket product. Match racing was popular during the early board track years. Here we have the golden submarine. We have the white, the palm of the car and the Chevrolet in the center. They toured.

As a group, and we did match races together. This particular race, there were three races. Ralph De Palma won all three. But look at all the people in the grandstands. This is Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn, New York. 1917. 40, 000 spectators at this board track event. This was the main attraction. All right, we talked about not having races during the World War I years at Indianapolis, but they did at Cincinnati.

This was, again, a two mile track, big track. Look at the grandstand, look at the lineup of cars. They ran five abreast, paid a lot of money. It was a thing that people were interested in doing even during the World War I time. Again, there’s a advertisement for the race. Look at the pretty colors, the artwork, look at the [00:35:00] admission price, dollar and a half.

Multiply that 10 or 15 times because the dollar was worth a lot more then than what it’s actual shows there. Here it says on the bottom about the Cincinnati track actually closed because of the exposure to the elements, but some of the wood was used to make a bar. That’s what happened a lot of these tracks too when they closed.

They couldn’t do anything anymore with the racetrack. But they would sell the wood to construction people and they would use the, uh, wood to build houses and whatever needed to be done. July 4th, 1919, celebrating Eddie Rickenbacker. Eddie Rickenbacker, some of you may know, was a very prominent automobile racer prior to his service in World War I.

And I’m just going to read here just a little bit about Rickenbacker to give you an idea, not only about Eddie, but the kind of success that people who were professional auto racers could have in these eras. Rickenbacker was from Columbus, Ohio. He was a young man whose father [00:36:00] died when he was 12, so he had to quit school and go out and work.

He got a lot of Part time jobs, a lot of jobs involving his hands. He became very interested in mechanical things and began taking correspondence courses in engineering. He would get a letter every so often and here’s this information he would do is send it back and get another one. And so. This is another way of education during this time when people couldn’t go to school, but they wanted to improve themselves in 1910.

He was 19 years old. He had been working at the Firestone Columbus factory in Columbus, Ohio, that made automobiles. They were made one of the first left hand automobiles in this country. He had been a riding mechanic in the Vanderbilt Cup races with Lee Frayer. He had been involved in this so much and had done so well that by 17 years old, he was the shop foreman of the machine shop for the Firestone Columbus company, but he wanted to do something better.

He wanted to improve himself and go on and do other [00:37:00] things. So they made him a salesman of Firestone Columbus cars, and he was given the Omaha territory. He was 19 years old at the time in 1910. And what this required was he would take people for rides and how good it was. And how powerful it was and how much this and that try and get them to buy it.

And then he’d encourage them to come out to the races and see how the engine performed against other cars. Cause they had lots of races on fairgrounds tracks and city to city, any place that had a race, he would compete in, in this Firestone Columbus car that he turned into a four cylinder racing car.

And he did very well as a salesman and he did very well as a racer. Raced at every race within a hundred miles of Columbus with one of these cars that he developed. 1911, he was a relief driver in the first Indianapolis 500. Drove 370 miles and his car finished 13th in the race. Again, with Lee Frayer, they shared the ride.

Then in 1912, again, he drove his [00:38:00] relief, but the company was nearly bankrupt. So he left the Columbus Buggy Company. At the time, he wanted to be a professional racer, so he went and did that. The only problem was he had been barred by the AAA because he had been racing in a lot of unsanctioned races and they didn’t like that.

The interesting thing was the contest board that barred him, he was the head of that contest board from 1927 to 1946. In late 1912, he went to Des Moines, Iowa, and began working for the World’s Fair. Duesenberg Brothers, who had located there, is a 3 a day mechanic, and he was also their racing manager for the Mason Automobile Company.

This is how they got their start involved in racing, but racing, Masons worked well for the Duesenbergs and for Rickenbacker until the Mason Company decided they were going to get out of racing. So what do they do? Duesenbergs decide we’re going to start our own company. They did this in [00:39:00] 1914. They made Eddie the head of their racing division.

They had two cars in the first Indianapolis 500. They performed well. Eddie won a lot of races, including the 300 mile race at the Sioux City track, which was a two mile dirt track. And it was one of the biggest races of the 1914 season. He won 10, 000, which at the time was over 250, 000 in our money. And this was actually what saved the Duesenbergs from going bankrupt.

After the 1914 season, he went to the Maxwell team. He won many races with that, including several board track races. And Maxwell was getting out of racing. So he bought the racing cars from Maxwell with the help of Carl Fisher and Fred Allison, the Prestolite company and named them the Prestolite specials.

And with those cars, he won a lot of dirt races and he won three major board track races during 1916, as [00:40:00] well as racing and dirt and road races. The board track races he won were at Sheepshead Bay at Des Moines and a 300 mile or at. Tacoma. This is where he was being honored. And that’s the car that he won the Tacoma race in with a riding mechanic because that was the rules of the time.

And then his last win was at 150 mile race at the Ascot Speedway in California, which at the time was a mile track. That was actually the end of Eddie Duesenberg’s automobile racing career. He had 41 national championship races, seven victories. And he also in 1916 won 60, 000 as an automobile racer.

Today, that’s about a million and a half dollars. So he was very successful. He joined the air force after that first started as the driver for blackjack Pershing, then got into the air service, wanted to start an air division with former racing drivers, but they, for some reason, didn’t want to do that. He became the Ace of [00:41:00] Aces, 26 victories.

That’s one of the aircraft, the Scout, the SPAD that he used. And then later in the 1930s, he was awarded the Medal of Honor for his service during World War I. But here on this particular day, they’re honoring Eddie Rickenbacker. Notice the other names. Louis Chevrolet, Dario Resta, Eddie Hearn, Cliff Durant.

Ralph Mumford, a major sports personalities in automobile racing. Here’s Harry Hartz and Harlan Fangler. Harlan Fangler, of course, for years was very involved in the Indianapolis 500. Harry Hartz was 1926 champion, an exceptional board track racer. This is a 1922 Dursenberg that raced in the 1921 French Grand Prix.

That was the first French Grand Prix after World War I. And you see the number on the tail. The laws at the time required any vehicle on the roads in France to have a number. 1924 Duesenberg was the first American supercharged race car, just to see how it’s developed over the years. Talk about board [00:42:00] track racers.

These are two ads from the 1920s. And these people were equal to Jack Dempsey, equal to Babe Ruth, as far as being stars. Notice the picture in the center, Fred Wagner, he was the official starter for all the board track races. He was the official starter for all the AAA races, but he was as well known. as the people who were the racing and the racetracks where they race.

Here is a late 1920s ad. Again, the Dusenbergs were interested in selling automobiles. They used racing to do that. And here’s an ad showing all the various ways that the Dusenberg was a outstanding vehicle for its chassis, its driveline, and its engine because that’s what they were selling the people.

How would you let your people know about it? Well, that left panel there shows the handouts that were given and it’s the Atlantic city motor speedway, their first race. And there’s a guarantee and the top left that says these races aren’t fixed. This isn’t hippodrome [00:43:00] because in the early years of automobile racing, especially the international motor contest, this is, these would go around the tracks.

And they would have races and they would promote this driver. Let’s see if he can win here. And there’s the battle between this driver at driver. Well, these were all races that were already picked and they were just seeing something on the racetrack, but they guaranteed you that these were races. That were true races, national and international speed king.

And these were handouts. All the tracks had these particular things. Media was very interested in auto people racing. You can look through and see some of these things like this magazine. Look at the artwork on the front of the board track. there. This was something that attracted people’s attention. The newsreels, you can go on the internet and see newsreels of board track racing because they were photographed, there were excitement, there were speed.

Also, entertainment used board track racing. One of the early movies that Charlie Chaplin made was of an automobile race. Why? A lot [00:44:00] of people there. It was in the daytime because that’s how they filmed things. They didn’t have studio work. They had to be out. where there was bright sun. So they used racing as something that people were interested in.

The Roaring Twenties was a great time for automobile racing. Here’s some modern mechanics and inventions. We probably know that as Mechanics Illustrated. This is the beginning of Mechanics Illustrated. This particular man, Ray Kuntz, was a automotive engineer and is identified as an authority on automobile racing.

He’s encouraging young men to become automobile racers. He’s telling them how much money they can make, how easy it is to convert a model a or a model T into a racing car. He even in the article tells you some of the parts that you need, how much they cost, how easy it is to build, how many of us wanted to be racers when we were kids, how many of us had our parents say, yeah, Herbie, go ahead.

I don’t think too bad, but that’s what it was in the twenties. Here’s a [00:45:00] pamphlet that Arthur Chevrolet offered for 2, or if you brought a Fondi head, you got it for free. It was an eight page pamphlet with no photographs in it, but it told you directly and entirely how to convert a Ford Model T into a winning race car, what you needed, how long it had to be.

The first thing was to take the chassis at a hundred inch wheel base. The first thing he said was you make that 88 and it told that, and it was very popular. Here’s another example of advertisement. You could buy like you can today. You can go to anyone by modified stock car for parts, put them together like a giant model kit.

Here you could build a racing car. Out of a Ford that was good on dirt tracks, brick, or board tracks. 750 for a complete frame. That would be about 10, 000 today. This will give you an idea of the cost of these things. And this, I’ll tell you a little interesting story. I wanted to say how are we going to relate this to what’s today.

So, well, let’s say [00:46:00] 1925, that would be a good year because of a couple of things. Let me see what the average income was in 1925. So I typed in the computer, average income, 1925. 14. 40 was 3, 078. 27. Good, now we’re going to have to compare it to today. So I figured, let me try, see what average income 2018 figure gives the whole year.

Boy, that was a chore. No matter what government site I went on, they talked about average income for people that were particular age, average income for people in the Northeast, average income for people in the particular state. I’m sure if I looked hard enough, it would have average income for people who are blonde, left handed, and wear green shoes.

It was just that difficult. The average income today For all of us, somewhere between 50, 000 and 52, 000, according to the U. S. Department of Labor. That was at the bottom. But look at the prices! Pound of [00:47:00] bacon, 0. 47. That would be 6. 70 today. And you can see down the side. Postage stamp, 0. 02. The only thing that’s interesting about all of these As you see, a gallon of gas costs 2.

88. In town, they’re selling, what was it, 2. 69. So we’re doing better now than in 1925. But you see here, 1925, that was the first year for the front wheel drive Miller. And the front wheel drive Miller cost 15, 000 in 1925. That’s 216, 000. A Ralph De Palma, 10, 000. That’s 144, 000. These prices did not change from the first made until the time they were ended.

