Against Death and Time: One Fatal Season in Racing's Glory Years (15 page)

Back-markers, strokers and struggling rookies were on hand as
well, ready to nibble at the leftovers, happy simply to make the
thirty-three-car starting field. Many were in ancient, battered automobiles that had seen better days. Al Keller, a thirty-five-year-old
veteran of jalopies, midgets, and stock cars, was taking his first shot at
Indianapolis in a six-year old-Kurtis-Kraft dirt track car, the former
"Wolfe Special," which had carried the immortal Rex Mays to his
death at Del Mar, California, in 1949. Like many of the cars in
Gasoline Alley, the Keller car had a bloody past-now forgottenand was repainted with a new owner and revived hope.

Rodger Ward, the tough guy with the edgy reputation, was also
back, with another veteran machine-albeit with a more positive
heritage. His Aristo-Blue Special was the former Agajanian dirt-track
car that had carried young Troy Ruttman to victory in 1952. After
four seasons of combat, the aging car was now owned in part by an Indiana automobile dealer and in part by Hoot Gibson, the retired
cowboy movie star of the 1930s.

The Chevrolet division of General Motors had descended on the
Speedway with a full contingent of sales and public relations types. A
new convertible would serve as the race's pace car, while Mauri Rose,
three-time winner of the 500 and now a Chevrolet engineer, was on
hand to give press demonstrations with a V-8-powered Corvette. The
latter was intended to energize the flagging model in the face of Ford's
vigorous new Thunderbird challenge. The fleet of Chevrolets that supported the campaign, as well as all of the handouts and sales
brochures, were lavished with the division's ivory and red theme colors.

Dinah Shore would present the winner with the four-foot-tall silver Borg-Warner trophy. She was the hostess of a wildly popular
Chevrolet-sponsored Sunday evening television variety show. Her
theme song, "See the USA in Your Chevrolet," was one of the most
successful musical numbers in the history of advertising. Her
planned presence on race day would lend an air of big-time glamour
seldom seen in a city that some New York and Los Angeles cynics
referred to as "Indian-no-place." Dinah's wardrobe would, as
expected, be red and ivory.

Practice leading up to the first day of qualifying was thankfully
uneventful, aside from a few spins and some damaged egos. As
expected, McGrath was easily the quickest; once more, an argument
flared between Vukovich and Travers about the use of nitro. With his
friend McGrath running almost two miles an hour faster, Vukovich
wanted the extra boost of "pop" to narrow the gap. Travers stood firm
as his star driver stomped around the garage demanding that the
volatile stuff be loaded into his fuel tank. "McGrath will be quick in
qualifying," Travers kept saying, his angry eyes shielded behind his
ever-present aviator's Ray-Bans. "But I'm telling you, an engine with
that junk in it won't last five hundred miles. So what do you want, the
track record or some kissy-face with Dinah Shore at the end?"

The grumbling between the pair, usually good-natured, went on in
fits and starts until the first day of qualifying, the so-called pole day,
when the coveted pole position-and its bonus money-would be
determined.

As I finished my scrambled eggs at Newsome's, the skies darkened
and my walk down Georgetown Road took place under a spattering
of rain. By the time I reached the garage area, the shower had cleared,
but a brisk, chill wind began to stiffen the flags and send hats sailing.

By noon, heavy nimbus clouds hung over the track. Yet the giant,
double-decker grandstands had filled with fans, each of whom had
paid a dollar to watch qualifying and intermittent practice. No car
moved. The track was buffeted by 30-mph gusts. A crewman from
Chapman Root's Sumar team ducked into the garage and gathered
up Vukovich and Travers. "The teams have all gotten together. We're
saying, if you don't go, we won't go. Too damn windy."

Vukovich watched him leave. "Fuck 'em," he mumbled. "I'll go
when I'm ready. Not when they tell me."

Still, the Hopkins stayed in the garage. So did McGrath's Hinkle
and Bryan's Dean Van Lines, as well as every other serious contender.
The giant track remained empty and silent. An occasional angry
shout from inside the grandstand echoed into Gasoline Alley. The
crowd was getting restless. Still there was no movement.

