Driving with the Devil by Neal Thompson

Author:Neal Thompson [Thompson, Neal]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-52226-9
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2006-09-08T04:00:00+00:00

Despite the glitter and glamour, Indy was still a dangerous event and could be as potentially violent, deadly, and bizarre as any stock car race. Years earlier, a wheel flew off a car, over the racetrack fence, and into an adjacent backyard, where it landed on a twelve-year-old boy, killing him. Indy drivers competed in other AAA-sanctioned races, in their same open-cockpit cars, and despite the regularity with which they were flung from those cars—sometimes to be run over by peers—racers rarely wore seat belts and only recently had begun wearing hard-shell helmets. Some drivers kept them refrigerated the night before a race, to cool their heads during the miles of hard driving.

Still, AAA events such as the Indy 500 were considered a “gentleman's” sport. Car owners were typically industrialists or heirs, often referred to as “sportsmen,” who had earned or inherited fortunes in beer, beef, or steel. Racing was their weekend hobby, just as racehorses occupied the spare time of other millionaires. Byron had to feel like an odd man out among such men, at a race called Decoration Day.*

To qualify at Indy in 1947, drivers had to average 115 miles an hour for four laps. Ted Horn, the 1946 AAA champ, qualified for the pole position at 126 miles an hour in his beautiful Maserati. Although Horn had raced a Ford V-8 at Indianapolis back in 1935, Fords were now a rarity at Indy, even as they had come to dominate the dirt tracks of the stock car-racing circuit. It became clear during qualifications for the 1947 Indy 500 that Byron's Ford engine was out of its element and in the wrong league at the Brickyard.

During practice laps, Byron bumped and bucked along the brick-paved macadam of the 2.5-mile track, a cigar locked in his jaw. But Byron's homemade racer—not nearly as sensual as a Maserati or an Alfa Romeo, nor as powerful as an Offy-powered car—strained to find enough zoom. The car wasn't hugging tightly to the surface the way it should. The suspension felt soft, and Byron phoned Vogt back in Atlanta and told him the car kept slewing to the right. “It's wanting to spin out,” he growled into the phone.

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