The Grand Prix

The Grand Prix car is the epitome of the automobile. A dragster will outaccelerate it. A land-speed-record car will run faster by hundreds of miles an hour. A sports car is more civilized. Any kind of sedan is more comfortable. But the Grand Prix car is the ultimate expression of the purpose of the automobile: to run fast and controllably over ordinary road. It is all automobile, all function, weighing, usually, less than 1500 pounds, pushed up to 180 mph-plus by a rear-mounted engine of 400-odd horsepower, small, thin-skinned, fragile. The driver, half reclining, his shoulders tight against a wrap-around plastic windshield, holds at arm's length an absurdly small, padded steering wheel. A gear-shift lever two or three inches high lies close to one hand or the other, and the gasoline tanks are around, under and sometimes over him. Fat foot-wide tires on small wheels take the power to the road. The car is built to a precise standard, or formula, internationally agreed upon, and usually laid down, whatever else may be claimed for it, to restrict the car's top speed by limiting something--engine size, fuel capacity, minimum weight. Despite this, race-car speeds rise year by year in percentages that can be predicted. The Grand Prix car is built to Formula I, which is changed every four or five years. (A new formula came in last year.) Formula II and Formula III cars are smaller and slower, compete in their own classes. A Formula I car can cost $50,000, the engine alone, $15,000 to $25,000--and ideally each car should have two spares.

This, then, is the instrument with which men play the most dangerous, demanding, scientific and expensive of all sports. Next to real tennis (court tennis), it is the most exclusive of sports as well. Eight firms make Grand Prix cars, there are 11 races for them and about 20 men qualified to drive them. (Only the spectator count goes to the other end of the spectrum. Motor racing is the number-two spectator sport, topped only by the aggregate of the three kinds of football: soccer, rugby and American.) The drivers thus make up a super-elite among the world's athlete-performers. Probably because they know that their work is more dangerous than anything comparable, much riskier than, say, bullfighting, they have little in common with men who play lesser games. They have a marked tendency to keep their own company. Like the very rich, they are really comfortable only with one another, yet they pointedly avoid forming close friendships among themselves, as gladiators did, and for the same reason. They are men of marked personality and peculiar physical equipment. As nearly as we can tell, looking back, they always have been. They have been flamboyant, like the giant Vincenzo Lancia, one of the first great drivers, who upended a pint of champagne and tossed the bottle to the crowd as he started an early Vanderbilt Cup race. They have been bitterly competitive, like George Robertson, who told his riding mechanic to throw a wrench at the car ahead to make it move over, or pugnacious, like Wilbur Shaw, who was sitting exhausted after winning a 500-mile race, burned, bandaged, just out of the field hospital, and 12 pounds lighter than he'd been before the race, when he heard another driver say, "Shaw's a lucky so-and-so." Shaw hurtled over an eight-foot barbed-wire-topped fence and punched the man in the face. They have been cold, colorless and calculating to the point of fascination, like Ray Harroun, who decided that an average speed of 75 miles an hour would win the first Indianapolis race in 1911, ran the 500 miles at 74.6 and did win.

There are more Harrouns than Shaws driving today. It was plain in the late 1950s that a new breed of driver was in the making, and I think the terminal date in the sea change may have been August 4, 1964, when Carel de Beaufort was killed practicing for the Grand Prix of Germany. The Count de Beaufort of Holland was the last of the titled gentlemen amateurs. In the beginning, drivers titled or wealthy or both figured importantly in Grand Prix racing; they were still important in the 1920s and 1930s, but after World War Two there were only the Marquis de Portago, killed in 1957, the German Count Von Trips, killed in 1961, and the Count de Beaufort. De Beaufort--Carel Pieter Anthonie Jan Hubertus Godin de Beaufort--owned his car, a Porsche, and ran it as often as he could. He was a big man, over six feet and 200 pounds, a tight fit for a Formula I machine. Like Portago, he was pleasant, amusing, cultured, multilingual, much traveled, at home in any ambiance. Both died pitifully young, at 28. Portago's closest friend, Harry Schell, an American who had lived all his life in France, was of the Beaufort-Portago pattern. Schell was adventurous, extroverted, uninhibited, curious about everything, a practical joker on an outrageous scale. He laughed a lot, drove as carefully as was consistent with staying in the game. He had a flat in Paris, a house in Deauville, a cabin cruiser and other useful amenities, and he intended living forever, as Portago had intended. No one expected Harry Schell to be killed in a race--he had been hurt badly only once--and he wasn't: He was killed in practice for the 1960 Tourist Trophy race in England. He went flat into a brick wall at something around 100 miles an hour, no one knows why. Steering failure or hydroplaning--the circuit was wet--are the best guesses.

