Against Death and Time: One Fatal Season in Racing's Glory Years

by Brock Yates

  The moment before the disaster. Rodger Ward's car (in a cloud of dust near a pedestrian crossover bridge) smacks the retaining wall after breaking its front axle. Approaching are Al Keller (on left) and Johnny Boyd (right). Race leader Bill Vukovich brings up rear, preparing to lap all three down the 4000-foot back straightaway. It appears that Vukovich is looking down to his left. Some observers believe he was reaching for a rag to clean his goggles. If this was the case, the split second his vision was away from the incident ahead might have prevented him from taking evasive action. Vukovich is traveling about 140 MPH, meaning that he was less than a second away from entering the melee about to unfold in front of him. Vukovich's car ended up outside the track, well beyond the bridge, after hitting several parked cars and miraculously missing a cluster of spectators. (Dick Wallen Productions)

  Jack McGrath buckles up for his last ride at Phoenix, Arizona 1955. Always concerned with safety, McGrath wears a new, aircraft-style plastic helmet in place of the aged leather units favored by most drivers and uses four-point seat and shoulder harness. But the lack of rollover protection was the cause of death for this popular driver during a series of violent flips following a front axle failure.

  Phil Waters in the Cunningham C4R drives to victory in the 1953 Watkins Glen Grand Prix. The crude 4.6-mile network of paved Town of Dix roads was adapted after a major spectator crash on the original course through the Upstate New York village. Note the lack of guardrails on a circuit that was the antithesis of the super-tracks to be designed and built around the world within the next half-century. Walters averaged 83.3 MPH on this primitive course.

  Phil Walters celebrates his 1953 Watkins Glen victory. This brilliant driver raced midgets and stock cars under the name "Ted Tappet" in deference to his high family who considered professional automobile racing below his station. Walters was a decorated WWII glider pilot who, following the 1955 LeMans race, was headed to the Ferrari Grand Prix team. But after witnessing the carnage of the Levegh accident, Walters quit racing in his prime and opened a Volkswagen agency on Long Island, never to race again.

  Sports car racing in the 1950s was elemental at best. Smalley's Garage in downtown Watkins Glen served as the technical inspection station for cars competing in the amateur sports car races. In the foreground is the Italian-built Bandini of Roger Merrill, Jr., while number 94 (with its top still up, implying that it was to be driven to the races) is the MG TD of William Bastrup. Under the tent in the right background, a volunteer committee performed the technical inspection, checking brakes, tires, lights, etc. A Jaguar XK 120 and MGTD can be seen at the left. (William Green Motor Library)

  One of the greatest duels in Indianapolis history unfolds in the opening stages of the 1955 `500: Bill Vukovich dives below the white line in turn one to pass Jack McGrath, nearly driving on the grass apron. The pair passed and re-passed each other before. McGrath's engine failed and Vukovich drove to his death.

  French Gendarmes and rescue workers attempt to treat the survivors following Pierre Levegh's crash. While his MercedesBenz 300SLR race car never reached the crowd, its engine and front suspension assembly scythed through the throng, initially killing 81 and injuring another 75-100. The final death toll has never been officially determined, but many believe it ultimately exceeded 100.

  James Dean prepares to leave a Los Angeles gas station after filling the tank of his new Porsche 550 Spyder. He will then head north for his rendezvous with eternity at Cholame, California later that day. Behind him is parked the Ford station wagon with Dean's race car trailer. It will be driven to the race at Salinas by studio photographer Sanford Roth and friend Bill Hickman. It was planned to haul the Porsche home with this rig.

  The shattered wreckage of the so-called "little Bastard" lies at the roadside near Cholame, California. The primary impact was directly behind the left front wheel, meaning Dean's body was protected only by a thin layer of aluminum bodywork. The fate of this automobile-one of the most notorious in historyremains unknown to this day.