A small, spare, balding man in a gray suit bustled into the garage.
He had a pinched, humorless face. The treasurer of the Speedway, Joe
Cloutier, he pulled Travers aside. "Look, somebody's got to get out
there and make some laps," he said with his squeaky Hoosier twang.
"I've got sixty thousand of 'em sitting in the grandstands at a buck
apiece. Unless somebody does some qualifying I'm in the tank for
refunds. The last thing I need-and you guys need-is me passing
out sixty thousand rain checks."

Travers shrugged and said nothing. Vukovich walked away and
then turned. "Look, Joe. I ain't gonna take a chance of stuffing this thing in the wall so I can save you and Tony a few bucks. If the wind
dies down, I go. If not, we go another day. Maybe you can get some
other poor sucker to try it."

He did. Jerry Hoyt was a twenty-six-year-old Chicago native who
had grown up around the business. At age nine, he was the mascot for
Lucky Teeter's traveling automobile thrill show, where his father
worked. He began racing midgets and sprint cars as a teenager. Three
previous tries at Indianapolis had resulted in dry holes, although
Hoyt was considered a solid player on the sprint car circuit and had
teamed with Sweikert to run the half-miles for the remainder of the
season. His Speedway car was an aged Myron Stevens creation owned
by Detroit sportsman Jim Robbins that had done yeoman service
over the years but had never been considered a serious contender.

With less than half an hour left before qualifying officially ended at
six o'clock, a whoop rose up from the remaining loyalists in the
grandstand. The Offenhauser in Hoyt's Robbins Special rumbled into
life on pit lane. Pulling on his driving gloves, he set out to brave the
breezes in a wild charge for the pole position. As other crews, including Vukovich and Travers, sprinted to the pits, Hoyt took the green
flag to begin his four-lap run against the clock. Dodging the gusts and
driving perhaps beyond his skill, he ran a shocking average speed of
140.045 mph to win the number-one starting position. Two others
then tried before the gun went off ending the day, with only former
national champion Tony Bettenhausen joining Hoyt in the field, at a
disappointing 138 mph. But Cloutier's precious money had remained
in the bank. Surely higher speeds would come as the serious players
faced the timing clocks the following day.

We slogged back to the garage area. In the distance, the impatient
honking of horns rose up. The giant crowd had headed for the gates.
Now Sixteenth Street and Georgetown Road had become a sea of
fuming iron. "You gotta give it to Hoyt," said Travers. "The guy has
some balls." Vukovich stalked ahead, saying nothing. A reporter from the Chicago Tribune came up. "Ol' Hoyt kinda snookered you hot
guys. Whaddya say to that?"

"Nothing. Last I heard the race ain't till Memorial Day," snapped
Vukovich.

Back at Newsome's, the Buick men cracked open another bottle of
Old Grand-Dad and watched the sun set.

"Tomorrow oughta be good," said the cuff-linked one. "All the hotshots will be ready. Weather is supposed to improve. We'll see some
serious speed."

"Not so fast that somebody ends up in my yard," said Eldon
Newsome.

The Buick man was right. The next day, calm winds and sunny skies
produced big speed. Vukovich put the Hopkins in fifth place at 141
mph while, as expected, McGrath was far and away the fastest, at nearly
143 mph. He would start third. Bryan was a wink off the pace and
would be eleventh on the grid. The long day involved all manner of
qualifying attempts, both fast and slow, with Keller surprising everyone
by manhandling his antique Kurtis-Kraft around at 139 mph.

One who never left the garage was Manny Ayulo. He was a friend of
Jack McGrath's who drove for Peter Schmidt, whose family owned a
large St. Louis brewery. Manny, as he was known in the fraternity, both
drove and served as chief mechanic on Schmidt's bright red roadster.
The son of a Peruvian diplomat who had been raised in Los Angeles,
Ayulo stubbornly refused help when the car's Offenhauser developed
endless lubrication problems. The tiny, balding driver labored so furiously over the engine in search of the ailment that his friends urged
him to get some sleep before testing the car. Ayulo shrugged them off
and worked through the night to get the engine right.

Even his close friend Wayne "Fat Boy" Ewing couldn't dissuade him.
Fat Boy was a metalworking genius. Armed with only a copper hammer, a pair of tin snips, and a bag of sand, he could form stunning,
complexly curved race car noses and tails out of sheet aluminum. He was one of several such unique craftsmen in the sport, a hard-drinking
drifter who often lived in the back of his beat-up station wagon as he
rolled from racetrack to racetrack, "stooging" for various race teams.
Fat Boy employed his mystical skills with aluminum and steel until
the early 1960s when fiberglass and other synthetics began to replace
his beloved metals. At that point he disappeared from the tracks and
was never seen again.