Swingers like Schell, who was a tail gunner for the Finns in the Russo-Finnish War, or Portago, who once flattened a man for smoking a cigar on a New York night-club dance floor, have no counterparts running today. A Formula I car can represent $100,000 and its owner wants at the wheel a man who has sieved out of himself all impetuosity and derring-do. He wants him to go fast, very fast, for speed is the only name of the game, but he wants him ice-cold, unflappable, computerized, his helmet cosseting a brain full of diodes and printed gold circuits, programed to stay out of trouble, all and any kind, inside the car or out of it. Jack Brabham's number-two driver is Denny Hulme, and when they are running in the same race, Hulme's orders are to finish behind the champion. It's not on record that he ever tried it the other way. That's not done today. In the 1930s, driving for Mercedes-Benz, Manfred von Brauchitsch, an explosive red-headed Prussian aristocrat, blew loose and started to contest first place with the number-one driver. He ignored slow-down signal boards. The Mercedes team manager, the iron-willed Alfred Neubauer, was reduced to running out on the circuit to shake his fist at Brauchitsch as he charged past. Some say he had a gun in the fist. No such colorful tableau will be seen in the 1967 season.

Stirling Moss was the first of the truly modern drivers, and Jimmy Clark is the ideal today; indeed, Clark couldn't be tighter fitted to the purpose if he were the product of a 20-generation breeding program. Clark is physically right; he's small, light and strong. He's cold, a planner to his toes, panic-proof and patient. He indulges in no public display of feelings. He's competitive on the circuit and quiet away from it. His home is a sheep farm in Scotland, and he spends as much time there as he can. He smokes and drinks little. He flies his own plane, as Brabham and Graham Hill--both married, fathers and nonsmokers--do. Brabham may drink a glass of wine or two. Hill, if he isn't working next day, will take a drop of what's going, but he would be classified a total abstainer by the ilk of Duncan Hamilton, who retired in 1959. Hamilton's career was studded with memorable incident. On a party in Milan with Fon Portago, Peter Collins, Mike Hawthorn, Luigi Musso and Eugenio Castellotti--all of them swingers, and all of them killed at the wheel--Hamilton appropriated an airport bus and did a couple of fast laps around the big square near Milan Cathedral. The police put up a roadblock. When one of them jumped up on the step, Hamilton opened the door to consider his complaint, but when the officer pointed a revolver at him, Hamilton, a big and powerful type, slammed the door on his wrist and confiscated the gun. He took the cap from another policeman whom he caught trying to climb in a window. He then announced that the honor of his family had been irreparably breached, and he would have to shoot himself. By now the ranking policeman on the scene was a captain, who pleaded with Hamilton not to do anything so rash, and finally agreed to forgive and forget, if only Hamilton would not blow his head off. In his autobiography, Hamilton notes that he could still detect symptoms of hangover a full week later.

