Friday - May 27, 2005

40 YEARS AGO COME SUNDAY

INDIANAPOLIS MOTOR SPEEDWAY
http://www.indianapolismotorspeedway.com

In 1965, a rear-engined racer won the Indy 500 for the first time.

“There was nothing graceful about the way the old guard at Indianapolis accepted the revolution that occurred on the Championship Trail in the sixties.  Its members fought with the tenacity of true reactionaries to prolong the ten-year reign of the roadster, despite the obvious superiority of the new, lightweight, rear-engined European cars which began invading the Speedway in 1961.  The men of the old guard were inherently suspicious of change—unless they brought it about themselves.”

The Indy roadster was a unique front-engined machine developed after World War II.  It represented a refinement of the classic “sprint” car, the characteristic car of dirt tracks, and regular winners at Indy until 1953, when Bill Vukovich put a roadster into the winner’s circle, a car designed and built by the legendary Frank Kurtis.  Other designer-builders followed Kurtis’ lead, and in the late 1950’s, A.J. Watson came to the fore.  By the early 1960’s, his products were generally the cars to beat at Indy.  Veteran driver Rodger Ward claimed that there were none better, and many agreed with him.

”If you had had it in mind to win the 500 in 1960, you would have gone to A.J. Watson’s shop in Southern California and ordered a roadster chassis.  For $30,000 Watson would have built you a stout, tubular-framed car on a 96-inch wheelbase, with 18-inch rear wheels on a live rear axle and 16-inch wheels suspended on a solid axle at the front.  He would have slipped a 256-cubic-inch, four-cylinder, Hillborn fuel-injected Offenhauser engine into that long, broad nose, fitted a gas tank behind the driver, and rolled your car out into the light of day with a dry weight of around 1700 pounds.”

The burly, reliable Offenhauser burned alky instead of gasoline.  It was descended from the famous Harry Miller engines of the 1920’s, and had appeared during the Great Depression as an economical yet durable engine “for the masses.” Its design was stretched through numerous modifications over succeeding decades, giving it a competitive life at Indy exceeding four decades.  Its high torque made possible a car with only two speeds, characteristic of the Indy roadsters.

A.J. FOYT AND HIS WINNING 1964
WATSON-OFFENHAUSER ROADSTER
http://indy500.com

”The old-style Indy driver was born on lethal, pockmarked, rutted, dust-choked small-town dirt tracks.  He was baptized on tight, short, paved ovals where he rapidly learned that a mistake would bounce him off the wall and into the path of the oncoming pack.  Only if he could endure this apprenticeship and avoid Valhalla would he come to confirmation at the Speedway.  A man who hadn’t flipped a midget or put a sprinter through the fence on Saturday night was likely to be dismissed as ‘a sporty car driver.’ Any car that didn’t have a chassis made from scaffold poles and an engine that ran on 10 percent nitro was a ‘toy racer.’ It was as simple as that.

“It wasn’t an indefensible point of view.  No foreign driver had won the 500 since Italy’s Dario Resta did it for Peugeot in 1916.  No foreign car had even impressed at the Speedway since Wilbur Shaw won the 1940 race in an 8CTF Maserati.  During the fifties, Fangio and Ascari, the best drivers Europe had to offer, came to the Speedway and were easily rebuffed.  And in 1957 and ’58, a group of Indy vets took their fat, pearly roadsters to Italy for the Two Worlds Trophy races and challenged the top European grand-prix drivers on the banking at Monza.  The Americans, led by Jim Rathmann and Jimmy Bryan, broke the track record and buried the opposition….This was the context in which the invaders assaulted the old guard anew early in the sixties.  This time with devastating effect.”

English Grand Prix driver Jack Brabham, who had won two successive world driving championships, turned up at Indy in 1961 with a tiny rear-engined Cooper-Climax.  It did not have the power to match the roadsters on the straightaways, but it was much faster through the turns, and it completed the race, finishing ninth.  This raised many eyebrows in Gasoline Alley, but it was only the beginning.

In 1962, Dan Gurney, veteran Formula 1 driver, entered a rear-engined car built by master hot-rodder Mickey Thompson, who tried his hand at Indy on several occasions in the 1960’s.  Gurney did not finish the 1962 race, but he was hardly deterred.  Even a third or fourth place at Indy in those days would pay more than a whole season of successful racing in Europe.  So Gurney persuaded British designer Colin Chapman, of Lotus, that building a winning Indy car would be well worth the investment, and he connected Chapman with the Ford Motor Company, which was interested in getting back into racing as part of a new “youth marketing” campaign (to which, incidentally, we owe the Mustang).

While Ford was busy producing a 256-CID V-8 engine that would run on straight gasoline instead of alky, Chapman revamped his revolutionary Formula 1 Lotus monocoque chassis with a longer wheelbase and a left-side offset to run at the 1963 Indy 500.  His champion driver Jim Clark got one such car, Gurney got another, and a third was held in reserve.

They nearly pulled it off, too.  Clark finished a close second to Parnelli Jones, driving his well-known “Ol’ Calhoun,” a sturdy Watson roadster with the classic Offy engine.  The finish, however, was clouded by controversy over an oil leak from Jones’s car that allegedly caused Eddie Sachs, among others, to spin out.  Many felt that Jones should have been black-flagged, and the issue remains controversial to this day.

JIM CLARK IN HIS 1963 INDY LOTUS
http://indy500.com

In 1964, 12 of 33 starting cars were rear-engined, several of them built by A.J. Watson.  Eddie Sachs and Rodger Ward were among those who migrated to rear-engined machines, while A.J. Foyt, who had amply expressed his mistrust of the new “funny cars,” elected to remain with his front-engined roadster.  Parnelli Jones did likewise.

This was the race marred by the tragic, blazing crash of Eddie Sachs and Dave MacDonald in the early going, a crash that resulted in widespread safety reforms for cars and pit procedures as well.  Clark, back again in a Lotus, all but ran away with the race until forced out by tire problems, and veteran A.J. Foyt won in a Watson roadster, the last victory for a front-engined car.

In 1965, 27 of 33 starters drove rear-engined cars.  Foyt and Jones were in two such, but this time, there was no stopping Clark and his Lotus, who led the race almost the entire distance.  Parnelli Jones came second, two laps behind.

COLIN CHAPMAN AND JIM CLARK, 1965
http://indy500.com

The revolution was now half complete.  Some Indy drivers, such as Jones and Foyt, successfully adapted to the new rear-engined cars.  Others, however, could not, and they either fell back to dirt-tracking or retired.

In 1971, the revolution was over.  Rear-engined cars did not adapt to dirt tracks.  Young drivers coming up through the midget and sprint-car divisions of USAC found that advancement to Indy cars was no longer the logical thing that it had been for decades.  Thus, in 1971, dirt tracks were dropped from the USAC Championship Trail, and half a century of tradition vanished overnight.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:  Quotations are from Charles Fox, “The Great Cars and Drivers” (New York:  Grosset & Dunlap/Ridge Press/Madison Square, 1972).

For more information, visit these websites:

http://indy500.com

http://www.indianapolismotorspeedway.com

Posted by Tannenberg     on 05/27/2005 at 11:03 AM   
Filed Under: • Miscellaneous •  
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