Indy--The Golden Brickyard

When the first Indianapolis 500-mile race was run in 1911, the Speedway management thoughtfully provided 3000 hitching posts for horses and the house was priced 50 cents, $1 and $1.50. No provision is made for horse-borne trade today and the price spread is $5 to $35. What else is new? The track is still the same flattened oval laid out in 1909, two and a half miles around, the long straights five eighths of a mile, the short ones one eighth, the turns one quarter, banked at 9 degrees, 12 minutes, to be safe at 90 miles an hour--but if you don't go through them at 140 now, you're obstructing traffic. They still proudly call it the greatest race in the world, which it isn't, and never call it the oldest closed-circuit race in the world, which they proudly could; a big brass band still plays Back Home Again in Indiana before the start and a bugler sounds taps in memory of the 46 lives the race has taken down the years. Quiet in their cars, 33 of the toughest professional athlete-performers alive, from lumpy-knuckled, short-fused veterans of the dirt tracks, happy at the pinnacle of their profession, to ice-cold Scots and Sassenachs jetted in from the Grand Prix other world, more at ease in the cream-and-gold, blood-and-fire ambiance of Monaco, here out of pride and for the loot, all wait to hear the courtly anachronistic command, "Gentlemen, start your engines!" The hundreds of balloons float up from the infield, the cars circle the track once under restraint, a noise like no other noise the world knows is turned on and they go, hoping, each, to get through the crowded first five miles without signing on for a ten-car lash-up, with the biggest crowd that annually comes together for any purpose anywhere watching. Indianapolis seems to be indestructible. Here the chariots will always run. A. J. Foyt, a three-time winner, says, "I think of it in the same way I think of the Kentucky Derby: It's the only one. There are other tracks running, sure, and in the next few years there'll be more, and bigger, and better. But this one, this one is Indy." The place has survived wars, depression, neglect and, lately, such assaults as the Foreign Invasion, the Ford Revolution and the Terrible People-Eating Turbine Car, and still it flourishes. Long live the great round-and-around and the sacred ten-pound bricks!

A bicycle racer started it all, Carl Fisher, a destiny's tot who quit school at 12 to sell papers and candy on the steamcars. He was one of those who, if dropped into Iceland carrying two dollars and a box of matches, would come (text continued on page 100) out a millionaire. He saved his pennies, started a bicycle-repair shop, then a store, sweet-talked a big manufacturer into giving him 120 bikes on the never-never, made money and, in the way of the gifted, smelled the horseless-carriage revolution from afar. He owned the first one in town, went to New York for the 1900 auto show, went back and started an agency. You raced to sell, in those days, and Fisher bought a big Winton and played the country fairs. His proposition was a flat $500 fee and his big stunt was a match race with a horse. Bring on the fastest horse in the county, he'd say, and we'll go for any distance you like, so long as it's over 200 yards. The horse always outgunned him on early acceleration, always got a good lead, always lost in the last few jumps.

Fisher came to be a pretty good chauffeur, he ran with the likes of Barney Oldfield and Louis Chevrolet, but he knew the money game, as they did not, dying broke for it, both of them.

Mike Todd and P. T. Barnum would have admired Carl Fisher. He knew his time for the way it was. When he wanted to introduce a new-model Stoddard-Dayton, in 1908, he had the car hooked to a big free balloon (he qualified for one of the first U. S. balloon-pilot tickets), put himself behind the wheel, the balloon captain in back, and for three hours drifted over Indianapolis at 1000 feet.

Fisher had been to Europe, he'd seen the fast French and German and Italian cars running; he knew racing was the way to go, but he'd watched Vanderbilt Cup races here, too, and he knew that road racing wasn't for America. For one thing, the embattled farmers wouldn't stand still for it; worse, you couldn't sell tickets for a race over 15 miles of public highway. A track was the thing, and in Indianapolis, which then looked like the center of the industry: Marmon, National, American, Marion, Premier cars were all built there. Fisher pulled in Allison, they sold A. C. Newby and Frank H. Wheeler, and for $72,000 the four of them bought 320 acres of land northwest of town. They called in a New York engineer, P. T. Andrews, and told him to have the plant ready by June of 1909. Andrews signed on 450 men, 300 mules, 150 road scrapers, assorted six-ton and ten-ton rollers and went to work. The idea was to lay down two inches of gravel, two of crushed limestone, stone dust and thousands of gallons of liquefied tar.