It was the style of some of the gentleman amateur drivers of the golden period of the 1920s and 1930s to ignore the mere mechanical aspects of racing. When the car stood ready, they drew on their capeskin-and-chamois gloves and got into it, presuming it to be perfectly prepared. I think Portago must have been the last to maintain this attitude. He told me that he couldn't distinguish his car from the other two on the team unless he had put a secret mark on it somewhere. He had no affection for a car, or interest in it. "When the race is over," he said, "they can shove the thing off a cliff for all I care." The 1967 driver takes a different view. Often he is capable of discussing design on level terms with an engineer. Jack Brabham, John Surtees, Dan Gurney, Richie Ginther, Graham Hill and Bruce McLaren are all very knowledgeable people, with a test-pilot attitude toward the vehicle. Mike Parkes, an Englishman, works for Ferrari in two capacities: as development engineer and as driver. There are still drivers whose orientation is less obsessively professional, younger men who have nonautomobilistic outside commercial interests, or private means, some who are not really dedicated, not sure that if they are able they'll be driving five years from now. One of these may take the championship this year, or next, but he can do it only by bulling his way through the little mob of 18-hour-a-day professionals at the top.

Almost as soon as the automobile ran at all, men began to race it. Exhibitions and demonstrations aside, the first genuine race was run over the 732 miles from Paris to Bordeaux to Paris in June 1895. Emile Levassor won in a Panhard, at an average speed of 15 miles an hour, and solemnly told reporters that no one should ever attempt such hideously dangerous speeds again. Many drivers were prepared to accept the risks, however and the Paris--Bordeaux was only the first of a series of great city-to-city races, running out, with Paris as a hub, to Marseilles, Amsterdam, Lyon, Toulouse, Berlin, Vienna, Madrid. The Paris--Madrid, in 1903, was the last of them; indeed, the cars never made it to Madrid. The French authorities, horrified at the accident rate, stopped the race at Bordeaux. Of the 175 cars that had started in Paris at 3:30 that morning, only about 100 got to Bordeaux. Most of the others broke down, but there were many accidents, and at least a dozen people--drivers, mechanics and spectators--were killed. The roads were bone dry, and the great spidery high-riding cars ran through clouds of blinding dust, their drivers sometimes steering by the tops of the trees that bordered the road. Primitive as they were, some of the bigger cars would do 90 miles an hour and more, with brakes that would barely stop a bicycle. The winner averaged 65 miles an hour for 356 miles, a really astonishing rate.

In the year before, 1902, a closed circuit had been set up in Belgium, the Ardennes circuit, starting at Bastogne and running 53 miles through Longlier, Habay-La-Neuve and Martelange back to Bastogne. Ardennes was the foundation stone under Grand Prix racing, the logical extension of city-to-city racing. Fifty-three miles of road could be policed, after a fashion, and spectators could see the cars pass more than once. The American newspaper publisher Gordon Bennett had in 1900 offered a cup for an international race, first run Paris-Lyon in 1900; in 1903 it was run over a 103-mile closed circuit in Ireland. In Sicily, Vincenzo Florio founded the Targa Florio, still going today, past 50 runnings; and in the United States, W. K. Vanderbilt set up the Vanderbilt Cup series. The French Grand Prix of 1906, at Le Mans, was the first to use the term. The (continued on page 158) Grand Prix(continued from page 94) concept of true motor racing as a competition by fast cars over ordinary two-lane roadway had been established as the ideal. It still is.

Some courses, like Le Mans and Rheims in France, incorporate regular highway; one, Silverstone in England, is based on a World War Two airport; Wat-kins Glen in the United States and the Nürburgring in Germany were designed and built for racing, and simulate roadway. The length of the course can be anything: Monte Carlo is 1.9 miles to the lap, the Nürburgring is 14.2. A race at Monte Carlo, or, properly, Monaco, is 100 laps. The Grand Prix of Germany at the Ring is 15. This year's 11 races (there were 9 last year) will be run in France, Monaco, Holland, Germany, Belgium, England, Italy, South Africa, Canada, the United States and Mexico. These are the races that count toward the world championship for drivers and the championship for constructors, the manufacturers of the cars, on a system of points for winning and placing. They are properly called grandes épreuves-the word means "test," or "trial"-and purists argue that only the old European races are grandes épreuves, excluding such social climbers as Mexico and the United States. That aside, a country can have a number of Grand Prix races, that is, races run to the standard set up by the world governing body of the sport, the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile, but it can nominate only one as its grande épreuve, and this one is designated with the name of the country: the Grand Prix de France, and so on. The G. P. of the United States is run over the 2.3-mile course in Watkins Glen, the Upstate New York village where American road racing was re-established in 1948.