They all stayed 15, 000 or 10, 000, which I thought was very interesting. And in 1925, if you wanted to buy a Model T, it only cost you 260. So you can see there was a wide difference in the cost like there is now of racing cars and a [00:48:00] Miller engine. If you blew your engine. 5, 000, which is 72, 000 in today. So that gives you a little idea of what the money values on these things are.

Here is the Miller specifications. I would point out that the fuel tank came in the Miller 25 gallons, but for longer races, they would put in up to 40 gallons. There was even one racer and I forget who it was who had a round. Tank like a giant basketball. So all the fuel would get down. There wouldn’t be anything laying around, but you see the workmanship.

These are just beautiful cars. This is what got me interested in these cars. I saw Miller’s, I saw pictures of Miller’s and I just thought they were. Beautiful. Notice the engine size 1920 to 22 was 183 cubic inches or three liters. That was when the AAA contest board decided to change the engines because they were going to be the same as the international limit on engines due to the French Grand Prix.

That’s how three [00:49:00] liter engine, and then they went down. And so like that, the bottom is a engine tag. It gives the firing order of the engine that. Harry Miller developed. All hand built, just beautiful racing cars. Notice the tire sizes, too. And here’s Jimmy Murphy, who was an outstanding board track racer, king of the boards.

He is the person who decided that it might be an idea to try a front wheel drive car, to pull the car through the corner, rather than push it through. He thought it would be, engineering wise, a better thing. And he had Harry Miller build one of these things. Unfortunately, Jimmy Murphy never got to drive that car.

He was killed at Syracuse in an accident going for the lead. That was in 1924, so he never got to drive this car. But this car appeared for the first time in the 1925 Indianapolis 500 and finished second, driven by Dave Lewis. And they were very popular, very fast. The interesting thing about the Miller, as though it was a good idea with the front wheel drive, the [00:50:00] Miller, A front wheel and rear wheel drive car won about the same amount.

Front wheel drive car was only a car that raced at Indianapolis and the board tracks. It did not race on the dirt tracks at all. The nine, ten years of board track racing, they used regular street tires. Whatever was on the car was what they used, and of course they caused problems. Gum dipping was a procedure to keep the heat away from the tire, but they were street tires.

And as wide as your hand, they weren’t very big at all. And they were inflated to 50 pounds. This was a hard, hard tire. Then in the 20s, they started making dedicated racing tires because they understood the problems they were having. At Indianapolis 500, you’d maybe go 10 or 15 laps in these tires and have to change them.

So that’s why they had the dedicated racing tires. And they started to balance tires. Sid Huggdahl was the first racer who balanced tires to get better wear out of them. This, again, was in the 1920s. In 1925, Firestone introduced, for the [00:51:00] highway, the balloon tire. Better traction, better handling. It was cooler.

Did all the things it wanted to do, and they developed from that. The Firestone Gum Dip Balloon Racing Tire was introduced in 1925. It won with Peter DiPaolo. Bigger cross section. Contact patch was bigger. On dirt tracks and at Indianapolis, 35 pounds on board tracks, 65 to 75, the high speeds and the high G forces in the turns, they needed something to stabilize the cars a little bit better, get a little more speed out of the wire wheels.

And so board tracks, they ran with a toe in of 1 8th to 3 inch because the high speeds would open the wheels up. On the lower size tracks, on the dirt tracks, they would run with a tow out because the speeds would push the tires in, so that was just a little bit of difference there. Also, the reason I used the Oldfield tire was, Barney Oldfield, when he retired from racing, became the firestone manager of racing.

And [00:52:00] the 1920, Indianapolis 500s, you may see in Historical ads are credited to being won by Firestone, which is true because Firestone made the Oldfield Tire and the cars that Tommy Milton, Gaston Chevrolet, and Jimmy Murphy rode in those Indianapolis 500 wins are all Oldfield Tires. And if you look closely at the pictures in the winner’s circle, you can see it says Oldfield Tires on their race car.

So the first. Three years of Firestone’s wins in that long series were on Oldfield Tire. Here’s an interesting track. This is the one in Miami, Florida. Mile and a quarter, Fulford Miami Speedway. Carl G. Fisher was developing Miami. He also had a board track down there. His general manager was Ray Haroon.

And the track ran one race. Won by Peter DiPaolo in the Duesenberg. Harry Hartz and the Miller. Not long after this race on February 22nd, the great hurricane [00:53:00] in September of 1926 came through. And that’s a picture of the racetrack after the hurricane came through. Absolutely destroyed it. There was nothing that was left of it.

All that wood was used to rebuild the Miami area. Board track events. Here we talked about some of this varied length. races, things like that, things to get people to come to the races. There was one 500 mile race. The lineups were cars that were developed by the manufacturers. 1920, 1931. This is when it became more of a dedicated racing series.

All of the national championship were on board tracks. There were still other kinds of racing, but they were mostly millers. and Duesenbergs and the Fronty Fords and the Frontenacs were 1920 to 1924 because those engines did not ever have a supercharger on them. The other interesting thing about the 20s to 1931, mostly during this time, numbers were assigned to cars based on the decision of [00:54:00] the contest board or how the car was entered into the race.

1924, that was the first year they assigned numbers based on how you did. The year before. So if you see a 1925 picture with number one, that car was the winner of the championship in 1924. Here’s an official program showing Barney Oilfield and Louis Chevrolet special race. There’s the Los Angeles Speedway, that was the Beverly Hills Speedway, but that was also known as Los Angeles Speedway.

The reason I put this on here, 1928 State fair, this was the year that board track racing was really on the way down. So the AAA contest board decided that dirt be brought into the old, as far as national championship races. That’s how this became the first national championship dirt race in a long time at the state fairground.

Stock car races were special things. They see the number one and the two, they are actually cars that could have been driven to the track because stock car racing [00:55:00] was just what it said. Stock car racing. Notice the spare tire, the windshields. The headlights, that’s what they raced. They were specialty races.

Also, motorcycles ran on the board tracks, and I say those people just did things differently. A lot of accidents and so, but they used them. The bottom picture is what is considered by historians as the first real stock car, in the fact of a racing stock car. In 1933, the AAA sanctioned its first road race, which was the Elgin Road Race in Illinois.

And Fred Frame, one with this car. Notice there are no fenders, no windshield, no spare tire. There was a little bit of work that could be done. So this is what they consider the first stock car built. And this car is currently owned by Dana Mecham of the Mecham Auto Auctions. Louie Meyer. In 1985, I had the opportunity to write a story about him and spoke to him for over an hour about automobile racing.

Wonderful man. Everyone I’ve talked to who’s known him. And I’ve [00:56:00] talked to several people, said he was a gentleman, and that’s how he treated me. He won three board track races. He started as a mechanic and then to a driver, then became a Indianapolis 500 winner and champion. He had the Meyer Drake engines for a while, then he had the Ford racing engines.

And this is his 1928 Miller that won the Talked to him about a lot of things, and when he said he wanted to be a board track driver, Pop Wagner said to him, Okay, you get out on the track, but if you pass anybody, I’m going to flag you in. There was no other way to learn how to drive, so you had to drive around the back to learn.

And he became very adept at it. And I asked him, well, who are some good board track drivers? And you say, Hartz, Leon DeRay. A lot of them, he said, but Frank Lockhart, he said, was just very good. And Frank Lockhart was maybe one of the best race drivers and engineering people that we have ever dealt with.

This car was the car that Frank Lockhart set a world record and that stood for 30 years. Fred [00:57:00] Wagner, he was the starter for all the board track races. He was the official starter for AAA for over 20 years. And he started out to be a runner. And then he started flagging, getting involved with that.

Interesting that he holds the checkered flag. He’s the first person to ever be photographed with a checkered flag is in the 1906 Vanderbilt cup races. He also not only was. He was the man who checked the track for security and safety. He was the man who got all the money before the races started. He was the man who assigned positions.

He was the man who would call fouls because they had no communication. Something happened on the track, he was it. He was the man at the end of the race who would tell you where you’re going to pick up your train to take your trip to the next race. He would get housing for the people. And in his spare time, he wrote a nationally syndicated column on automobile racing.

But the most interesting thing about all his involvement with automobile racing, he [00:58:00] didn’t know how to drive an automobile. Here are the signals that he would wave. True 1929, this was about standard. Here’s the official thing from the AAA handbook. Red, that meant the course was clear. That’s how they started the race.

Yellow. The course was blocked. You slow green. You are entering your last lap white stop for consulting and the pits and the checkered flag. You are finished. They changed it in 1930, the triple a contest board, because they wanted to be a little more current. That’s when the traffic signal said red stop, yellow caution, green go.

So they changed those signals. Although notice, the white still meant stop, and the black was added, which means you were entering your last lap. That was in 1930. That again was changed in 1937, for the white meaning you’re entering your last lap, and the black flag meant that you were stopped. And since, that’s been basically the American racing flag.

Here’s a map that shows where the [00:59:00] tracks were during their lifetime. And it was interesting that Louis Meyer told me he and his wife would travel from Los Angeles, where he lived, to Indianapolis, because that was the center location for all the racing. But he only covered about a hundred paved miles during that entire trip.

Everything else was gravel or something worse. He’d stay at a farmer’s house for a dollar and a half, get paid. Big breakfast and they’d send you on your way. Racing, you would stay at a buddy’s house if you were at a racetrack and so. All the cars were shipped by rail. Atlantic City was interesting because they had two rail lines into Atlantic City because during World War I, the location of the Atlantic City track was a ammunition loading plant.

Here’s how cars got to the racetrack. This is a 1917 Hudson. This was a dark blue car, by the way. And this also made it possible for races to be announced at major locations. They came on railroad cars. When they got to the station, leave them out so the people would know there’s a race in town. The bottom is Umbrella [01:00:00] Mike Boyle, who was a Indianapolis car owner.

He was the head of the Chicago Electrical Union. And they used the, uh, Diamond T truck to get it from the railroad station to the track. Mike Boyle was an interesting guy. They called him Umbrella Mike because he always walked around with an umbrella. Mike would go in a bar and he’d talk to people and they’d come by and they’d drop a little something into the umbrella.

And Mike had connections. In Chicago, in 1920s. If you needed something done, you saw Mike. This is William Shattuck, who was a pulmonary physician, an actual MD, who became a race driver because he enjoyed working with the people when he was a physician at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. And he bought a car and he raced in 35 events.

Never won one. But he was competitive. He was a relief driver at Indianapolis. He just had some fun doing it. Probably heard a lot of you. I’m sure of Leon Duray, whose actual name was George Stewart. But when he was racing with the international motor contest association, he wanted to be the dashing Frenchman.

