Against Death and Time: One Fatal Season in Racing's Glory Years (4 page)

They were officially called Novi Governor Specials. Their owner, a
Michigan industrialist named Lew Welch, built, among other things,
speed governors for Ford tractors. Welch's relationship with the
aging, eccentric mogul dated to the 1920s and was cloaked in mystery. Some believed that Ford money backed the two cars.

The pair were parked outside their garages, glinting in the sunshine as crewmen worked among a swirl of bystanders.

"See that young guy in the sport coat and open shirt?" said Medley.

I spotted him, a plain man with dark hair and a large, flat nose.

"Yeah, so what?"

"Henry Ford's bastard son, Ray Dahlinger."

"Cut the shit," I blurted.

"True fact," said Tom. "Everybody knows it but never talks about it.
They say of Henry had an affair with a Detroit babe named Evangeline Cote. He got one of his senior employees, named Roy
Dahlinger, to marry her. Her father and brother both got Ford dealerships in Michigan as payoffs to shut them up. That's Ford's kid, Ray
Cote Dahlinger. He hangs out with the Novi team here at Indy."

"Jeez, and I thought old Henry was this Bible-thumping puritan."

"And a Jew-baiter to boot. But the old son-of-a-bitch put America
on wheels," said Medley.

"And the Dahlinger family in high cotton."

A small man wearing a beret and wire-rimmed glasses stood over
the open engine bay of the number 15 Novi. He was jean Marcenac,
the brilliant Frenchman who crew-chiefed the two cars. A crewman
named Radio Gardner struck a large starting motor into the blunt
snout of the Novi. Race cars carried no starters, and the unit looked
like a giant Electrolux vaccuum cleaner. It whined for a moment,
before the engine blurted into action. The noise sent men reeling, covering their ears against the primordial shrieking. Acrid methanol
fumes poured out of the twin exhaust pipes, causing eyes to water and
noses to smart, adding to the Mephistophelian aura of the machine.

"That thing even sounds like death," muttered a reporter from the
Indianapolis Star standing next to me. "It already killed Hepburn. Its
sister tried to kill Nalon. Wonder how much time Miller's got."

Marcenac was unperturbed as he fiddled with the throttle linkage,
blipping the engine to warm the oil.

Back at his Pasadena, California shop, he had agreed to start the
Novi engines at odd hours, after neighborhood complaints about the
noise and concerns from a nearby pottery store owner that the awesome harmonics might shatter his more delicate pieces.

As the engine was warming, Chet Miller sidled out of the darkened
garage and into the sunlight. He donned a crash helmet, a domeshaped object resembling a kitchen pot. He had trouble with the chin
strap, thanks to a permanently bent left arm, the relic of a major
crash at the Speedway in 1938. Miller had swerved off the backstretch during the 500 in order to avoid fellow driver Bob Swanson, who was
sprawled in the middle of the track following a melee that had killed
the defending champion, Floyd Roberts.

"Chet's going for the record," said a short man standing behind
me. "They say he went over 140 on some stopwatches this morning.
Now he's gonna make it official."

Miller climbed into the giant machine, sliding deep into the
leather seat and grasping the flat steering wheel, which appeared to
have been salvaged from a Greyhound bus. He crammed the beast in
gear, idled out of the garage area through a canyon in the grandstands, and disappeared. The crowd stampeded off toward the pits,
expecting to see history made as the first 140-mile-per-hour lap was
recorded at Indianapolis.

Medley and I reached the pits-no more than a wide apron on the
inside of the front straightaway-as Miller rumbled off the fourth turn
and arrowed toward us. The shriek of the Novi V-8 bounced and rattled
off the high roof of the grandstands, echoing across the Indian flatlands.
The Novi rushed past and squirted out of sight into the first corner.

Another lap. Miller gaining speed. Stopwatches clicking along pit
row. "One thirty-eight!" somebody shouted.