The first 1907 Grand Prix was the South African, run January 2 at Kyalami. Pedro Rodriguez won in a Cooper-Maserati. Rodriguez had not won a G. P. before. His primary reputation, and it is a formidable one, is as a long-distance specialist. Pedro and his younger brother Ricardo began their careers on the Mexican motorcycle circuits. They moved to sports cars and Ricardo won a race at Riverside in California before he was old enough to have a license to drive on the road. He was killed in practice for the Grand Prix of Mexico in 1962.

The drivers' world-championship system was set up only recently, in 1950, and nine men have held the title since. One, Juan Manuel Fangio of Argentina, won it five times; Jack Brabham of Australia, the current holder, three times; and Jim Clark of Scotland and Alberto Ascari of Italy, twice each. One American has been champion: Phil Hill in 1961. Fangio won 24 Grand Prix races during his career. Clark, next highest ranked, has so far won 20. British drivers have dominated the field for more than a decade.

It is usual, in American journalism, to qualify the champion's title, the ordinary form being "road-racing champion of the world." This is a gratuitous and egregious error. The fact is that the champion of the world is just that: the universal boss, properly ranked over the lesser talents who drive only stock cars, midgets, dirt-track cars, sports cars, Indianapolis cars, and so on. The Grand Prix driver's car, and the terrain over which he moves it, demand all of the separate skills of the other and lower categories, raised to the nth power. It is basic to an understanding of the fantastic level of skill required to drive a G. P. car flat out to know that it has nothing whatever to do with driving a two-seater sports car at 100 miles an hour on a parkway; there is virtually no connection between the two things, save one so tenuous as to be analogous to that between a hand-cranked hurdy-gurdy and a cathedral organ. Thus, the really great Grand Prix driver can drive anything. He can outmatch the specialists in their own fields. Examples abound. Stirling Moss of England, probably the greatest driver who ever lived, was as capable in sports cars as in Grand Prix. He won the most demanding of all sports-car races, the 1000-mile cross-country Mille Miglia, at the highest average speed ever recorded, almost 100 miles an hour, which meant doing 175 on slippery two-lane roads, and going into cities at 150. He won the coveted Coupe des Alpes of the Alpine Rally, a stock-car event, three times in succession for not having lost a single point, a feat accomplished only once before. He drove land-speed-record cars and he drove karts.

When Jimmy Clark came to Indianapolis in 1963, moguls of the "500" establishment, parochial as Tibetans, unlettered and naïve, were merry at the prospect of a "sporty-car" driver pitted against the brutal reality of the "Brickyard" and the hairy men who ran on it. It was instantly obvious that as far as skill mattered, Clark could blow off any driver in the place when and where he pleased. Two years later, having sorted out problems of rules, rubber and pit crews, he did just that. There were those who were astonished, because Indianapolis was the first big track race Clark had tried. They need not have been. Jack Brabham ran for years on Australian dirt tracks. It was valuable schooling, but he didn't learn how to drive, in the full sense of the word, until he went to Europe.

Of every 100 men who attempt a serious stab at Grand Prix racing, talented men with good backgrounds in other kinds of driving, two or three will, in the course of anything up to five years, make it: They will step into the ring of 20 or so drivers who are internationally "ranked," which is to say, licensed to drive Grand Prix cars. Of this number, perhaps half will be good enough to be serious contenders for the world championship; one out of five of this group will almost certainly win it. In some years there may be one out of the top five--he will not necessarily be the champion--so incredibly skilled that he approaches the eerie. In its 72 years of existence, motor racing has produced five such: Tazio Nuvolari, Rudolf Caracciola, Juan Manuel Fangio, Stirling Moss and Jimmy Clark. All of them were clearly gifted far beyond common capacity, and all remarkable for obsessive single-mindedness and blinding concentration.