  The skeletal remains of Pierre Levegh's Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR smolders atop the earthen barrier intended to protect the crowd from the speeding cars at LeMans. The deaths were caused not by the automobile, but from its engine and suspension bits that flailed through the packed crowd. Levegh was thrown clear of the wreck and died on the track surface. In the background are the pits mobbed with curious onlookers. Race officials made the decision to continue with the competition so that emergency vehicles would be able to leave the crash site unimpeded by the giant crowd departing the track following an immediate cancellation.

  Pierre Levegh at the wheel of the ill-fated 300SLR Mercedes-Benz prior to his death at LeMans. The impact of the accident sent the engine and Front suspension assembly into the crowd while Levegh, wearing no seat belt, as was the practice in those days, was pitched from the cockpit and killed.

  John Fitch celebrates a 1953 victory while driving for the Cunningham sports car team. With him is his wife, Elizabeth. During the 1955 LeMans race she stayed in Switzerland and heard a report on U.S. Armed Forces radio that it was her husband, not his co-driver Pierre Levegh, who had been involved in the catastrophic crash.

  Bill Vukovich in the revolutionary Kurtis-Kraft 500A fuel-injection special that carried him to victory at Indianapolis in 1953 and 1954 with a near miss in 1952.

  Who in God's name were these people, who dealt with death so casually? Were they all insane? All obsessed with a death wish? "Motorized Lemmings?"-as Newsweek columnist John Lardner denounced them following the Vukovich crash. Surely some of them had come home from the war restless for action, bored with the Ike and Mamie good life that had overwhelmed the prosperous, vinyl- and dacron-coated nation with its Barcaloungers, its drip-dry fashions, its automatic everything, and its nightly dose of network feel-good. Others, like Jack Kerouac and his fellow beatniks, were rebelling in the coffeehouses of Greenwich Village and Haight-Ashbury, while some, wilder and more lethal, were forming motorcycle gangs like the Hells Angels, Booze-Fighters, Satan's Sinners, and Outlaws.

  An Englishman once observed that at some point, all sane young men in their late teens or early twenties will attempt to kill themselves in a looney, risk-taking adventure. The poet Richard Hugo, who, before being cursed with alcohol and depression, was a pilot in World War II, confirmed the suspicion. Following V-E day, his squadron was stationed in Sicily, training for future combat. Their aircraft, P-47 fighters with giant radial engines, were claimed to be unditchable in water. Flight engineers warned all the pilots that landing in water meant certain death. In the summer of 1945 a fellow pilot and friend of Hugo's was returning from a training flight over the Bay of Naples when, on a whim, he decided to try a water landing with the gear up. He was killed instantly. Hugo would later ponder the possibility that deep in the psyche of all young men lies a hatred of peace and safety and an irresistable urge to flout all rules and conventions. He suggested that his friend might have chosen the risk as opposed to the prospect of returning home to the cushy domesticity of postwar America. His choice was to play Russian roulette with his airplane and his own mortality in the cauldron of war.

  Years later, Michael Cimino would have one of the characters in his classic film The Deer Hunter play the same game with his own .45 automatic, when there was no gambling involved. This urge to walk the edge seemed particularly tied to war, whereas conventional thinking presumed that human nature would be to seek to preserve one's life rather than waste it. Yet following the American Civil War, young men rushed west to face the dangers of savage Indians, cattle stampedes, rustlers, fierce weather, and drunken gunfighters rather than languish in the tranquility of the East. So too for the World War I vets who migrated to Paris as the Lost Generation, there to booze and barfight themselves insensate. Looked at in this light, the men who unleashed their passions in race cars and on motorcycles in the late 1940s and the 1950s were hardly breaking new ground in terms of mad, self-absorbed risks to life and limb.

  Ironi
cally, the technology that rose out of the industrial creativity energized by the war effort on all sides offered even more macabre opportunity for self-imposed danger. The cars competing at places like Indianapolis and in European road racing were light years more advanced than those of the prewar years, thanks to quantum leaps in metallurgy, fuels, bearing surfaces, lightweight alloys, and synthetic materials of all kinds. But regardless of the fevered increases in performance, the men riding inside those incredible capsules remained as fragile and physically vulnerable as ever.