So he would [01:01:00] dress in black and his hair combed back. And this worked fine until the French attache in New Orleans wanted to meet the great French driver. And Leon didn’t speak any French, but he was very fast and he was early working with alcohol fuels because the engines were supercharged and needed the power.

And also he eventually became a car owner at Indianapolis. But he also went in 1929 with that front wheel drive car. Sent many records in Europe and also raced in the Italian Grand Prix in Monza. Here, uh, just briefly is the Atlantic City proposal to build the track. You can see how much they were expecting to make.

Cost, the lumber, they actually used over 5 million board feet of wood. This was about a 6 million dollar job in today’s money. And the people who ran this, they were investors of wealth, rich sportsmen, business tycoons and so. Here’s the Atlantic City track. This is opening day. Far picture on the left is [01:02:00] 1926.

This is a rather recent overhead picture of the track. Because this was an ammunition dump and all the chemicals and stuff, they used it when the property was no longer used. The state of New Jersey allowed it to just grow up. It’s now a wildlife area. Terry and I were there a couple of years ago. It’s one of the few former sites that has nothing on it.

There is not even a marker to indicate the history of that track, which had the ammunition dump or the racetrack. But, that’s the way things are. Here’s Harry Hartz, who won the first race, non stop, 300 miles. He won 12, 000 then, that’d be 171, 000 today. Just amazing. This is the official report. Notice they have when the tires were changed, right rear.

Left rear. Things like that. This record that Harry Hart set in that first victory of his lasted for over 30 years. He went 135 miles an hour for his 300 mile race. No one in America ran a [01:03:00] faster race until Sam Hanks won the Indianapolis 500 in 1957. Harry was the National Champion in 1926. He was in a bad crash, spent two years in a hospital, walked around the rest of his life with a cane, but he was very involved in the Speedway and the Technical Committee.

1927, Frank Lockhart set a world record that also stood for over 30 years. It went 147 miles an hour around 729 miles an hour around Atlantic City track. This is a picture of him setting that speed record. This is a qualifying record that was not broken for over 30 years. Leon DeRay in a front wheel drive Miller at the Packard test track went in 1928, 148 miles an hour, but that wasn’t a qualifying record.

So it was, you know, apples and oranges. Notice he has a air intake in front of the cow. This is the engine he did it with. This was an invention that he made with the. A couple other engineers. This was the Intercooler. When the air came into the supercharger [01:04:00] while it was being supercharged, the air fuel mixture was over 300 degrees.

Going through this intercooler before it got into the engine, lowered the temperature by 200 degrees. It went from 300 to 100. This made all the difference. He said this was an oil cooler so people wouldn’t know what it was. Leon DeRay was the next one to make one. Used it on the front wheel drive Miller, but the U shape, it was a five piece unit.

They used gasoline and benzoyl to help power it a little bit more, because the compression was so great on these engines anymore, they needed more than they could get. The first 100 octane fuel wasn’t until 1934, when Jimmy Doolittle with Shell Oil Company made the first aviation fuel with that. level.

Here again is the report of that race. The yellow I outline this tells about the speed record that he sent at the bottom. It shows his speed 147. 729. Cliff Woodbury was second fastest that day. He was almost four miles an hour slower. Here’s the tires that they [01:05:00] used. Notice the pressures were very high.

The sizes. Each race they identified the tire being used by serial number. This was part of the official records and they show what happened and how people went out of the race or something broke, someone ran out of gas, non stop, things like that. Atlantic City Speedway was also known as Speedway, New Jersey.

That was in the official records. They wanted to do that and promote it because although it was listed as Hamilton, it was actually in a township and they wanted to make something else like Indianapolis, which is actually in Speedway, Indiana. And sometimes it was called Amatol because of the ammunition plant.

Here when Lockhart set that record, the speed at Indianapolis was 113 miles an hour. Tony Bentenhausen was the man who broke Lockhart’s qualifying record, 176. 830 at Monza when they had the Race of Two Worlds. Then George Amick broke what was then the American record at Daytona. He unfortunately was killed [01:06:00] in that special 100 lap race.

It was the only Indianapolis car race at Daytona. And then the first time that someone went faster than Frank Lockhart at Indianapolis was when Jim Hurtabees. Went 149 miles an hour in 1960. The last board track winner was Shorty Catlin, and that was at Altoona. Altoona was the longest living board track.

It was there for longer than any other. Woodbridge was one of the small half mile tracks. The last winner was Burt Carnance. That’s the site of the Woodbridge High School football stadium. So that was one of the ones that lasted through. And here are your top board track winners, Murphy, Milton, you see all names that you remember.

Thought I’d highlight Tommy Milton for a minute because of his 50 board track wins, land speed records, Indianapolis, all the things he did. He was 100 percent blind in his right eye and had limited vision in his left. And there he is in the Miller. Here, Gaston Chevrolet when he was killed. This was a major, major event.

This was a dangerous sport. There’s no question [01:07:00] about it. They’re going so fast and what they’re going in. And how they’re doing. Eddie O’Donnell and he crashed. One of the mechanics was thrown out of the racetrack. The color panel shows this. And the reason this color panel was drawn was because Gaston Chevrolet actually believed he called his brother Louis and told him I, I’m going to die here.

And Lewis said, no, you’ve been successful at that track. You’re going to retire, race one more race. You’re going to be the national champion. That was it. Here is the national story that went out about this. It’s very graphic, very graphic, but that was 1920s writing. Here is a picture of Eddie Rickenbacker.

Notice the football helmet. That’s a picture taken in 1914. He was maybe the first to wear head protection other than the flight helmets that they wore because they had nothing else. Helmet, goggles, and gloves. That was all the protection they had. Here, unfortunately, a list of the people who were killed in board track racing.

It was a different time. These were different people. Factors that influenced the board track. The automobile industry, as we [01:08:00] talked about it, was developing the car, the high speed. Major business people, Firestone family invested in board tracks. The Ford family invested in board tracks. Thomas Edison invested in a board track.

So did Louis B. Mayer because the Culver City track is built right up against the back lot of the MGM studio. Automobile race in a major sport communities wanted to have it increased the value of the community and get people to help the economy. And these people were major racers. What caused the demise?

It cost a lot to maintain something that wasn’t protected by anything for the weather, plus the recertification that may cost a hundred thousand dollars to put new wood down when they needed it. Lack of competition. Louis Meyer told me the fastest car always won because it was just speed. There was no way for a slower car to, uh, get around a faster car, weather damage, dwindling attendance, because people Oh, okay.

Yeah, we saw that. It’s not continuing to be. And then, of course, the Great Depression. [01:09:00] Here’s a postcard of the Charlotte Speedway. Interestingly, they had two or three stock car races there that didn’t draw any attention at all. Now you go to Charlotte, that’s all they have. After the board tracks, there was nothing till the Nutley Velodrome and some other places raced midgets on these tracks.

You couldn’t get a championship car on that. They were too small. Seventh of a mile, you have four or five championship cars on there. They’d be nose to tail. But the velodrome ran for a couple of years, very successful. But also they had three fatalities. The New York newspapers just were out against this kind of thing.

That’s Tommy Heinrich. It’s leading this group of people. You figure seventh mile track. They’re going around seven, eight seconds, 70 miles an hour. That’s really doing something. And that’s Henry Banks who became a director of competition in Chicago. They built a board track for one use. Cost 25, 000 then, almost a half a million today.

This was for the world championship at 90, 000 people see this race. And it was for one race. This was at the polo [01:10:00] grounds. This was a high bank board track. It was supposed to be run for several weeks, but every time they had a race, it rained except for two times. And what they used to make this board track was a portable board track.

This was an article in 1948, Popular Mechanics, about this board track. Someone got the idea. We can have automobile racing all over the country, wherever you want it. Pop it down, have your race. The promoter was a millionaire sportsman. They had people who were involved, National Midget. The designers, Leon and Lionel Levy, were architects who developed horse racing tracks, boxing arenas in baseball and football stadiums, things like that.

All of this with a steel underpinning, it was like putting a big model kit together. You transported it from place to place. Cost 150, 000 then just for this. Million and a half today. But the transportation and the labor was extra. They ran it a couple times in the polo grounds, then it was shipped out to the Rose Bowl.

[01:11:00] Rose Bowl and Los Angeles had board track midget racing. Problem was the tracks were too narrow. No activity, no action, because they had had dirt midget racing at these two venues. They tried this to think it would be better. It wasn’t. That was sort of the end of board track racing. And I’ll end with this.

Here are two interesting books. Both are still available. Although they’re not new books, they’re used books or something like that. Although the Wall Smacker, which is Peter DiPaolo’s autobiography, you can get in an e book, tells all about the board track era. That Guts and Glory that Dick Wallin produced in 1990, I wrote two chapters in that book.

I would have written it differently today than I did then. Because of the internet, you can find out so much more information than going to the libraries like I did. Plus, there are other books. Griff Borgeson has the book about the golden era of auto racing in the 1920s. And Mark Dees excellent book on the Millers.

These give you some insight into board track racing. [01:12:00] Ladies and gentlemen, I, I hope I’ve piqued your interest anyway. And, uh, I’m just proud to be able to address this group. And board track racing is something that, uh, Happened a long time ago, but it’s a major part of American history and I hope you enjoyed it.

Thank you.

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[00:00:00] BreakFix’s History of Motorsports series is brought to you in part by the International Motor Racing Research Center, as well as the Society of Automotive Historians, the Watkins Glen Area Chamber of Commerce, and the Argettsinger family. Well, my name is Kip Snyder. For those who may not know, I’m the Visitor Services Outreach Coordinator for the International Motor Racing Research Center.

And I want to welcome you all here. Thank you for taking a little time out of your afternoon to come visit us. As we talk about open wheel madness, before we get going, I have several people I need to thank on this. First of all, and foremost of all, our two speakers, Mr. Herb and a store and Steven Bob, when we were considering.

Putting this program together, I emailed Lenny Sammons from Area Auto Racing News and asked him what we were projecting to do and who might I get that would be experts in their field and, and Mr. Sammons immediately suggested Herb and Steve. We are very happy and very honored to have them here today. I am personally fascinated at both of the things they’re going to talk about.

Stephen’s going to [00:01:00] talk about sprint car and open wheel racing in the 20s and 30s and some guy named Al Capone. And what he had to do with racing. And that was the hook that got me psyched on his talk as well. So I certainly want to thank both Herb and Stephen for coming here. Yes. Thank you again. Uh, we’ve certainly enjoyed our presentation and I’m looking forward to what Stephen has to say.