On the fifth of June, the Speedway ran a balloon race or, rather, the start of one: 3500 people paid to see it and 40,000 watched for free. Fisher flew in the race and got as far as Tennessee.

In August, automobiles ran at the Speedway. Under the pounding of hard tires on 90-mph machines, the track surface crumbled like chalk. The back wheels threw stones at slingshot velocities into the plain-glass goggles of following drivers. Work-staggered mule teams were still pouring tar on the track three hours before the first event. Every race worsened the track: cracks, potholes, blinding dust. Charles Merz, driving a National, lost everything, left the course, spun into a crowd, killed two spectators and his mechanic, Claude Kellum--the first Indianapolis fatalities. The race was stopped and the four owners decided to pave. Bricks were best, Andrews told them. So they laid 3,200,000 ten-pound paving bricks in a bed of sand, level to within three eighths of an inch in 12 feet. The hardhanded Indianapolis bricklayers worked fast: A shift was nine hours then; and in that time, 140,000 bricks would go down. The ace of the crews was timed at 250 an hour. His name, alas, has been lost. He is The Unknown Bricklayer. Finally it was done. A ceremonial "gold" brick (bronze and brass, carburetor-body alloy) was laid at two in the afternoon, Friday, December 17, 1909. James J. Jeffries, the former heavyweight champion of the world, had the first ride. They tried racing right away, although, in nine-degree weather, and drew 500 paying customers. When it got warmer, Fisher ran a race between an airplane and a propeller-driven car. The plane won. He put on another balloon race. He put on a Memorial Day program of 42 short races. Then he decided that too much was too much, that there should be only one race a year and that one the longest the public would sit still for: 500 miles, he decided. Every Memorial Day. That was the law as Fisher laid it down, and his writ still runs.

The first real race was 1911's. Ray Harroun won it, an engineer for Marmon who had retired as a driver after he'd won the national A.A.A. championship in 1910. He was a thoughtful, calculating man, Harroun. He designed the engine, modified the stock chassis into a single-seater (everybody carried a riding mechanic in those days to pump oil, change tires, watch for overtaking cars) and stipulated he'd drive the first 200 miles and the last, letting a relief driver handle the middle hundred. He slip-sticked a decision that a 75-mph average was the fastest he could run with reasonable tire wear. When he heard that other drivers were going to protest his lack of a mechanic, he got an eight-inch by three-inch mirror, welded it to the car with half-inch iron bars. It wasn't the first rear-view mirror ever, but it may have been the first on an automobile. The morning of the race, the fuzz cleaned out 200 overnight gate crashers, let in a claimed 80,000 fans (Indy has never released a precise head count) and turned the cars loose. Harroun ran at 75, and when the chargers went by him, he let them go and passed them later in the pits. changing tires. He won by a full lap, at 74.6, and retired for good. He took $14,000. (First was worth $171,227 to A. J. Foyt last year.) The Marmon "Wasp" (it was first called "The Yellow-Jacket," but that was too much for the headline writers) was retired with him.