  Bill Vukovich's death caused a short, frantic outcry in the national press and among a few politicians who denounced the sport of automobile racing as barbaric madness appealing to only the basest, most ghoulish human instincts. Several bills to ban racing totally were introduced in Congress, but were ignored. Homer Capehart, the powerful Republican senator from Indiana, was sure to roadblock any such legislation, which meant certain death in the Upper House.

  The danger and carnage at Indianapolis seemed to trace a course in American society that ran in direct opposition to the pallid, pastelhued lifestyle now recalled from the 1950s. In the midst of the saccharine sweetness that engulfed daily living and that enraged Kerouac and his ilk, automobile racing stood as a steaming fissure of violence and death on an otherwise tranquil landscape.

  Of the thirty-three men who climbed into race cars at the start of the 1955 Indianapolis 500, eighteen of them would die violent deaths in races-three of them before the year was ended. All of the top five finishers were doomed, as were Keller, Elisian, and McGrath, while two others would suffer horrific injuries that would end their careers. Half a century later, when two major wars were fought in Iraq and American casualties barely reached the triple digits, the notion of a sporting activity that consumed the lives of over half its participants borders on the demented. Such levels of danger would simply not be tolerated today. Life has become too precious and too easily preserved to accept the idea that death and injury are realistic components of war, much less of a sport. Lawmakers, insurance underwriters, social activists, safety groups, editorialists, and moralists of all stripes would be at full cry at the first hint of such potential carnage. Risk-taking, once an accepted component of life, has in the past few decades been relegated to the closet with other antisocial activities, leaving the men who knowingly faced destruction in 1955 among the more bizarre and perverted of humankind.

  Returning to Los Angeles, I received word, as expected, from the editors of the Saturday Evening Post that my story had been cancelled. I was settling back into my little apartment to devise another project when I received a call from a friend who edited a small, struggling sports car magazine based in New York titled Sports Cars Illustrated. His European correspondent had met a lovely girl while on vacation in Monte Carlo and, being a wealthy Italian who didn't need the work, had quit on the spot. The editor needed someone to cover the upcoming Le Mans 24-Hour race in France in less than two weeks. If I was available, a free plane ticket, modest expenses, and $500 would be mine. Having no real prospects for work and figuring a week or two in Paris and environs might be good for the soul, I jumped at the offer.

  As I readied myself for the trip to France, updating my passport, packing, and arranging airline reservations, I couldn't resist making one more trip to Travers and Coon's shop to fathom their reaction to Vuke's death. Jim Travers was alone when I arrived early one morning. The Keck streamliner was in its customary spot on jack-stands in the middle of the shop floor, surrounded by spare parts. Travers was seated at his small desk, littered as always with blueprints, work orders, and invoices. "Look at this," he said, a hint of bitterness in his voice. He handed me a sheet of paper from the Speedway listing the finishing order and the prize money. Vukovich was placed twentyfifth, with winnings of $10,833.64, a total inflated by the bonus money he received for leading so many laps before crashing. "At least he's ahead of McGrath. They've got him listed twenty-sixth. I hope Vuke understood that the nitro shit jack was using didn't work. That ain't much solace, but at least it's something."

  Travers reached into the pile on his desk and pulled out an eight-by-ten photo. It was a shot taken from behind the second turn facing down the long back straight. Ward's car could be seen scuffing the wall in a cloud of dust, with Keller and Boyd close behind. In the foreground, headed into the chaos that was about to commence, was Vukovich. "Take a close look at that," said Travers, handing me the picture.

  I examined it closely, then handed it back. "It looks like what everybody described, basically," I shrugged.

  "Except for one thing. Look closely at Vuke's head. It's tilted downward. I think he was reaching into his lap, looking for the cloth he always carried to wipe his goggles. In the second he took his eyes off the track, that may have been enough for him to get into Boyd. Maybe, just maybe, if he'd had that extra second, he might have missed the whole thing."

  "That close, huh?" I asked.

  "That close. That much difference. Right at that point on the track he's hard on the throttle, coming off the corner at maybe 140, 150. One second makes a world of difference at that speed."