First off, it’s going to be really tough to come up after Herb. That was excellent. My name’s, uh, Stephen Bubb and it was really great to get back up in this area. My high school years, I lived across the state line in Tawanda. I worked for a gentleman who owned a number of tree farms, including one in Dundee, New York.

So I’d have to come up here and spend some time in Dundee working at his, uh, tree farm. Unfortunate thing was on Fridays, I’d have to go home. So I have to go right past Dundee Speedway as the race cars were going in. Always tough to do, being a real true racing fan. Little background, I am from the Harrisburg area.

I live Right across the river from Harrisburg. Have a fortunate spot because we’re right in the middle of a racing hotbed down there. From my [00:02:00] house, the wind’s blowing right. You can hear Williams Grove Speedway running. You can hear Susquehanna, which is now BAP Speedway. You can hear that track running.

I am the, uh, librarian at the Eastern Museum of Motor Racing. I’ve been retired from work for about a year. I worked in Pennsylvania House of Representatives on staff, and that is why I don’t have any hair. Because if you work with politicians for 30 years, you lose a lot of hair. And I am really glad I got retired.

Did a lot of things in motorsports. I was a corner flagman. Assistant Flagman. I’ve worked on pit crews, done scoring, been a head scorer, been a publicity director at Williams Grove Speedway for a while when they had the Saturday Night Series. I’ve been very involved in racing, working with the Eastern Museum of Motor Racing as a librarian, which has just been absolutely fascinating.

Any museum, like the museum you have here, is a treasure. I hope everybody appreciates what you have here. Each museum, they’re priceless, and what we’re doing to save racing history, [00:03:00] we have to do it, because so much racing history is being lost every single day, and we have to preserve every little bit of it.

So, I’m gonna be talking about 1920s and 1930s racing. The United States entered the 1920s, having just come out of World War I. 1920s, The American public was hungry for entertainment. Leading the way in summer sports was naturally baseball. Also attracting plenty of the public’s attention was automobile racing.

Automobile competition was going through its growing pains as it ended the 1920s. Tracks were plentiful as horse tracks dotted the countryside. As 1920s racing began, there were two basic forms of dirt track competition. There were the stock cars, the road cars of the day. The second form was the engineered machines constructed for the speedway.

Now this is Speed Gardner’s car. This was from the 1920s, I believe it was 1928 that this photo. The second form is of interest. Today we call them sprint cars. A look at the history of the sprint [00:04:00] car shows the name came about late 1950s, 1960. Prior to that time, they were known as big cars. This leads to an interesting discussion that was recently occurred.

Racing historians go with what I term the Chris Economacky rule. Economacky, the dean of motorsports, said the term big car came with the arrival of midget racing. When midgets burst upon the scene in 1934 and 1935, promoters began referring to the other racing cars This was shown to be true in advertising from the mid 1930s.

Racetrack promoters would often state in their advertisements that they were having races featuring big cars, not midgets. So what were the big cars prior to the arrival of midgets? Often newspapers just announced automobile races with no distinction between stock car and manufactured racing machines.

One term I found used in newspapers, and the term I use, is speedsters. Another term I noticed was light [00:05:00] cars. There is one problem. In 1920s newspapers, mainly in Philadelphia and Altoona, I found where they referenced the cars as big cars. This creates an issue with the Chrisikali Maki rule. I brought up the concern with noted racing historian Tom Schmee.

It left both of us puzzled, and for those of you that know Tom Schmee, uh, tell him I said don’t get a big head because I mentioned him today. Tom’s a good friend of mine. I decided to look into 1920s usage of big cars, and I came up with two theories. The first is engine size. At some of the races during the 1920s, they split the cars by engine size.

They had a class for cars using engines 450 cubic inches and less. There was a second class using engines 320 cubic inches or less. Big car may refer to the cars using the larger engines. A second theory deals with a traveling racing group. In the 1920s, there was a traveling racing group that staged exhibition races.

They featured cars called [00:06:00] tiny cars. I was fascinated about this form of racing and located a newspaper photograph of a tiny car. They were the forerunner of the midget. They’re about the same size as a midget. This car has headlights on it. But it is basically about the same size and they used an outboard engine like the early midgets used.

Shanley Park, we have discovered, was the first track in Pennsylvania to hold a automobile race. We first thought it was in Philadelphia in 1899 and I was doing some research on 1899 motorcycle racing and I found results and it said the winner won a July 4th, 1899 motorcycle race. At Shenley Park, and I thought, we have no history of that.

So I immediately dug into Pittsburgh newspapers and sure enough, there was an automobile race July 4th, 1899 at Shenley Park in Pittsburgh. That track is still there, it’s now a running track. So Shenley Park was actually the first track in Pennsylvania. to hold an [00:07:00] automobile race. After discovering the tiny car group, the term big car was possibly used to separate the two forms of cars.

For this discussion, I will use the term speedsters. We have speedsters becoming big cars, and big cars eventually becoming a sprint car. As racing entered the 1920s, competition was mainly on horse tracks. There were a few raceways built exclusively for automobile racing, However, the overwhelming number of races were on fairground horse tracks.

I do want to point out an interesting aspect to racing research. My history research hero is Joanne Freeman. Ms. Freeman is one of our country’s leading historic researchers. Through studying Ms. Freeman’s research, I learned that too often we get locked into the well traveled path. To find missing history nuggets, one must veer off the well lit well traveled path and instead venture into history’s dark, unlit alleys.

By rooting through history’s sometime unkept past, the gems that were missed come to life. Using this [00:08:00] line of thought, I went to work on the existence of 1920 racing facilities. Almost every county had a fairground horse track, and automobile races were prevalent at these facilities. What too many researchers miss are the small town horse tracks.

At the time, many small towns still had some type of fairground. By digging into small town newspapers, suddenly long lost automobile races came to life at these small town tracks. Racing was going strong in the 1920s, and stronger than many knew. The small town horse tracks hosted horse racing events. To increase attendance at their horse races, the small town ovals were adding automobile and motorcycle races.

AAA was the main sanctioning body of the time. To have a AAA sanction on your race was a badge of honor. At first, AAA only sanctioned races on tracks a mile or larger. I found an article where a Western Pennsylvania track was able to track AAA. Their horse track was a half mile in size. When they filled out the [00:09:00] paperwork for AAA, they listed the track as a mile.

The AAA officials were unaware of the discrepancy until they arrived the day of the race. They allowed the race to be held with the AAA sanction, but following the event, They permanently banned the track from staging another AAA race. In the 1920s, AAA was the leading sanctioning body. They did have some competition.

The International Motor Contest Association was one of their leading competitors. The American Automobile Racing Corporation was a strong group. AAA and the American Automobile Racing Corporation co sanctioned races at the Allentown Fairground. Another group trying to make some ground in the racing business was the International Automobile Racing Association.

There were smaller racing groups such as the National Motor Racing Association and the Tri State Racing Association. The racing situation at the time was much the same as our present time. If AAA sanctioned the event, usually a handful of AAA stars would participate in the race. The remainder of the racing [00:10:00] field was filled out by local stars.

It was a situation that could be compared to our present day World of Outlaws or All Star Circuit. They bring in some of the star drivers and the remainder of the field will be local competitors. One star driver every track was hoping to draw was Ralph De Palma. De Palma won the 1915 Indianapolis 500.

During his career, at some point he held every speed record from a half mile to the Indianapolis track. This taking place on track surfaces from dirt, board, and brick. In an interview from the 1920s, DePalma talked about his views on racing. Automobile racing is the cleanest and fairest of all, said DePalma.

Lots of people out there believe that every race is fixed before it starts. That every accident is planned by the poor drivers just to give the fans a thrill. They are wrong. Every man who competes in automobile races believes that he is the best in the world. Give a driver a large crowd for whom he can perform and he will fairly eat up the track.

[00:11:00] Hitting the curves with the gas feed down. Roaring on the straight stretches like a demon. The drivers are just too busy trying to reach the top to be bothered by dirty and unfair topics. Then two prizes to automobile racers are exceedingly small. Good dirt track drivers make a living, but not much more.

Ralph De Palma in the interview had an interesting take on racing accidents. He believed that having three crashes was almost like having a good luck charm. Every driver suffers three mishaps, DePalma explained. It’s part of the game’s tradition. I’ve had my three crackups and have been laid up in the hospital for as long as seven weeks at a time.

I’m not due for more than that sort of thing. Three and that’s all. You think it’s funny? Well, we’re all glad when the third smash up has been passed. The third one puts a rabbit foot or some other lucky piece in your car for keeps. So that’s an interesting take. He believed that three crashes and you were lucky then.

Not going to have any other serious wrecks. Ralph De Palma toured the country towing his racing machine. [00:12:00] Starting in 1924, he began competing in a Miller Special. The Michigan driver had Wesley Crawford and Reeve Stanley serving as mechanics. De Palma’s engine used a supercharger of his own design.

DePalma said his engine had a price tag of 10, 500. That price tag should raise plenty of eyebrows. When computed to inflation, Ralph DePalma’s engine today would cost 158, 262. You could buy a lot of 410 engines today for that amount of money. There were other drivers that were touring the nation. Speed Gardner, who we saw in the earlier photo.

Ira Vail, IP and Nat Federman. Zeke Myers, Jimmy Gleason, Russell Snowberger. Frank Lockhart, Wilbur Shaw, Ernie Triplett are names of drivers that were out on the road. When they arrived at the local track, sometimes there would be stiff competition from the local talent. One such driver was named A. B. Litz, or better known as Deacon Litz.

Deacon Litz was from Du Bois, Pennsylvania, and ran a tavern known as [00:13:00] the Quiet Woman. There’s an interesting story on it, but I won’t go into it. Don’t go into it because it would be called sexist as to why he named it The Quiet Woman. Had something to do with his wife. The local paper referred to Litz as a consistent, non spectacular speed artist at Du Bois.

I don’t know if I want to be known as non spectacular, but that’s what he was called. Litz in his early days built his own cars and towed to the regional tracks to compete against the national stars. Litz was defeating the big names and he began to accept better rides. Litz eventually went from local driver to national driver.

He competed in 12 Indianapolis 500s. A press release from an October 8, 1927 speedster race at the Bloomsburg Fairground highlighted Deacon Litz. On a day when the grandstands were sold out and people were sitting in the aisles, the racing commenced with an invitational race. Deacon Litz defeated the Field of Seven in a 10 lap race.

Then his day hit a major issue. Deacon Litz, read the press release, owner of a 20, [00:14:00] 000 Miller Special, while in time trials, suffered heavy damage to his machine when a piston broke and plunged through the engine block. Automobile men estimated the damage at several thousand dollars. Litz previously had won the Five Mile Invitational event, and there was every indication he would lead the field in every race in which he participated.