It was once fashionable among road-racing enthusiasts to knock Indianapolis as an endeavor requiring little skill, a libel in part built up by Indy people themselves. Bill Vukovich, winner in 1953 and 1954, killed in 1955, a man who lived in a steady slow burn, said, "All you have to do to win is stand on the gas and turn left." There is vastly more to it than that, although it's probably true that it's easier for a Grand Prix driver to do well at Indy, cars equal, than for an Indy driver to do well at, say, the Nurburgring, 14 miles around, 3000 feet uphill and down, or Monaco, where even a minor mistake, like Bandini's last year, can kill you. But the Brickyard seen from the watcher's point of view, not the driver's, has one great advantage over almost every other big-league course in the world: Here you can see what's happening. How many saw Mike Hawthorn outbrake Fangio on the last corner of the G.P. of France in 1953? Who saw Stirling Moss, losing all his brakes at 130 miles an hour just before a bend in the 1957 Mille Miglia, make the corner and stop the car with wheel and gears? At Indianapolis, almost everyone can see almost everything. In 1912, Ralph DePalma had the race won in the 195th lap, 12-1/2 miles to go, when a connecting rod let go in his Mercedes, tore a hole in the crankcase and dumped his oil. He kept on, the car running slower and slower as the engine tightened up, down to 40 miles an hour; he toured around, waiting for it to seize solid--three and a half miles out. He and his mechanic pushed it all the way in, while Joe Dawson, who had been five laps behind when the con rod broke, went by them time after time, flat out, to get there first. DePalma got $380.42 for that.

When Fisher founded Indianapolis, one of his major selling lines was that the track should be a proving ground, a laboratory for "the industry," and it's still said, there, and most other places where cars run, sometimes in a different way: "The race car of today is the passenger car of tomorrow." It isn't true and it's too easy to refute to bother, but it is true that when a breakthrough has been made in some quiet room somewhere, it is often so flamboyantly demonstrated on the track that it seems to have been born there. Four-wheel brakes, hydraulic brakes, disk brakes are examples. The year 1913 saw such a breakthrough at Indianapolis. Jules Goux and Georges Boillot, drivers for the French Peugeot factory, and an Italian driver, Paolo Zuccarelli, worked out some ideas for a better racing engine. They took them to a Swiss draftsman, Ernest Henry, got the (continued on page 207) Indy--the Golden Brickyard (continued from page 100) backing of the factory and made a team of new cars in 1911. They won almost everywhere they ran. They were radical: small engines, hemispherical combustion chambers, double overhead camshafts, four valves per cylinder. American engines of the day were slow-turning and big--a 1912 Simplex went almost 600 cubic inches. Peugeot sent two cars to the 1913 Indy, and once their drivers, Goux and Zuccarelli, had accepted some local advice on tires and average speed, it was all over, bar the shouting: Goux won, running at 80 miles an hour most of the way, with an occasional spurt at 90. He had killed four bottles of champagne during his pit stops--it was a very hot day--and said afterward, "Sans le bon vin, je n'aurais pas pu faire la victoire." It was the last time the winning driver, not the engine, ran on alcohol, and it was the first Indy Revolution. After 1913, the big engines were dead.

The French came back in strength for 1914, Peugeot and Delage sharing the first four places; the first American, Berna Eli Oldfield in a Stutz, fifth, and four miles an hour off the pace. A Belgian Excelsior and a British Sunbeam chased him in, but foreign cars never did so well again. Quick to get the message once they'd really been shown, as they would again when the British invaded in 1963, the Americans came back. The Duesenberg brothers, Fred and August, to be, with Harry Miller, among the treetop legends of the golden 1920s, had run a car in 1914. Eddie Rickenbacker, who had appeared as a relief driver in 1911, drove it to tenth.

Engines were smaller in 1915 and, for the first time, starting position in the race proper was set on qualifying time. Ralph DePalma won. He broke another connecting rod, but only three laps from the end, and made it in. The next year, with few foreign entries because of the War, and the race cut to 300 miles, DePalma, irked at the serf-like stature of the drivers vis-à-vis the wealthy promoters, asked for appearance, or starting money. Fisher was appalled at what looked to him the thin entering wedge of socialism and refused indignantly. Dario Resta took the race in a Peugeot. (The 1911 Peugeot was the most-copied design in automotive history: Engineers took it apart, measured each part to the thousandth of an inch and built duplicates for Vauxhall, Straker-Squire, Humber, Premier, Delage, Opel, Nagant, Aquila Italiana, and the eminent authority Griffith Borgeson, author of The Golden Age of the American Racing Car, wrote "[the Peugeot] engine and chassis were the textbooks for Harry Miller and Fred Offenhauser.")

During the Kaiser's War, the track was used as a military aviation post and for farming.