  Travers took the photo back and laid it on the rubble covering his desk. He turned to look out the window at a typically warm Southern California morning. "Either way, it doesn't make any difference now."

  "What now?" I asked.

  "I dunno:'

  Hopkins says he's gonna repair his car and keep going. But Frank and I are out. I don't want to see that thing again. And Keck. He's got a new babe who's into horse racing. The new car just sits there. I guess he'll want us to finish it. But with rich guys like that, who knows? Their money makes `em different. I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't drop the whole project."

  Travers was right. While the Keck streamliner car was entered in the 1956 race, without a driver assigned, a call came in late December from Superior Oil. It was Howard Keck's private secretary. She announced coldly that the racing team was dissolved. Without ever speaking to their boss, Travers and Coon picked up their tools and walked out, leaving the streamliner, the winning Fuel-Injection Special, a mass of spare parts and engines and several midget race cars in the dark shop.

  Puzzling over what was no doubt the last photo taken of Bill Vukovich alive, I left Travers and headed back home to make my final trip preparations. Surely the more civilized atmosphere permeating the European-style motor sports I had seen at Watkins Glen would help cleanse the memory of Indianapolis. Or so I naively believed.

  TO GET TO PARIS FROM LOS ANGELES IN THE SUMMER of 1955 was a serious journey. Intercontinental jet travel awaited the development of the Boeing 707, which meant a series of hops via a Pan Am Douglas DC-8B. With its four Pratt & Whitney radial engines humming away, these 300-mph giants took me from Burbank airport to New York's Idlewild, then to Gander, Newfoundland, and finally into Paris's Orly airport. The trip, including an overnight stop in New York, consumed the better part of two days-which still stood as a massive gain in time over earlier travel by transcontinental train and ocean liner between New York and Cherbourg.

  After a day spent working the kinks out of my body in Paris, I took a train to Le Mans, a bustling trading center lying to the south and west of the capital that had served as Eisenhower's headquarters in the latter stages of World War II. Like all major French towns, its history dated back to Gaul and the Roman occupation. It had been the scene of endless sieges and massacres during the Hundred Years War and was said to be the favorite haunt of Henry II and the birthplace of Jean Bon, the first Plantagenet king. It had suffered heavily in the Franco-Prussian war and in World War I. It spread out from its shellpitted fortress walls housing a twelvth century cathedral that towered high above the River Sarthe.

  The city had hosted automobile racing since the early 1920s. The only victory by an American driver in an American-built car in a major European Grand Prix race came at Le Mans in 1921, when Californian Jimmy Murphy drove a Duesenberg in a win notable because the Indiana-built race
car carried four-wheel hydraulic brakes, a revolutionary breakthrough in an era when even the most exotic automobiles employed crude, cable-operated units based on technology dating to horse-drawn buggies.

  Since 1923, Le Mans had been the site of the world's longest and most difficult endurance race. The local Automobile Club D'Ouest organized, each June, a twenty-four-Hour race for productionbased automobiles to test both speed and endurance. At that time of the year, in that northern latitude, the night lasted little more than six hours. Over the decades, the great European marques Alfa Romeo, Bentley, Bugatti, Jaguar, Talbot, Ferrari, and MercedesBenz had dominated the event and, like Italy's Mille Miglia, the race had become a major national holiday. Run over an 8.4-mile circuit through the provincial countryside on a rough rectangle of public roads closed for the occasion, the great race attracted hundreds of thousands of spectators who spent the day jammed fifty deep on the perimeters of the track or in the amusement park that carnival operators erected for the occasion. Aside from a large grandstand on the main straightaway, there were no provisions for the spectators, who crushed together like subway riders around the course. The privileged few were offered food and drink at the Cafe de Hippodrome on the edge of the three-mile-long Mulsanne straight.

  The magazine had arranged lodging for me at the small Hotel Moderne in the center of the city, near the Place de la Republique, were the Cafe Gruber was located. This was the main hangout for English-speaking race teams and notables, meaning that interviews and informal chats with drivers and team managers might be carried out away from the noise and frenzied atmosphere of the racetrack.