Concentration is the single most valuable attribute of a Grand Prix driver, assuming he has the ordinary armorarium of needed skills. It is easy to see why. Think of yourself in a car that will do 190 miles an hour, on the Bonneville Salt flats, with a completely clear, billiard-table-level ten miles ahead, marked on the crystal surface by a six-inch-wide tar-black line. One mile from the end of the course, you have arranged for two bright-red flags to be stuck into the salt, so that you will have time to brake. You have only to crank the car up to 190, keep it reasonably close to the black line, and stop it gradually. For miles around, there's nothing you can run into. In this simple situation, so placid in the telling, you will find yourself concentrating until your head hurts, because once you have passed 125 miles an hour, a single coarse movement of the steering wheel, a bungled gear shift, a panic lunge at the brake is enough to start the car sliding, to roll it, and to kill you.

Now, put yourself in the situation of a Grand Prix driver running in the race that usually opens the season: the Grand Prix of Monaco. You are wearing flameproof underwear and flameproof overalls, leather gloves and the best helmet the aviation industry can produce and money can buy. Your goggles cover the top half of your face. For the rest, you tie on a mask of white flameproof cloth. You are now fireproof--for a maximum of 30 seconds. If you're not out of the burning car by then, all bets are off. You have lowered yourself into the vehicle by stretching your arms over your head and tucking them into the car afterward. You have just enough arm movement to turn the steering wheel through the limited arc it requires and to flip the gearshift lever through its 4, 5 or 6 slots. You are going to get tired of that, because you'll have to shift every three to five seconds for two hours and 40 minutes: about 2500 times--and 2500 clutch-pedal movements. You'll put the brakes on as hard as you know how 600 times. The car has been set up, or chassis-tuned, to your precise requirements, which may have made it almost undrivable by another man. You may prefer that it understeer a bit in the corners, tending to go straight, or plow, where another driver would rather have the rear end swing out. Within reason, your mechanics will adjust the car to do anything you like, to help you in your basic problem, which is to make it go just as fast as it possibly can every foot of the way. This means holding it at a speed just a hair under the rate at which it will lose all tire adhesion and fly off the road into the scenery. If you go slower, everyone will pass you; faster, you'll be out of the race and probably into the hospital. Everything is complicated by the fact that you are going to race through city streets, nowhere more than two cars wide. Monte Carlo is a hilly city, and you are going to go steeply up and steeply down; you are going to go through right-angle corners, hairpins, fast bends; once a lap you are going through a tunnel (at about 115) so curved that you can't see the exit from the entrance, and will have to hope, 100 times, that no one is sliding crosswise in front of you. Out of the tunnel you will howl along an unfenced water front. High curbs, marble and granite buildings, plate-glass windows, trees and water border the circuit. There is not a yard of ground in which a driver can make the slightest mistake and not pay for it, in lost time, damage to the car or injury to himself.

No two circuits are alike. The Nürburgring has 176 bends, and rises and falls 3000 feet. Zandvoort, in Holland, lies in dune country. A strong wind blows off the sea and lays sand, nearly as slippery as oil at high speeds, on the corners. At Spa, in Belgium, it nearly always rains. Last year the weather was clear at the starting line, but halfway around the 8.7-mile circuit the whole field of cars, running about 140 mph, slammed into a wall of rain. Because he must constantly adjust to changes in his environment ranging from minor to startling (driving a G. P. car fast in traffic requires about five decisions a second), the driver must function at a high efficiency without interruption, and he must have unusual equipment to begin with. Most G. P. drivers are slightly but strongly built. (Big men are unusual.) They have notable endurance and they recuperate quickly from injury. They are rarely ill.

