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

by Brock Yates

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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