"He's still warming up," came another voice. "Next lap he'll stand
on it."

The drum roll of power. A flash of white at the far end of the
straightaway. The ungodly howl of the Novi's supercharger blended
with the ominous rumble of its exhaust to create a deafening racket.
Miller blazed past, hunched over the steering wheel as he had done
thousands of times. If anybody knew how to get around the dreaded
rectangle, it was Chet Miller. Or so everyone thought.

The screech of agonized rubber on pavement.

"Oh, oh, the voice of Firestone," said Medley. "I hate that sound."

"The Voice of Firestone" was Speedway slang for the howl that
Firestone racing tires emitted during a spin, filched from the title of a popular NBC Radio classical music program sponsored by the
Akron company.

Another screech, and then a hollow, thumping explosion unique
to the impact of soft metal on concrete.

A track official ran onto the front straight, waving a black flag.
Practice was stopped. An ambulance bolted out of Gasoline Alley, its
light flashing, and rushed toward the first turn. A thousand faces
along pit row gaped in silence.

A woman screamed. I turned to see Miller's wife, Gertrude. She
was sitting in the low bleachers behind the pits, the closest a woman
could get to the all-male action. She slumped in tears into the arms of
a younger woman beside her. Others gathered around her, all wives of
drivers who sat in tormented isolation. Sobbing uncontrollably,
Gertrude Miller was led away by her friends. As drivers' wives, they
were all potential victims of instant tragedy.

Medley and I turned and trudged back to the garage area. A pall
hung over the place. The racing fraternity, as it was called, had a sixth
sense about serious crashes.

Something serious had happened to Chet Miller. He was dead.

His accident was identical to that which had killed Ralph Hepburn
in the same car six years earlier. The Novi had bobbled slightly entering the turn, then dove to the inside apron. Partially on the grass,
Miller had repeated Hepburn's error by nailing the throttle. Again the
beast seized its reins and arrowed into the wall at 120 miles an hour.
Chet Miller died with the same basal fracture of the skull that had
killed his teammate.

One second, Miller was chasing the fastest lap in Indianapolis
Speedway history. Another second, and he was dead.

Engines were silent. A pall hung over the entire track. Mechanics,
crews, members of the press, and the various manufacturer's reps
who infested the place, stood zombie-like, each digesting the tragedy
in his own way.

We headed instinctively toward the Vukovich garage. Travers and
Coon were laboring, heads down and mute, on the Fuel Injection
Special-the number 14, battleship-gray Kurtis-Kraft that Vuke was
to drive. He lurked in the back, shielded from the press. We were
among a select few allowed into his private space.

"Tough deal about of Chet," mumbled Medley.

"Yeah, he was a good guy," answered Vukovich.

"I wonder what happened?" I asked.

"Nothin' happened," snapped Vukovich. "He made a mistake. He
got killed. That simple. You don't make a mistake in this place. Some
days you eat the bear. Other days the bear eats you."

He turned away and began to sort through a mass of spark plugs
on the bench. "What are you gonna say to the press? They're sure as
hell gonna ask your opinion about the crash," I said.

"They can write whatever the hell they want. They don't need me,"
he grumbled.

A scrawny man with streaky gray hair walked up as we left
Vukovich in his sullen isolation. It was Ken Purdy, the editor of True
Magazine and an accomplished writer about motor racing.

"You've gotta wonder about all this dying. When's it gonna stop?"
I said.

Purdy, who was given to literary references, fired back, "Probably
never. Ernest Hemingway said there are only three real sportsbullfighting, mountain-climbing and automobile racing. The rest
are children's games played by grown-ups."

"You've got to die to make it a sport?" I countered.

"Let me put it this way. Tazio Nuvolari was maybe the greatest race
driver who ever lived. Someone once asked him why he risked his life
in a racing car. `How do you want to die?' he asked his inquisitor. `In
bed, in my sleep,' was the answer. `Then how do you find the courage
to turn out the lights at night?' said Nuvolari. Ironically, Nuvolari
died in bed, but his point pertains," said Purdy.