Indiana patriots, still hot-blooded from the War to make the world safe for democracy, made noises about the irreverence of sports on Memorial Day, and the race was updated to the 31st. (In 1922, the local American Legion stuffed a bill through the state legislature to the same effect; but the governor, a white hat, vetoed it.) A Peugeot owned by the track, Howdy Wilcox up, won in 1919 before an audience that included Eddie Rickenbacker, a great war hero now, the number-one U. S. fighter pilot, his unblinking 1000-yard stare ranging on things other than race driving. (A few years later, he bought the place.) Three men were killed in 1919, and another, Elmer Shannon, nearly died in one of the freak accidents that racing produces every decade or so: Running ahead of him, Louis Chevrolet lost a wheel and the bare spindle severed the timing wire on the bricks; one end of it whipped around and razored an artery in Shannon's throat. In the time it took him to get to his pit, he nearly bled to death.

The Mad Twenties may really have been, as they're so often called, the golden years of U. S. sport, days of titans--Dempsey, Ruth, Jones, Tilden. They were surely big years at the Brickyard. Gaston Chevrolet, one of the monumentally unlucky Chevrolet brothers, had a good day that day in May 1920, winning in a Monroe, a Louis Chevrolet project engineered by Cornelius van Ranst; but most of the decade was to belong to Fred and Augie Duesenberg and, most of all, to Harry Miller among the builders, and to drivers still as well remembered: Jimmy Murphy, Tommy Milton, Peter DePaolo, Harry Ham, Ray Keech, Leon Duray, Lou Meyer, Lou Moore and Frank Lockhart. Lock hart was the legend, a name as big as Jack Dempsey's, if over a far shorter time span.

Lockhart won the 500 the first time he drove it, in a car he didn't know, on a wet track. He was a dirt-track driver out of California, a tremendous natural talent, a near illiterate who never really learned to spell but almost certainly had genius, if genius is the obsessive drive to do superbly well something one has never been taught to do. Robert Millikan, Nobel Prize winner, told Lockhart's mother that her son was a born scientist who should at all costs be given a college education. Mrs. Lockhart, living by sewing, couldn't see how to make it. Lockhart had the real obsession: He never played with other children; instead, he took things apart and put them together again. When he was on his own, he had no time for anything but the machine. He married the only girl he ever dated. He had never heard the crushing dictum "If you won't sell your mother to buy paints, you are no true artist," but he believed it. He made his mother hock the family furniture to buy tires. He drove flat out; sometimes he would kick the car into an entering slide yards before a corner. In the formal sense, his ignorance about engineering was profound, but he made many mechanical innovations in his cars; indeed, two 91-cubic-inch Millers that he set up were the most successful of even that exalted make. He won everywhere. He was up so tight before a race that he usually vomited. He broke track and straight-line records all over the place. He wanted the Land Speed Record, held then by H. O. D. Segrave of England at 203 mph, and in February of 1928 he went to Daytona with a car of his own basic design, two linked Miller engines stuffed into a chassis that was tiny, compared with the monsters the British used. The Stutz company put up most of the money, so the car was called the Stutz Black Hawk. At something around 225 mph he ran into rain, lost visibility for an instant, hit wet sand and lost the car. It flipped end for end, rolled into the Atlantic, landed on its wheels. There was a fair surf up. Fred Moscovics of Stutz got to him first, held his head out of the water to save him from drowning until he could be lifted from the car. He wasn't really hurt, and in April he was back at Daytona. He wanted the L.S.R. not only for itself but for what it could bring him: money, muscle, room to move, leverage to shove himself upward. His mother, sick and penniless, wired him for ten dollars. He wired back: "Ma I have the World by the Horns. you'll Never have to Push a Needle Again. I'll never have to work anymore." He blew a tire at about 220. His body landed at his wile's feet.