Did you take notice in the price of his race car? A 20, 000 race car at that time was a top line machine. When adjusted for inflation today, that race car would be worth 285, 262. That’s for a dirt track car. An interesting side story on Deacon Litz. When Prohibition hit, Litz was arrested for violating the Prohibition laws.

His sentence was to come in May, the same month as the Indianapolis 500. Litz made a deal whereby he pled guilty to violating the prohibition laws. Judge A. R. Chase sentenced Litz to three months in county jail along with a fine of 400. As part of the deal, the judge suspended [00:15:00] the sentence until December after all racing was completed.

Litz cut a real nice deal. Another driver that would take the money from the National Stars was named Lafayette Stallman, better known as Leif Stallman. Stallman competed at tracks that were outside the AAA sanction. AAA had a ban on their drivers competing on tracks outside AAA’s sanction. Some of the drivers did race at non sanctioned events.

Using an alias, which sometimes makes it difficult for racing historians, some of the star AAA competitors raced in the outlaw races. The Brookville, Pennsylvania driver traveled around to several states and was quite successful competing in his 16 valve Dodge. In 1924, he made the decision to retire from racing.

In the Jefferson Democrat newspaper, Leif Stallman placed an advertisement listing his race car for sale. The advertisement read, For sale. Racing car. Elegant condition. Equipped with the best racing equipment money can buy. Has record for half mile track of 29 seconds. Has record [00:16:00] for mile track of 52 seconds.

Is light and fast. Will sell to the right quick buyer. Reason for selling, am in business and cannot follow it up. Another probable reason for his 1924 retirement came on August 9, 1924. He was leading a race when a lapped car crowded him into the fencing. His Dodge struck the fence and a 12 year old boy that was sitting on the fencing, instantly killing the child.

Stallman’s car went down an embankment and landed on a sand pile. Stallman had several broken ribs, severe cuts, and a wrenched back. Stallman’s retirement was short, though. He built a new car called a Frontenac Buick. He took a Frontenac and a Buick, combining parts from both machines. Stallman constructed a new, quick car.

Stallman became an outlaw driver long before the term outlaws became popular. He sought out high paying races around the Middle Atlantic region. In 1926, the new Kensington Half Mile track, located north of Pittsburgh, opened. [00:17:00] The track, called the Million Dollar Speedway, due to the cost of building the raceway, opened with a non sanctioned automobile race.

To attract attention, plus drivers and racing fans, The raceways of Management decide to pay $1,000 to the winner today. Many tracks pay $1,000 to the winner. That money brought La Stallman. Stallman won the race, taking the long route, noticing the track was rough on the bottom. Each lap Stallman was against the outside rail.

Stallman estimated he probably ran an extra quarter mile each circuit of the 200 lap race. Stillman’s Outlaw style caught up to him. In 1926, AA began to move into the tracks that dotted the Western section of Pennsylvania. AAA made an ultimatum. You have to join AA if you wanna compete in our races. If you join aa, you can no longer race at tracks not sanctioned by aaa.

On July 24th, 1926, Stallman won AAA sanctioned race. At the Dubois fairground. A week later, he was competing [00:18:00] in a race not sanctioned by Triple A. Triple A’s action was quick. On August 4, Triple A announced Leif Stallman was disqualified from the Dubois win because the July 31 race was a contest neither sanctioned nor supervised by the contest board.

Triple A also announced Stallman was permanently barred from any further AAA contest. Stallman’s excursion into non sanctioned field was a particularly flagrant violation of regulations, the AAA board statement said, coming as it did only a few days after the bars had been let down at his most urgent appeal to be permitted to enter sanctioned racing.

When the tracks at Butler, Pennsylvania and Lawn City, Pennsylvania entered racing last May, all Western Pennsylvania drivers were given an opportunity to join. Stallman was not among those who took advantage of the offer, and later, when he asked to come in, he was refused. He pleaded, however, that he had not been offered the opportunity to enter in May.

For that reason, he was admitted on [00:19:00] July 23, the day before the Dubois race, upon the express stipulation that should he ever backslide, he would be permanently out. Yet in the face of that agreement, he refused. He raced outside the following week. Neither this board nor the triple a has any quarrel with any promoters, car owners, and drivers outside its sanction, but it does have a standard, which is not often equal.

It desires that this standard shall be set an example that nothing shall dim its present and well defined leadership that the attempt it has made to make racing clean and Gert was safety shall not be undermined. Unless AAA drivers live up to these standards, they cannot be maintained, and no driver can live up to them by racing today on a track sanctioned by AAA and tomorrow on one that does not qualify.

Did that deter Stallman? Not in the least. He continued his outlaw style, working around AAA sanctioned tracks. Continued racing into the early 1930s. The ban by AAA [00:20:00] did keep him from making the big next step up the racing ladder. There is one driver from this era that time has forgotten, but he deserves his place in automobile racing fame.

His name is Andy Crumshaw. Andy Crumshaw was not a known feature winner, but he was a fascinating story of racing determination. Crumshaw was from Alliance, Ohio. Due to an issue at birth, Crumshaw lost both of his legs at the hip. He also had part of his right arm amputated. Despite the inflictions, Crumshaw went after life with a gusto.

Andy Crumshaw was well known in Alliance. He owned and operated the largest newsstand and retail business on the east end of town. Crumshaw never considered himself crippled. One of his great projects was building a car of his own design. Taking several different cars, Crumshaw constructed a luxury car, one that he drove across the country and across southern Canada.

Crumshaw loved racing. He took a Frontenac and rebuilt it. He would steer the car with his left arm. Crumshaw made an extension he placed on his right arm. [00:21:00] Using that extension, he could operate the gas and the brake. Andy Crumshaw toured around the country, although the majority of his racing was from Ohio and East.

Many of the tracks would advertise his upcoming races, stating the invalid driver would be competing. Andy Crumshaw was anything but an invalid. He was a competitive racer. And often finished in the top five. He won a feature at the Evensburg Fairground. One fascinating thing I find about this is his mechanic has an arm and a sling.

And I take it that somewhere along the line the two of them had quite an adventure. Crumshaw’s racing did hit a major obstacle in 1927. While racing at Lisbon, Ohio, the leader suddenly slowed and Crumshaw’s car made heavy contact. Andy Crumshaw was transported to the hospital and received the bad news.

He had broken his left arm, the good arm, placing him on the sidelines for a while. Just before I came up here, I did find another story on Andy. He has apparently a good sense of humor because When he broke that arm, he came back to the track while the races were still going on, went over to [00:22:00] the judges stand, held up the arm in the sling and said, look, it’s the good arm.

So apparently he had a very good sense of humor. Racing popularity was strong. This is a young driver just making his start and it’s a driver that anybody that follows racing will know. This is Lenny Duncan, and this is at Deer Park, New York. We think this is probably about 1925, 1926, somewhere in there.

We received at Eastern Museum many of Lenny’s photos, and this was at the bottom of the box. And one day I was rooting through, and I thought, Oh, this is, this is absolutely tremendous. That’s an amazing photo. In going through newspaper accounts of races, both AAA and non sanctioned, the announced crowds were amazing.

Often the attendance at half mile races would be around 20, 000, sometimes grating. Racing was profitable, and this money brought the seedier underside into the sport. There were reports of promoters taking the money and running. The sport also attracted the attention of organized crime. I found two interesting stories about organized [00:23:00] crime in the 1920s.

The first came in 1922. It’s actually not a dirt track. This is the Uniontown Speedway. It was one of the leading raceways in the country. The criminal element saw an opportunity and began sending individuals into the track to open a betting line. A lot of money was exchanging hands as bets were being placed not only on the outcome of the race, but on other elements of the event.

In 1922, the tracks management learned of the activity and alerted the police. The Speedways Management issued a press release stating that no gambling will be allowed inside the track’s gates. The press release read, A number of sportily inclined gentlemen have been attempting to make books on the big event, and it is to block the plans of these men.

Anyone detected making a bet at the track on Saturday will be ejected without ceremony. There will be a number of police officers in plainclothes stationed throughout the grandstand and infield on Saturday with orders to place anyone under arrest who violates the rules of this respect. The Uniontown newspaper decided to investigate the betting [00:24:00] situation.

While the Uniontown Speedway management could control the betting inside the track’s gates, they had no control outside the raceway. The newspaper found bookies had set up betting. Some of the wagers were what the newspaper called a freakish nature. Some of the wagers discovered by the paper included odds of 2 to 1 that an accident will occur on Death Curve, where several spills took place.

There was even money that none of the cars would change a front tire. Due to one was offered that none of the drivers will go the entire 225 miles without a stop. There was even money that 1, 000 automobiles will be parked inside the speedway. I wonder who had the chore of going in and counting 1, 000 automobiles inside the speedway.

There was 3 to 1 that rain will not interfere with the event, and 4 to 1 that no one will be killed during the race. It was 6 to 1 that the winner will not lead all the laps, and even money that engine trouble will put at least two cars out of the race. Other strange wagers were, the winning car will have an odd number, [00:25:00] and another bet was on whether the feature winner will be a married man.

Racing caught the interest of one of crime’s most notable individuals. Mr. Al Capone became involved in stage what might be one of our sport’s greatest races. From 1920 through 1933, prohibition was in full force. Al Capone and some of his criminal element were gaining large amounts of money by supplying bootleg alcohol.

Capone needed some way to hide and move money. One way was through automobile racing. After Capone was sentenced and on his way to prison, Johnny Black, the former personal and publicity director for driver Barney Oldfield came forward about Capone and racing. In a newspaper interview, Black talked about Capone and his bootleg buddies using racing.

Al Capone was as strewed in racing as he was in business. To hide some of the money he was making through bootleg alcohol, Capone began to purchase race cars. He bought good cars, often ones that raced at Indianapolis and other big speedways. He made the [00:26:00] purchases through a third party. Keeping his name out of the deal.

The same was true when hiring drivers. It was handled through a third party. The drivers would learn of the car’s real owner after the competitors made the final agreement to drive the car. Capone’s dealing and racing caught the attention of other operators in the criminal world. Al Capone and some of his principal lieutenants suggested a way to settle differences between factions.

Tiring of using tommy guns to settle differences, they suggested staging an automobile race. When the big Chicago 10 mile race was announced, Johnny Black said, the gangsters entered them under assumed names. They then commenced to select the drivers. The mob heads wanted the best. They were willing to pay the price.