It's hard to think of one who is not physically compelling in one way or another, and since women are irresistibly attracted to men, no matter what they look like, who are conspicuously wealthy or conspicuously brave, racing drivers can move centered in shoals of good-looking women. The committed ones--wives, mistresses, friends--cluster around the pits, and the closer they are to the drivers the more likely they'll be actively helping, scoring, timekeeping, whatever. They want to be busy, they don't want to think about what it's like on the circuit, about what may happen out there. The others, most of them attached to men of lesser rank than drivers, men concerned with the sport in any capacity from team manager to spectator, float about looking madly glamorous in hip-huggers or golden-leather miniskirts. The drivers are not more than momentarily diverted. The girls, they know, will be around forever, but this race, today, will never be run again.

A London psychologist, Berenice Krikler, made the only study of the G. P. driver I know, using as a sample five of the top rankers, including two world champions. She found that they were well above their national levels in intelligence; that their motor reaction times were, on average, no faster than those of a control group of nondrivers, but that they were capable, when motivated, of reaction times quite beyond those of the control group, and were particularly fast in foot reaction; that their concentration was superior, equal to that of college graduates of higher intelligence than theirs; that their mental speed was below average in relaxed circumstances but extraordinarily high when they were put under stress. (Most people, of course, react oppositely.) They were nonimpulsive, attentive to detail, patient, persistent, and very realistic in the goals they set for themselves. They felt somewhat detached from ordinary life, and took a great sense of exhilaration, power and control out of driving, so much so as to indicate that retirement is probably harder for a race driver than for any other comparable professional. The root fascination for the driver lies in his control over a vehicle that combines brute power and great delicacy, with high stakes riding on his maintenance of this control: wealth, fame, life or death.

Wealth is probably the least of it. One or two drivers at the top of the tree may get into the $100,000-a-year bracket, sometimes perhaps quite a little way into it, but most are pleased to do $20,000 or $30,000 a year. On European circuits, first prize for a big race may be less than $3000, to be shared with the owner of the car. (First prize at Indianapolis in 1966 was worth over $150,000 to Graham Hill, the 1962 world champion who won.) The driver will take up to $1000 in "starting money," paid if he begins the race, regardless of where he finishes. A top-ranking driver will have contracts with manufacturers of everything from tires to toothpaste, and these can bring him $50,000 a year, or $1000, depending upon how well he did the season before. The percentages of owner-driver splits are tightly held secrets, but they are not often as good as 50-50. The driver's solution would seem to be to race his own car, but the cost is so nearly prohibitive that there are only three men trying. Joakim Bonnier, a Swede, and Guy Ligier, of France, are independently wealthy; Bob Anderson, an Englishman, actually makes racing support him, a feat for which he is held in awe.

Another factor militating against privateers is that the race-car manufacturers will not sell cars as good as those they propose to run themselves. The only private patron still trying to buck the factories is Rob Walker of the Johnny Walker Scotch whisky firm. Walker's financial resources are of course ample, but no amount of money will buy a duplicate of Enzo Ferrari's or Jack Brabham's number-one car. Walker has had his triumphs--one of Moss' greatest races was Monaco 1961 in a Walker-owned Lotus, the second time a Walker car had won that Grand Prix--and, in the old British sports tradition, he will probably go on as long as he has a chance of winning and as long as the tax people will let him; but when he finally steps aside, it's unlikely anyone will take up the torch.

The major firms currently building Formula I cars are Honda of Japan, Ferrari of Italy, All-American Racers of the United States, McLaren, Brabham, Lotus, Cooper and BRM of Great Britain. Ferrari and Lotus sell passenger cars in limited numbers, as does Honda, which also has a broad supportive base in industry. Brabham manufactures race cars for sale and has sold 250 of them (Formula II, Formula III, Formula Junior), which makes him a General Motors--like giant in a field in which the sale of a dozen cars is a big deal. McLaren--a firm headed, like Brabham, and Dan Gurney's All-American Racers, by a driver, the New Zealander Bruce McLaren--makes Grand Prix cars. Cooper has a profitable backup in modifying passenger cars to go faster than standard. All-American Racers sells Indianapolis cars, Gurney-Weslake cylinder heads, and has had oil and tire sponsors.