"Manny's got a hair in his ass," grumbled Fat Boy as he left the
Schmidt garage. "He's gonna do it by himself or not do it at all. He's
in some kind of a zone. No sleep. Might as, well leave him alone," he
said, shrugging his wide shoulders and walking away.

Late in the afternoon, during a lull in qualifying, the Offy was fired
up. After loosely strapping on his seat belt, Ayulo surged onto the
Speedway. Blazing down the front straightaway to complete the first
test lap, the Schmidt never turned. Ayulo smacked the wall head on.
As the car bounced away from the freshly whitewashed concrete and
pinwheeled to a stop, it was obvious that survival of such impact was
impossible. Still, the wiry little man who had banged his way to
Indianapolis via a hundred other crashes lived out the night at
Methodist Hospital.

Some claimed that in his haste to get on the track, Ayulo had
failed to properly connect the steering linkage. Others were convinced that his reflexes had failed and his timing was off as he barreled into the corner. A millisecond's misjudgment in correctly
finding a proper entry line at 175-180 mph, and the car might have
augured into the wall.

Either way, on Monday his young wife, Bonnie, was on an
American flight to Los Angeles, taking Manny Ayulo home for burial.

The two weeks of terror had begun.

On May 22, with qualifying for the race completed, word came via
the Associated Press that Alberto Ascari, the former two-time world
driving champion and well-liked personality among the Indy crowd, had suffered a strange accident in Monaco. While running the Grand
Prix through the streets of the tiny principality and fighting for the
lead, Ascari's D50 Lancia had locked up a brake entering a chicane in
a section of the course that bordered the harbor. In an instant the
Lancia mounted the low stone wall and pitched into the Bay of
Hercules. For a moment Ascari was trapped-until skin divers,
posted for exactly such an incident, hauled him to the surface.
Although he spent a night in the hospital, the plump man known
among his friends as "Ciccio," returned to his Milan home without
apparent injury, other than a stiff back.

Ascari had run the Indianapolis 500 in 1952 with a factory-entered
Ferrari. While he spoke no English, his easy manner and ribald sense
of humor had won him many friends among the Americans. His car
was ill-suited to the big track, and he retired after forty laps when a
wheel fractured and he spun harmlessly. But it was clear that he had
enjoyed his sojourn into the heartland and spoke of returning with a
more competitive car.

Then Ascari's long relationship with Enzo Ferrari, the powerful,
tyrannical capo of Scuderia Ferrari, broke up in a dispute over money
and Ascari moved on to drive for the newly formed Lancia team.
With that, further plans for a return to Indianapolis ended.

Little was said about Ascari's plunge into Monaco's harbor, other
than the typical spate of gallows humor that followed all accidents in
the sport. In the 1930s several drivers had ended up upside down in
a now-filled creek that bordered the Speedway's first turn, but a
muddy face was small potatoes to a salt-water dunking in a deep
Mediterranean harbor.

Then, four days later, during a lull in practice, came the stunning
news that Alberto Ascari was dead. How could this be? He had survived his Monaco crash, only to be killed at the giant Monza
Autodome, located on a former royal park in a suburb of Milan.

The mad coincidence of his demise haunts the sport to this day. Ascari left his Milan apartment on a warm May day to visit some
fellow drivers who were participating in the upcoming Super-
cortemaggiore 1,000-kilometer sports car race set for the Monza
track on the coming weekend. After a quiet lunch with his longtime
Ferrari teammate Luigi Villoresi, who had run well at Indianapolis in
1947, Ascari visited the pit of Eugenio Castellotti, a darkly handsome
Florentine who was considered a major talent. On a whim, Ascari
asked Castellotti if he might take a few slow laps in his 750 Monza
Ferrari to "work some kinks out of my back." After removing his tailored sports coat and tucking his tie into his pima cotton shirt, Ascari
climbed into the car. He was handed a borrowed helmet, having forgotten his own favorite robin's egg blue one, which he considered a
good luck talisman. Strapping it in place, he eased out of the pits and,
per his promise, made three easy laps around the sprawling, treelined circuit. But passing the pits, he punched the throttle of the powerful Ferrari sports car and disappeared down the long straight, its
V-12 growling like a deranged cat.