They got the best pilots money can buy. Exactly 45 kingpins of speed swayed by money and orders of the bootleg kings were on hand to qualify. On race day, there were 45 cars and drivers, all owned by some member of organized crime. A few minutes before the race, [00:27:00] the field increased to 47. Drivers Bill Chittum and William Wolfe heard about the race and decided to enter.

They did so not knowing the circumstance of the race. The race organizers were quite willing to take their entry money. One problem occurred prior to the race. The race starter, the head flagman, Apparently being tipped off, took flight and sought safety. Johnny Black had flagging experience and accepted the position.

There were 47 cars on hand, only 18 were going to make the starting field. Johnny Black said that, tersely told that they must earn their stipends from their bootlegger bosses, And that if they laid down and lived after the race, they might look forward to a ride after it. In this atmosphere of death, the pilots threw everything they and their cars had into the speed activities.

To the speed kings, it looked as if the old Grim Reaper was handling the flags himself that day, with a fateful fate in prospect for the racing pilots, if they did not win, and a potential death facing them if they did. Narrowing the 47 cars down to 18 [00:28:00] presented some of the most intense racing ever witnessed.

By the end of qualifying, the drivers had smashed the smithereens more than 1, 000 feet of fencing. Drivers went through holes in the fencing made earlier by other drivers. William Wolfe, the outsider that entered the race at the last second, could not believe what he was watching. Unaware of the situation, Wolf commented in an interview about the almost insane racing he was incurring.

If you took your foot off the accelerator for a second, Wolf said, not one, but about a dozen cars flashed by you. And those boys were driving. I want to tell you, they were maniacs. I did not understand until afterwards. The best made plans by the gangsters failed on this day. The two outsiders, Wolf and Chittum, finished first and second in the feature.

Bill Chittum won, and William Wolf a close second. Upon reporting to the pits, Chittum and Wolf were informed of the race’s circumstances. Two quickly gathered their winnings and made a hasty exit of the track. They were not the only ones to make a quick exit of the track. Following the race, flagman Johnny [00:29:00] Black received the same information.

When I learned after the race that the racketeers had taken this way to settle their disputes instead of with machine guns and fear for lest I might be blamed for the loss of their cars later, I did not waste much time in Chicago, Black said. The sport of automobile racing had a strong and healthy run through the 1920s.

As it entered the 1930s, I noticed something odd. I developed a spreadsheet that I could document Pennsylvania’s races from the first one in 1899 to the present. As I looked over the spreadsheet, I noticed a drop in races. From 1930 through 1934. At first I thought maybe I did less research on the time frame.

I went back and did research on the races through the years and noticed there was indeed a drop in the races. Then the historian kicked in. The Great Depression. It began in late 1929 and went through much of the 1930s. The 1930s are one of the more fascinating decades in racing. There was a depression in what it did to the sport.

Racing received a new breath of life when midget racing swept the sport in the mid [00:30:00] 1930s. But then there was the dark side. Racing became a deadly sport during this era to the point I often call the decade the bloody 1930s. First, the Great Depression. It did have an effect on racing. The number of races dropped.

There were fewer races held at the small town fairground ovals. The majority of races were at the established fairground tracks, usually a city track or a county fairground. Although the number of races dropped, the crowds did not. The newspaper accounts continued to report large crowds. Look at baseball attendance during the same time frame.

The stronger baseball teams were reporting record crowds while the smaller baseball clubs were struggling. Although money was tight, people still wanted to be entertained. I did notice one trend with racing events. There were mentions about the number of people watching the races for free. People were finding hillsides, trees, anything they could use outside to track rounds to see the races.

A race at Arden’s Downs is a great example of the hard times. The article mentioned that 27 people were arrested trying to crash the gate at the track. The [00:31:00] 27 were taken to Justice of the Peace James Stouffer on charges of trespassing. All 27 were fined 1 plus costs. Showing how hard it was at the time, 25 of the 27 Cannot afford the 1 plus costs and were committed to the county jail.

A day later, family members paid the fines and all but one were released. Times were hard for people and times were about to become hard for racing. There was a problem brewing and by the middle of the 1930s, it had become a serious issue. When racing began, the horse tracks were fine for automobile racing.

As racing entered the 1930s, the cars were becoming much quicker. As racing went through the decade of the 1930s, racing was outgrowing the horse tracks. The fairground horse tracks had safety features that were fine for horses, not for automobiles. The single board wood fence could not contain the speedy cars.

The fairground complex allowed fans to watch races from almost every inch around the track. The lack of fencing and the spread out spectators led to deadly results. [00:32:00] Frankly, and I have to really say this, there are times I wonder how racing ever survived the 1930s. Week after week, there were newspaper reports of drivers losing their lives.

There were numerous reports of fans being killed when cars went through fencing. One of racing’s greatest stars, by 1933, became one of its more outspoken opponents. Barney Oldfield, A member of AAA’s contest board suddenly could no longer see a future for the sport, mostly due to the carnage. The San Francisco Examiner newspaper was the perfect place for Oldfield to make a statement about automobile competition.

The Examiner was a quite anti automobile racing paper during the 1930s. Automobile racing has outlived its usefulness, Oldfield said in his interview. It has ceased to be racing and has become merely a morbid and brutal spectacle. The science of speed has reached a point where any manufacturer can produce a car which will satisfy any sane buyer.

Few of your average automobile race fans know or care anything about the finer points of the [00:33:00] cars of the racers. They watch without interest the most skillful and delicate driver, but let a tire burst, a wheel skid, a car break for the fence, and they are out of their seats in a flash. A soft spot on the track, a piece of broken metal, a speck of dirt in an oil feed.

These things and not engines, experience, or skill are the things which win automobile races now. Racing cars are now too fast for the tracks, and I doubt safe tracks can ever be constructed, especially with the demand for more speed and more hazards. As for the proposal to require promoters to post bonds to provide for the dependence of those killed or permanently injured, Henry Ford took out insurance on every driver and mechanic as a personal gift to them.

I quit racing for two reasons. First, there is no money or future in it for the driver. Second, because of the ever increasing dangers with the demand of speed and more speed and more risks. I knew I would get mine someday if I continued on, and I doubt if any kind of examination can ensure that the [00:34:00] drivers in a race are physically or mentally fit to enter.

Why, Tommy Milton, one of the greatest of racers, drove for years and he was blind in one eye. Bill Denver, who raced at Indianapolis, had an arm he couldn’t even bend. If there must be automobile racing, I favor a return to strictly stock car racing and the elimination of specially built racers constructed for speed alone.

These frail, highly powered cars built for racing are a danger to the driver and themselves. When there is a crash, they crumble like tin. Although the government, for the most part, remained out of racing, some local government stepped in to increase safety. In August of 1937, the government of South Bend, Indiana decided to pass a bill regarding the safety at the Playland Park racetrack.

The editorial staff of the South Bend Tribune supported the bill. The members of the city council have shown sound judgment in making a bill to protect spectators when automobile races are held at Playland Park, the editorial read. The new ordinance requires that a promoter of such races must pay a [00:35:00] license fee of 100, be insured to the amount of 5, 000 a person, and 100, 000 in accident.

The insurance must be with a company listed at no less than a million dollars, and that a retaining wall must be erected to protect spectators. This ordinance will be regarded by automobile race promoters as exceedingly severe, but it will be endorsed by spectators and thoughtful persons who have the good sense to appreciate why it was created.

Thank you. There was one major safety issue, and that was dust. In researching racing during the 1930s, so many articles mentioned the dust. Dirt horse tracks, paired with the increasing power and speed of the cars, brought billowing, blinding dust. The dust dramatically increased the danger factor of automobile races.

I found two interesting stories that highlight the dust dilemma. The first was at the Bloomsburg Fairground. The main event began at the Bloomsburg Fairground and immediately dust rose from the racing action. In the early laps, a car crashed into the fencing entering the third turn. The impact [00:36:00] sent the driver hurtling out of the car, his body landing on the track.

The accident occurred in front of the ambulance crew. With the heavy dust, the race officials were unaware a crash occurred in the third turn. The ambulance crew bravely went over the fence and pulled the injured driver from the track. They placed him in the ambulance and quickly left for the hospital.

When the driver arrived at the hospital, the hospital staff wanted more information on their patient. They called the track asking for information on the driver injured during the race. Track officials, still unaware a crash occurred, told the hospital staff person there must be some mistake, no one was injured during the race.

The staff person replied, we have a driver here, he is injured, he was injured at your track. The track official replied, they were mistaken and hung up. After the race was completed, the dust dissipated, and to the surprise of the track officials, there was a wrecked car against the third turn fence. The second story comes from the Monongahela City track.

Their big race was well underway. During the race, two cars crashed exiting the second turn. With what [00:37:00] was described as blinding dust, other cars crashed into the accident scene. The head flagman, not able to see much at all due to the dust, was unaware of the wreck. The accident continued to grow as more cars became involved.

The head flagman became aware of the fact that there were less and less cars coming by the starting line, so he signaled for a stoppage to the race. This worked for everyone except the leader. The driver in the lead car refused to stop, fearing he could possibly be passed. He continued circling the track despite frantic efforts to halt him.

Finally, a Pennsylvania State Policeman had enough. The officer walked out onto the track and drew his pistol. He stood waiting, and as soon as the leader appeared out of the dust, the officer took aim at the radiator. The car’s driver, suddenly spotting an officer aiming a gun at his car, quickly brought his machine to a halt.

The sad part of the story is a driver did die in the crash. The majority of the field was eliminated in the wreck, most not being able to see due to the dust. Racetrack owners and promoters were experimenting with calcium as a way to control the [00:38:00] dust. Adding crude oil to the surface was another way to hamper the dust.

Earlier I mentioned the New Kensington track. There’s a popular story told about an inventive way they handled their dust issue. The track was located close to a paint factory. The story told is that the promoter went to the paint factory and purchased their unused and unwanted paint. He then applied the paint to the track surface for a midget race.

The paint was not popular with the drivers. It did hinder the dust, but it also adhered to the cars and the drivers. One driver actually said his car changed colors during the race. He had a dark colored car and it was silver when he came out of the race. For a racing historian, parts of the 1930s were not fun to research.

The crashes were brutal and the newspaper writers described them with a flair not found today. Herb mentioned that about the one rider. Back then, writers really described the crashes. I was researching a July 4th, 1936 race at Jenner’s Speedway that had a double fatality. The writer from a small town newspaper described the [00:39:00] accident with such detail that it was absolutely, I guess the best word would be, horrific.

That is when I began to wonder how racing survived the 1930s. When you read Chris Economacky’s tremendous book, Let Them All Go, and if you haven’t read it, Definitely read it. You begin to understand the decade and the racing. Death was accepted as a risk with the sport. As Khan and Mackey pointed out, if a driver perished in a crash, they cleared the accident scene and went back to racing.