Seemingly satisfied that he had answered my question, Purdy
began framing pictures with his trendy new Nikon 35 mm single-lens
reflex camera and wandered back into the crowd.

Somewhere, as if by a signal, an engine fired up. It was the guttural
rumble of an Offenhauser. Another joined in. Then two more. Crew
chiefs were back at it, warming up their engines in preparation for the
track to reopen for more practice.

The debris of the Miller crash would be swept up, and business
would begin again, as if nothing at all had happened.

The bark and roar of the big engines spoke of a new beginning.
Chet Miller was dead. A race car was wrecked. It was time to begin the
resurrection.

Rumination over a tragedy would not be tolerated. Any reflection
might bring into harsh light the potential futility of the entire enterprise-that seeking unseemly speed for a few moments of glory and
a pocketful of money bordered on insanity. Death was a partner in
big-time automobile racing. To exclude it somehow unraveled the
meaning of the contest. This was a war against fear and reason, and
to pause, much less to wave a white flag, meant weakness, capitulation, and defeat.

Within an hour, the track was open again. Other men were charging past the ugly smear on the turn-one wall that marked Miller's last
moment on earth.

The rains came again the following day, which was supposed to be
the start of qualifying. Each entrant would be given four laps on the
Speedway. The thirty-three drivers recording the quickest times
would make the 500-mile Memorial Day race. The rest would load up
their cars and go home.

The low-pressure system that had cursed the Midwest for most of
the month of May ended by early afternoon. The grandstands filled
with perhaps 100,000 fans, each of whom had paid fifty cents for the
privilege of watching one car at a time circulate the track.

The gloom hung over the Speedway until mid-afternoon, when
the American Automobile Association officials judged the track dry
enough for qualifications. Freddy Agabashian, a mannerly northern
California veteran, managed to gain quick time in a new Kurtis roadster entered by the Chicago-based Granatelli brothers.

An ugly bank of rain clouds loomed in the west as the Fuel
Injection Special was rolled out of its garage and Vukovich climbed
aboard. Running in the rain was sure disaster, yet he headed onto the
Speedway for his four-lap run against the clock.

"This looks like To Please a Lady," cracked Medley as we sprinted
to the pits. He was referring to the 1951 MGM feature starring Clark
Gable and Barbara Stanwyck, wherein Gable had braved a rainstorm
to qualify for the 500.

"Life imitating art," I mused.

Vuke reeled off three perfect laps. The Fuel-Injection Kurtis,
smaller, lower, and narrower than the rest of the entrants, seemed
planted to the track, its driver in a long-sleeved denim shirt, leaning
aggressively over the steering wheel.

"Oh, shit, here it comes," shouted a photographer as he attempted
to shield his Speed Graphic from the cloudburst that suddenly
pounded the Speedway. The torrent sent the bleacher crowd scurrying for cover as the growl of Vukovich's engine rose in the distant
back straight.

"He's gotta lift. That thing will think it's on an ice rink," said
Medley.

"No way he'll finish the lap," I agreed.

Standing in the monsoon, we awaited the silence signaling that
Vukovich had cut his engine and was coasting into the pits.

Wrong. This was the Mad Russian, not some featherfoot tyro. The
Offy's thunder racketed off the grandstands as the car, sluicing and
yawing on the rain-soaked bricks, roared out of the mist and skated
past the checkered flag, rooster-tails of spray spewing off its wheels.

is

"Holy shit! Now I've seen it all!" exclaimed a reporter from the
Toledo Blade. "Nobody ever ran this joint at full speed in the rain.
That Vukovich has cast-iron balls, I'll give him that!"

He also had the pole position for the 1953 Indianapolis 500-mile
race, based on one of the most audacious driving exhibitions ever
witnessed in the thirty-seven-year history of the Indianapolis Motor
Speedway.