Against Death and Time: One Fatal Season in Racing's Glory Years
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Johnsgard, perhaps the most experienced academic in the study of race driver psychology, summed up the subject best when he wrote, "The dimension that separates them [professional race drivers] most clearly from the men on the streets is intelligence. In contrast to the general male population, the race driver has unusually high abstract intelligence, high achievement needs, strong heterosexual needs, high exhibitionistic needs, above-average needs for change and a high degree of self-sufficiency. He is very non-differential, dislikes nurturing others, and has a low need for order and planning ahead. He is quite expedient and free from guilt. He is reserved and very toughmined as against being sentimental and dependent. Taken together, the profile is a rather classical `masculine package:"
After the James Dean madness, my life changed. I sold the MG and bought a Chevrolet business coupe. My writing switched to network television sitcoms. Their feathery plotlines and inane dialogue helped erase memories of the death and carnage I had witnessed at Indianapolis, Le Mans, and on the road to Cholame.
I never saw Diana again, although I heard through friends that she had moved to Europe and continued her groupie life with the Grand Prix crowd until March 14, 1957. It was on that day at the Modena Autodrome that, while testing a Ferrari protoype, Gino Castellotti crashed to his death. His goal had been simply to regain the lap record at the obscure circuit after Frenchman Jean Behra captured it for crosstown rival Maserati a day earlier. His demise, like most others in the sport, was the result of pure hubris and an affirmation that Alexis Carrell's "audacity" had not disappeared entirely from the human psyche.
Following Castellotti's death, Diana apparently abandoned motor racing entirely. Word drifted back to Los Angeles that she ultimately married a German banking mogul and settled into a reclusive life in Gstaad, Switzerland, skiing in the winter and hosting lavish parties in the summer. In the late 1980s, when Ferrari prices went off the Richter scale with mad speculation in the collector market, I recognized her Ferrari Mexico being auctioned in Monaco. It was sold to a Japanese businessman for $6,500,000.
It was in 1957 as well that the automobile industry rebelled against the steadily escalating horsepower race. Ford, Chevrolet, and Chrysler were engaged in a vicious battle for supremacy in the steadily growing NASCAR Grand National stock car series. Chevrolet and Ford were selling "special service" packages that included all manner of heavyduty performance parts for racing cars. Chevrolet produced a limited run of lightweight, two-door 150 sedans, all in black-and-white paintwork, known as "Black Widows." Under their hoods were fuelinjected, 283 horsepower, race-tuned Corvette V-8s. Ford answered by equipping its similar two-doors with Paxton superchargers that boosted horsepower to over 300.
The Automobile Manufacturers Association, pressured by car companies that did not participate in NASCAR, voted to limit advertising involving bogus claims of power and speed. Bill France, the crafty boss of NASCAR, responded by banning special engines with fuel-injection and superchargers. General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler then suspended their racing operations, at least in public, to appease their stockholders, the media, and the noisy safety lobby. Sub rosa support would continue until 1963, when Ford denounced the hypocrisy and resumed official motor racing participation. The other manufacturers soon followed.
By the end of the decade, thousands of miles of Interstate highways had been constructed. Seat belts were slowly being installed in a few models, but another thirty years would pass before automobiles would include truly effective safety devices such as air bags, anti-lock disc brakes, better tires, and crush zones in the bodywork. Racing cars would also become safer, but a counterbalance of radically increasing speeds kept the grim reaper in the game.
As daily life became safer through advances in medicine, environmental clean-ups, and quantum leaps in technology of all kinds, the dangerous days of 1955 faded into the fog bank of history. The risks taken by men in the primitive machines of the day, be they racing cars, jet fighters, or motorcycles, or in the new sport of scuba diving, seem irrational today. Perhaps they were induced by chemical imbalancesif some current experts are to be believed. They claim that crossed circuitry in the brain's neurotransmitters causes such problems as Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), which in turn triggers risk-taking.
An extension of that logic implies that hiding under one's bed except to eat healthy foods is a shining example of sanity. If everyone behaved "normally," there would be no explorers, no astronauts, no test pilots, no Lindberghs, Francis Drakes, Colonel Stapps, Neil Armstrongs, ad infinitum. Truth be known, living is dangerous to one's health. This was best stated by the German philosopher Goethe, who said, "The dangers of life are infinite, and among them is safety." Tacitus noted, "The desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise."
The savage year of 1955 perhaps produced nothing of great benefit to the human race (aside, possibly, from fluoride-laced Crest toothpaste, Disneyland, Dacron, microwave ovens, instant oatmeal, and the first McDonald's fast food). But as men challenged the physical penalties of power and speed without fear, they perhaps in some small way affirmed the elemental value of audacity as a vital component of the human spirit.
The great racing driver Parnelli Jones, who was only beginning his dazzling career in 1955, once observed, "If you're under control, you're not trying hard enough."
That perhaps applies to everyone on earth.
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