This occurred with the Jenner’s crash. As horrendous as the crash was, they cleared the incident and went right back to racing. AAA continued to be the leader of race sanctioning. AAA took a firm control of any rough riding during their events. They started to crack down because of the accidents. This is the actual AAA transcripts that we have at the Eastern Museum.

And this is an incident that occurred on November 11th, 1934 at Ascot Speedway in Los Angeles. This is the original transcript, and it’s quite long. Floyd Roberts and Kelly Petillo were fighting for a lead on the last lap when Roberts was [00:40:00] accused of forcing Petillo off the track. The AAA hearing board held a hearing to decide if punishment was due.

That’s what this whole document is. This is the hearing. At the end of the hearing, the members were told the punishment that could be handed down if needed. The rules governing are contained in the rules book, page 101, section 293, particularly part C, which says foul driving either in a contest or practice shall be deemed a breach of these rules and shall be punished by exclusion from all events of the meeting and the offender may be fined or suspended for such time as the contest board may determine, read the document.

Penalties may be inflicted as follows fines, exclusions, suspensions, disqualifications. If you find Roberts guilty of this offense, you can recommend a fine, or you can bar him from any future races for a future length of time. You can recommend suspensions for a given length of time, or you can recommend disqualifications to the contest board.

If you find Roberts [00:41:00] guilty, you can exercise what might be in your judgment a just penalty. Or you can take the alternative and follow your recommendations with the board in order that the prize money be impounded. In other words, I see no other way if he is guilty where you can arbitrarily say he can be penalized from 1st to 32nd.

He won the races without penalty being inflicted during the course of the event. And we as a board have no power to rerun the race. If you feel he is not entitled to 1st place in this event, I think it would be proper then for you to refer the matter to the board. In the end, the board decided that Roberts committed no foul.

When you read this, it got quite heated during that board meeting. Although AAA was the leading sanctioning body, another organization was making a challenge. The Central States Racing Association, also called Consolidated States Racing Association, was taking aim at AAA. At the Eastern Museum of Motor Racing, we have the CSRA paperwork.

In reading the correspondence, CSRA was looking to take AAA [00:42:00] off its lofty position. CSRA began to move into AAA areas, and more tracks switched over to CSRA. Racing was still going through some growing pains. The early part of the 1930s found the majority of races still being held on horse tracks. By the second half of the decade, racing began moving away from the horse tracks to new raceways.

Some of these tracks had interesting stories. One was the Landisville Speedway. The Landisville Speedway was actually a football stadium for a semi pro football team. As automobile racing interest increased, the owner of the facility and the football team saw an opportunity. He decided to race the Speedsters around the football field during the football game intermissions.

Now fans could receive twice the entertainment for the money. A football game with an automobile race at intermission. The cars raced on a track built around the football field. His great plan hit a major snag one day. During the intermission race, one car veered off the track and crashed into the goalpost, sending the goalpost toppling to the ground.

For the second half, [00:43:00] all extra points and field goals had to be kicked on one end of the field. There were two saviors of the sport. The first was the realization of the need to build racing facilities exclusively for automobile racing. By the mid 1930s, the move away from the horse tracks began. The new tracks were constructed with banking in the turns, better suited for automobile speed.

The fencing was built at a height to better contain automobiles. One of the strongest improvements, the grandstand seating, was such that it contained the crowd in one area. No longer were spectators spread out around the track. Now fans could be confined to a grandstand along a straightaway. The sudden construction of new speedways led to an interesting situation in my home area.

In 1939, construction began on two speedways. Oddly enough, both were being built into amusement parks. The first was at an unincorporated area known as Hershey. The second was at a small railroad hamlet known as Williams Grove. Roy Richwine was leading the construction of the new Williams Grove track, while Milton Hershey, of Hershey [00:44:00] Chocolate fame, was heading up the Hershey project.

Many do not realize Milton Hershey was a racing enthusiast. Around 1920, he bought a large amount of land outside of the Hershey area. Milton Hershey bought it with a vision of constructing a large road racing course. That plan never came to life. Milton Hershey and Roy Richwine suddenly realized they had a problem.

Both of their new tracks were going to open the same week. The two agreed to have a meeting. At the end of the meeting, they came to agreement. The Hershey Speedway would open on Thursday and Williams Grove would open on Sunday. The second savior of the sport came, according to racing historian Crocky Wright, on June 4, 1933, at the Hughes Stadium in Sacramento, California.

On that day, a new form of racing came to life. Midget racing was born, and would soon be sweeping eastward. On June 10, 1934, promoter Bill Putnam staged the first Eastern midget race. This held at Olympic Park in Irvington, New Jersey. Malcolm McKenzie is listed as winning the first [00:45:00] Eastern midget race. As 1934 progressed, midget racing spread through New Jersey and New York.

At first, the cars were crude, but the sport attracted the attention of speedster stars. Soon, Bill Holmes, Bill Morrissey, Bill Schindler, Doc McKenzie, and a young driver known as Len Duncan were competing in the midgets. By 1935, the sport had grown enough that the East Midgets had their first driver’s group with the formation of the Eastern Auto Racing Association.

Soon, the Interstate Racing Association, the Keystone Racing Association, and the American Midget Racing Association were a part of the 1935 racing scene. Promoter Bill Heiserman introduced a new form of lining up the cars called handicapping, or reverse start. It met with resistance at first, but by the end of 1935, it became accepted.

Midget racing captured the fascination of the American public. The small racing machines could race in new forms of racing venues. The high school stadiums became a popular racing facility as the small machines [00:46:00] battled on the high school tracks. Stadiums of all types, be it football or baseball, were now new venues for the midgets.

The popularity of the midgets cannot be understated. Promoter Bill Heisman stated that he paid out 192, 018. 50 in midget purses in just 1934 and 1935. Using the inflation calculator today, that would be 3, 555, 078 for midget racing in two years. One driver had a quick jump on midget competition. Bill Betterman of Los Angeles, California became a quick start in midget competition.

Betteridge was a part of the earlier mentioned tiny car group. Betteridge was a 1934 West Coast midget champion. By 1934, the midgets had a number of venues around Los Angeles area. Tracks such as Moto Stadium, Gilmore Stadium, Loyola Stadium, Pershing Park, and Seaside Park were midget havens. of those tracks.

Only one remains. Seaside Park today is [00:47:00] Ventura Speedway. Gilmore Stadium is actually the CBS Studios in Los Angeles. A 1934 press release captured the popularity of West Coast midget racing and the popularity of driver Bill Betteridge. The number one topic on West Coast these days is the birth of the exciting sport of midget auto racing, which has been playing before banner crowds, stated the release.

Most of that excitement has been produced by a smiling young teenager named Billy Betteridge, who has just been proclaimed the 1934 West Coast Midget Champion. This clean cut Los Angeles youngster built a so called experimental midget back in 1932 and ran a few exhibitions with it. When Ken Brenneman and Hap Woodman decided to join forces and get others interested in the small cars, Billy Ridge was attracted to this group and it wasn’t long until he was in the thick of things.

Billy Ridge had fooled around with the Marine outboards for a couple of years and felt that the Kaley outboard engine would be suitable to mount in his homemade chassis. [00:48:00] Little did he realize the eventual success that was about to come his way Better Ridge was lauded by many who witnessed the little car in action.

Betteridge and his Kelly with a combination and after four promising outings in 1933 at Loyola Stadium, he came into his own during the past season. He racked up a phenomenal record of 30 midget wins and with eight straight at Gilmore Stadium and six out of eight starts at Moto Stadium in Long Beach.

Billy finds enough time out of a busy schedule to teach Sunday school class. It focuses on clean living, mentally and physically prepared, and will and determination to win. That’s what he has done. He’s just made to order for the mantle of a champion and displays the humility of one of racing’s finest personality.

Betteridge’s story comes to an unfortunate end. On June 8th, 1937, he was fatally injured. In a wreck on the opening lap of a feature at Atlantic Stadium, Billy Betteridge, a point champion at Moto Stadium and the National Midget Circuit of [00:49:00] California champion left an impression on West Coast fans as per this press release note.

The greatest tribute ever paid a driver, stated the release was given. Betteridge went 6000 fans to a man remained for over an hour, patiently waiting for an announcement as to his condition. When the announcement finally came, they were told that their beloved idol had passed on. They filed out in silence on the East Coast Midget Racing opened the sports door for many aspiring drivers.

One was Joe Pacino from Woodside, Long Island. He started his driving career with the Speedsters, but struggled. The Midgets offered a new opportunity and Bocchino took advantage of the new sport. Although not a known feature winner, Bocchino was on top of his game in qualifying, winning a number of heats and semifinals.

Joe Bocchino is still typical of quite a number of struggling young men in the sport of auto racing read a press release who have been following a dream. Joe’s early schooling goes back to 1934 when he broke in with the Garden State [00:50:00] Association in attempt to make it. He encountered the same problems as those who preceded him, the lack of good equipment.

But there was a ray of hope during the initial season that In which he placed in the top five in a race meet staged at Woodbridge, New Jersey. This was enough to keep him focused. He sat out the 35 season due to the lack of a decent ride. But in 1936, we find him taking part in 19 midget races, namely Bridgeport, Philadelphia, West Haven, and Freeport.

He tried his hand with a marine type power plant known as the Van Blurck, but has since shifted his attention to the Ford 60, which has proven to provide that necessary step to move his career along. Born and raised in Scranton, Pennsylvania, Joe now makes his home on Long Island, which puts him in close proximity with the tracks that make up the Heisman Circuit.

Midget racing became so popular, it was almost possible for a driver and race team to compete every night. This book, this was compiled by Carl Swigert, highlights the yearly racing of star drivers. And this is each [00:51:00] race that they did, and this whole book is different drivers. And it is every single race.

The first one is Billy Betteridge, who’s up here. The yellow on here is actually all of Billy’s feature wins. At the Eastern Museum of Motor Racing, we have a number of books by Carl Swigert and Joe Heisler. And it documents every single one of these midget stars, where they traveled, how they did, In qualifying and features and there’s an interesting aspect to this and that is travel.

We have to remember that this was prior to the freeways travel was not easy during this time race teams went great distances. It was not unusual to see a note of a driver competing in the Midwest on one night and a day or two later he was racing on the East Coast. There were no modern hotels, no fancy racing rigs, no chain restaurants, no fast food.

These competitors were true racers putting up with hardships of the road. And it is amazing when you look through here to see they race night after night. One night they could be in Pennsylvania, the next night in New England, the following night they could be in New Jersey. These guys really, really traveled.