The pattern changed in the Twenties. The accessory people, the sparkplug, carburetor, nut-and-bolt makers, began to bring in money: $23,550 in prizes in 1920, as against $5275 the year before. Finding a potentially winning car wasn't any more a matter of cut-and-try: You needed a Duesenberg or a Miller or a Frontenac-Ford. During World War Two, the supremacy of foreign cars had vanished. The Americans had evolved a specialist vehicle for round tracks, superbly conceived and fined down just for that. It was good for nothing else. Suspension was hopeless, and on the Indianapolis bricks, drivers took a fearful pounding, sometimes they and the mechanics taped themselves belly to shoulders; the brakes were good for three hard stops in succession at most, and what of it, they were only for coming into the pits; you couldn't downshift at speed. But the engines were marvels: When top-rank U.S. passenger engines put out .75 horsepower per cubic inch, a Miller would do 2.75! It was Miller who originated, or at any rate said loudest and most contemptuously, "Detroit Iron."

Racing people said of Harry Armenius Miller that he couldn't design a rattrap by himself, but they said, too, that he was an instinctive master who knew inside him how it should be done, who could see it there in his head, even if he couldn't do the mathematics. He was a carburetor man, a swinger who loved money but hated keeping it, a man who could attract talented people and bind them to him. Fred Offenhauser worked for Miller and Eddie Offutt, and there had been a day in the summer of 1919 when Leo Goossen had walked into Miller's little plant in Los Angeles. Leo Goossen, the American race-car designer, a world eminence, a quiet man, to the background born, whose hand was laid on every U.S. racing engine in the line that runs straight Miller-Offenhauser-Meyer/Drake-Ford. Goossen was a consultant on the Ford racing-engine project, and the Ford engines are assembled by Lou Meyer.

Miller's first success came with an engine built to the specifications of Tommy Milton and Ira Vail and drawing liberally in concept and detail from Duesenberg and Peugeot. (They took him blueprints and parts.) Jimmy Murphy won at Indy with it in 1922.

Miller shared an outstanding characteristic with Ettore Bugatti (who complimented him by plagiarism: Bugatti took his first overhead-camshaft design from Miller's layout). Like Bugatti, Miller demanded that his engines and his automobiles be aesthetically beautiful as well as mechanically efficient. A Miller race car could be identified as far as it could be seen. It looked like nothing else on wheels, lean, airy, light, purposeful. Griffith Borgeson, who restored a Miller with his own hands in the 1950s, marveled at what he found: every part an exercise in metal sculpture. Miller would not waste weight even on a gearshift knob by crudely turning it from the solid. His were hollow, thin-walled castings! He sold his cars for oddly flat-rate prices: $5000 for an engine. $10,000 for a rear-wheel-drive car, $15,000 for a front-drive. He would see the day, in 1929, when two of his cars ran first and second at Indianapolis and were followed home by 25 others. Miller won Indy a dozen times. If he had lived, he'd have seen a day when every car of the 33 ran an Offenhauser, the Miller's direct descendant. But Miller couldn't make money as fast as he could spend it, and the 1932 Depression found him with no cushion. He went bankrupt. Fred Offenhauser took over the shop, and in time Lou Meyer and Dale Drake had it from Offenhauser, but it was really all the same engine, the Miller engine. It was all downhill from then until he died, in 1943, alone except for Eddie Offutt. He had forbidden his wife to live with him, because he couldn't bear her looking at him: He had cancer of the face. She had loved him, but she had been afraid of him, too, in a way: Harry Miller was clairvoyant and prescient. He could give her whole phrases she had been about to speak, he could predict death, and often did until, finally, spooked, she forbade him. Once he said to Leo Goossen, showing him one of his crude but startlingly pertinent drawings, "Leo, I don't do these things. I get help. Somebody is telling me what to do." Perhaps. But if they were reading him the future, they were holding out on him.