In the beginning, race cars were fast versions of passenger cars by the same builders, and their costs were reasonably charged to advertising. In the 1930s, the Italian and German governments under Mussolini and Hitler subsidized Grand Prix teams as instruments of national propaganda, a gambit that reached its zenith in the monster Auto-Union and Mercedes-Benz cars running just before World War Two. One of them, the W125 Mercedes-Benz of 1937, weighed less than 1650 pounds and produced 646 horsepower. The German cars were unbeatable, and they did serve a provably useful propaganda purpose. Today propaganda is still the root support behind motor racing, but it is commercial, not nationalistic in purpose. An oil company may allocate $500,000 a year to racing, to be able to advertise that So-and-So won the G. P. of Whatzit on Blotz gasoline and oil. It was to make this support possible that exotic fuels based on alcohols were forbidden in Grand Prix racing a few years ago in favor of gasoline--aviation gas, to be sure, but gas just the same. The connection between the 130-octane fuel in a G. P. car and the regular in an MG in Birmingham is meaningless, of course, but it sells gasoline. Only three companies make racing tires today--Firestone, Dunlop, Goodyear. The competition among them is fierce and on a 24-hour-a-day basis. Spark-plug makers, battery companies, all manner of people lumped as accessory suppliers are willing to buy some of the publicity value of Grand Prix racing. For the builders of whole cars, it's a little tougher. A sports car or a gran turismo car can look a lot like a standard showroom sedan--thus the millions it cost Ford to win Le Mans were intelligently and usefully spent--but it's hard for the average motorist to relate his station wagon to a Lotus. A Grand Prix car is not a desirable consumer device.

Advocates of sports that are dull, dangerous or immoral have always been resourceful in fostering and defending them. Boxing, as ugly an endeavor as has been sanctioned for public display in our time, is touted as character-building. Until it became totally absurd, the cliché traditionally supportive of horse racing was, "it improves the breed." Fleeter carriage horses, sturdier draft animals were available, our grandfathers were asked to believe, because of the Mendelian pressures built up on the tracks. The boredom of baseball was excused on the ground of patriotism, the game was held to be as American as apple pie--a European culinary invention, by the way. Motor racing has its own cliché: "The race car of today is the passenger car of tomorrow." This line is most often hustled by motoring journalists anxious to inflate the importance of the field they cover and by race-track promoters. It is completely without substance. The late Laurence Pomeroy, the foremost world authority on Grand Prix automobiles, wrote, "Nearly all the worthwhile inventions of automobilism had been lodged in the Patent Office before the first Grand Prix of 1906, and the few remaining discoveries virtually coincided with the early period of Grand Prix racing...." He goes on to list 12 basic inventions, all of which have repeatedly been claimed as originating in racing, and none of which did. He might have added two dozen other things, from the automatic transmission and power steering to the limited-slip differential, to disk brakes, all of which came to racing long after their use by civilians. I did believe for years that motor racing had contributed one thing to the general welfare: the rearview mirror. I believed and even, mea culpa, lay down on paper that Ray Harroun, who won the first Indianapolis "500" race, had devised the rearview mirror because he proposed to run the race alone, without the usual riding mechanic to tell him what was going on astern. This jolly little fable was lately blown out of the water by one Thom Skeer of Woodbridge, Virginia. Writing to the magazine Road & Track, Mr. Skeer avers that the rearview was patented (No. 516,910) in 1894--for use on bicycles. He deserves a vote of thanks. It is enough that automobile racing has produced such nonutilitarian devices as seats made out of gas tanks and engines that will turn at the unlikely rate of 200 times a second. The rest is hypocrisy. One does not hear the Swiss argue that ropes developed for mountain climbing have meant stouter clotheslines for the housewife. The Spanish would deny that the corrida de toros has improved the breed of anything except the bulls, and that only to make them more nearly absolutely useless for anything except killing horses and men. Grand Prix racing similarly should be its own justification. There are few endeavors in which men voluntarily add life risk to the production of an aesthetically moving spectacle. That is enough. More should not be asked.