[00:52:00] Midget Racing went through its growing pains. With the cars available to race at so many venues, There was going to be some problems, even a new facility as Hershey Stadium with a strong money backing and a strong sanctioning body and C. S. R. A. Had issues the day following the opening midget race at Hershey.

Jack Conlon, the sports editor of the Harrisburg Patriot News, had an interesting look at the racing. The other evening at Hershey wrote Conlon. When the Midget Auto Races were inaugurated, more than 11, 000 fans turned out. At least a half a dozen times during the evening, the announcer called upon the audience to applaud.

The announcer who begs for applause insults the intelligence of the public just as much, if not more, than the public speaker who says, Do you see what I mean? Many persons who attend auto race for the thrills expect to see But the majority attend because they love the sport and that is their favorite diversion.

Perhaps we’re different. We would have come away from the track the other evening thoroughly enjoyed with the program if it wasn’t for the fact that they were continually reminding us that [00:53:00] it was time to applaud. It was really humorous for a while. Things are not usually done that way in Hershey.

Here’s hoping that those in charge of the midget races fall in line real soon. If you had not become disgusted with the announcer and were willing to endure more, all you had to do was try and get some refreshments during intermission. Picture the greater party of 11, 000 fans trying to get service with only two persons selling tickets and then less than a half dozen attendants endeavoring to serve the huge throng.

Talk about a day at the races. You ain’t seen nothing until you’ve gone through what we did the other night. However, we must admit it was the first race, and many of these conditions are likely to be remedied before long. On a side note, Hershey almost came to an explosive end that first year. They were scheduled to have a large fireworks display with the races.

The races and the fireworks were rained out, so Milton Hershey instructed the workers to store the fireworks under the front straightaway grandstands. During the week, a worker tossed a cigarette and it landed in the fireworks. This created a large explosive scene under the grandstands. Thankfully, the [00:54:00] grandstands were made of concrete and were able to withstand the explosion.

Hewstead Field is a prime example of the growing pains of midget racing. Hewstead Field was a multiple purpose sports facility. The complex included a football field and running track. The midgets were scheduled to race on the running track. The event was a qualifier for a race to be held at Madison Square Garden in New York.

The local newspaper added some pre life excitement to the event. And once again, this is what I said about writers at the time having a flair. The newspaper article read, Life and limb will be endangered Saturday afternoon at Husted Field when the cream of the daredevil drivers will whirl around the fifth mile of the track at speeds faster than a mile a minute.

The midget automobiles to participate have carried several drivers to their deaths and have sent numerous drivers to the hospital. Due to the nature of the local track, accidents seem imminent. A large crowd is certain to turn out for the large races. The cars are not playthings by any means. Doctors and nurses will be on hand in case of emergency.

Lovely way to sum up the, you know, races that are coming. On race day, [00:55:00] a total of eight midgets were at the track. The Husted Brothers, who owned the facility, had other concerns. They suspected a large crowd was not there, so the Husted Brothers began taking into account of the spectators. As the practice session began, the Husted Brothers asked the promoter how much he was paying in insurance.

The promoter replied he had no insurance on the race. They then asked if he had enough money to pay the drivers. The promoter stated that with eight cars, he believed he had enough money to pay the drivers. At the end of practice, the Husted Brothers made the announcement that They were canceling the races and all patrons would receive a refund.

By 1938, midget racing was booming. Eastern Midget Racing Alliance was formed as a way to protect the drivers. The Alliance was there to make sure the drivers received a fair purse. This group quickly ran into opposition. AAA wanted to be part of the East’s midget scene. In March, AAA met with the National Midget Auto Racing Circuit.

AAA took over the circuit’s schedule, and now AAA was firmly in place in the East. To show the strength of AAA, this was their weekly [00:56:00] East midget schedule. Sunday nights, they had racing at Nutley Velodrome and the Coney Island Velodrome. On Monday, they sanctioned races at Cedarhurst and Bridgeport.

Tuesday night, they were at Yellowjacket and the Bronx Castle Hill. Wednesday night, they were back at Nutley and Coney Island. Thursday, they returned to Cedarhurst and West Haven. Friday nights were for Yellowjacket and Bronx Castle Hill. And they finished the week on Saturday at Long Branch. That is 14 races in one week for AAA.

And that was all season long. There is one track on that list that needs mentioning. The Nutley Velodrome. The Nutley Velodrome was a bicycle track located in Nutley, New Jersey. And Herb mentioned about this earlier. Track was a six mile in distance, 45 degree banking in the turns. People thought promoter Jack Kochman was crazy when he suggested racing midgets at the velodrome.

Even Kochman had some doubts when he enlisted drivers Bill Scarnace and Red Redman to take some practice laps. Following that session, Kochman believed midgets could race on the velodrome surface. [00:57:00] Cotchman had an open practice and the first driver on the track, Ernie Gessel, turned a lap in 8. 4 seconds at a speed of 72 miles per hour.

That’s 72 miles per hour on a six mile track. By the second practice session, they had lap times under eight seconds. Racing great Tommy Henderson once talked about racing at Nutley. With the track’s small size and steep banking, Hinnerschitz said you would lose all perspective when on the track. Cars would circle the track so quickly that you would lose track of which straightaway or which turn you were in.

He said you would go up, you would go down, you would go up, go down constantly. You had no idea where you were on the track. Driver Henry Banks supported Hinnerschitz’s claim. Banks, in an interview, said, Driving the steeply banked track was an experience without comparison. Because of the blinding speeds, a driver never knew just where he was on the banks.

The track was doomed from its opening day. Ken Fowler’s crash into the outside railing injured 13 spectators. The local residents were unhappy over the massive traffic jams, and they considered the track a nuisance. A [00:58:00] group of citizens asked for a revocation of the racing permit, but Town Mayor Frederick Young allowed racing to continue.

What was interesting about Nutley opening was the Tri City Speedway opened the same night, and the two tracks were only a few miles apart. Tri City had 41 cars, while Nutley had just over 20. However, Nutley had a sellout crowd, whereas Tri City had a slim turnout. Nutley’s lifespan was just over one year.

On August 8, 1939, Carl Hottel was killed in an accident. He was the third fatality in 60 races at the Velodrome. The town of Nutley had enough, and racing was banned from the Velodrome. In March 1942, the Notley Velodrome was torn down and today it’s a park. With midget racing booming and big car competition continuing, a good problem arose.

There were too many races. Drivers and cars were being stretched thin. Promoters began to complain as the racing schedule filled drastically. The problem became pronounced in the fall when the county fairs were at their height. In central Pennsylvania, there was the Lebanon Fairground with its weekly big [00:59:00] car races.

A half mile north of the fairground was the Pleasant Hill Gun Club Midget Track. Both raced on Sundays. Adding to the confusion, just outside of Lancaster was the Central Speedway and their weekly big car events. Lebanon promoter Mark Light, who is also a noted race car driver, knew this was not going to work.

Light held a meeting with the other promoters and they came up with a solution. Lebanon and Central would alternate weeks with their big car races. Pleasant Hill held midget races on the Sundays when Lebanon was not racing. As the 1930s came to an end, another form of racing was gaining ground in sections of the country.

Jalopy racing was making a hit. The crude racing machines, often stripped down to the frames, could race almost anywhere, often in open fields, on autocross style tracks. This very cheap form of racing became a sudden moneymaker proposition. Fire companies and other local organizations staged jalopy races as fundraisers.

All of this great racing was about to come to an end as the war in Europe was increasing. By 1942, [01:00:00] the government shut down automobile racing in its entirety. Well, almost, because we did find some articles. There was some kind of what we, I guess, could call outlaw racing during the ban that did go on. The tracks became idle until late 1945.

The momentum racing gained in the 1920s and 1930s was lost due to the war effort. And I want to close out with this article that we found at the museum in the bottom of a box. It was from Mr. Ray Sherman, who’s the Associate Chairman of the Contest Board of the American Automobile Association. It’s entitled, The Racing Driver’s Gift to All of Us Who Drive.

This is from May of 1929. It’s a kind of just a very interesting read. This summer, as in many summers past, racing cars will roar over the bricks and the boards and through the dust of the dirt tracks while crowds thrill and cheer. To them, it will be a spectacle of sport staged for their amusement. To most of the drivers, it will be a competition for cash rewards, but to the car owners of the world, it will be more than [01:01:00] that.

Had it not been for the races of the days gone by, the world would be not so far along the path of progress. Our civilization would be a different thing. Our people would have less enjoyment of life than they would have today. America seems to have leaped from the mud of 30 years ago to the concrete of today and all that goes with it.

It did leap, and much of the impetus that made the leap of so long came from the roaring mortals of the tracks and from the sweaty, grimy hands that held to the wheels and from the thick shod feet that pressed hot pedals to the boards. Time was when a tire was a treacherous, uncertain thing. It was a creature of hope or despair.

According to whether it had or had not played the tricks upon its owner. Better tires? Maybe someday. Then the racer went out upon the tracks and burned them up and torn them apart till the fame of the uh, Goodyears and all the rest of them began to dim. And then came better tires that brought back Lester to the old trade [01:02:00] names.

Under hard pounding on the bricks and the rough usage on dangerous turns, steering knuckles, the soul of the driving safety cracked. Each crack brought its penalty to some men. And then engineers went back to laboratories and shops and came forth again with steering knuckles that would not break. And every part of a car went through a grind.

Without much, cars of today would not be what they are. In the great scheme of things, a contribution’s to the welfare of the world. And back of each test, behind each motor, had to be the hands of a man, a racing driver. This summer, 20 million of America’s families will roll over the roads in automobiles.

Fathers, mothers, children will sail at fast speeds on tires that make for safety. Cars with human freight will be pushed up frightful grades and gears and axles will not break. Steep descents, sudden stops, all in safety. A rambling tour through Sylvan Scenes is far removed from the roar and risk of the tracks, but no one could have been [01:03:00] made without the other.

The no man’s land of science has always lured the few, and the many have always reaped the real rewards. Perhaps someday a public place may hold a monument to the real racing driver, the man who brought safety to all who drive. I thank everybody for being here today. Thank you. Thank you.

This episode is brought to you in part by the International Motor Racing Research Center. Its charter is to collect, share, and preserve the history of motorsports, spanning continents, eras, and race series. The center’s collection embodies the speed, drama, and camaraderie of amateur and professional motor racing throughout the world.

The Center welcomes serious researchers and casual fans alike to share stories of race drivers, race series, and race cars captured on their shelves and walls and brought to life through a regular calendar of public lectures and special events. To learn more about the Center, visit www. racingarchives.

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