Louis Chevrolet was another wildly capable man and fatally flawed, too. He should have died a multimillionaire. He was gifted, full of drive and he could work good workmen into the ground. He gave his name to the Chevrolet car--it was detail-designed by Etienne Planche--when W. C. Durum was running General Motors. Chevrolet was a big man, quiet and gentle, but he had a fierce temper and when he quarreled with Durant--who may have tempted him deliberately--he not only broke off the relationship, he sold Durant all his stock. When he fell out with his next sponsor, Albert Champion of the sparkplugs, he beat him half to death. He was not only hot tempered--he even broke with his brother Arthur, finally--he was unlucky. Businessmen gulled him easily. His timing was terrible: He set up an aircraft-engine business with Glenn Martin, only to run into the Depression. He turned over his interest to Martin, who went on to glory. Chevrolet had been not only one of the great constructors of his time--Monroe, Frontenac, Chevrolet--he had been one of the topmost drivers, but he didn't know how to make use of himself. In 1933, he was working as a mechanic in a Chevrolet plant. He died in 1941, heartbroken.

Fred Duesenberg, born in Germany and brought up in Iowa, was a self-taught mechanic at 17 and ran his own bicycle-manufacturing plant at 21. (He raced his bikes, and held the two-mile and three-mile records.) He and his brother August fell naturally into automobiles and by 1907 were building a two-cylinder car, called the Mason after the man who backed them. The brothers ran four Masons in the 500 race of 1913, one of them finishing ninth. The next year, Fred and August Duesenberg were on their own in their own plant in St. Paul, Minnesota. Their racing cars began to be noticed, and on the side they built excellent marine engines. They built aircraft engines, too. During World War One, they were commissioned by the Government to build the Bugatti 16-cylinder aero engine, a design failure. They built one of their own that produced a reliable 800 horsepower, but the War ended before it could go into production. By 1920, the straight-eight-cylinder engine that was Fred Duesenberg's hallmark was ready to show in a passenger car, and the firm was solidly set up in Indianapolis. Duesenberg brought out a supercharged car in 1920, reintroducing a thoroughly all-American idea. The super-charger was invented by the Roots brothers of Connersville, Indiana, in 1859 and was used, in a modified form, on the Chadwick passenger car in 1906. Superchargers, or blowers, became standard wear on Duesenbergs and Millers. They have begun to show again: The eight Offenhausers that ran in 1967 had them and there will be supercharged Fords running this year.

Tommy Milton took the world Land Speed Record in a Duesenberg in 1920, at 156 miles an hour; and the next year, Jimmy Murphy won die French Grand Prix for Duesenberg, the first time an American car and driver had done it. (Murphy then bought the car from the Duesenbergs, stuffed a Miller engine into its chassis and proceeded to outdistance the 1922 500 field.) Duesenbergs won at Indy in 1924, 1925 and 1927. Those were the great years. But the Duesenbergs, like the Chevrolets, were poor businessmen in a trade in which even good businessmen fared poorly, and the company failed. The Duesenberg name and talents were bought by E. L. Cord (Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg), whose interests lay in passenger, not racing cars. And it is for passenger cars that the Duesenbergs are best remembered now, although they made only a few more than 1000. Of the Model A Duesenberg, their first effort, 667 were built, and 470 of the great S and SJ models, priced at $14,750 to $20,000 and to this day among the most sought-after automobiles ever made in America. In 1930, the Duesenberg brothers went separate ways. Fred died after a crash in the Pennsylvania mountains in 1932. August stayed on with Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg. The great Mormon Meteors--record-breaking cars run on the Utah salt flats by Ab Jenkins--were from his hands. He died in 1955.

Racing broke some people like dry sticks, but some laughed and loved it, like Wilbur Shaw, or loved it without laughing much, like Eddie Rickenbacker, and made it pay like slot machines. Wilbur Shaw laughed, but for all that he was a charming and civilized man, it was just as well to laugh with him, not at him. He came to the Bricks in 1927 in a Miller, ran fourth. He went on to be a fixture. He won in 1937 and 1939 and 1940, the last two times in a Maserati, the first foreign car to come first at Indy since 1919. Shaw was a charger. In 1931, he ran a Duesenberg airborne over the wall on the northeast turn. He walked back into the Speedway and took over another Duesenberg, nearly flipped it, too. When his new riding mechanic flinched, Shaw yelled, "You think that was something, you should have been with me last time." Eddie Rickenbacker took over Indianapolis the year Shaw first ran, when Carl Fisher finally tired, keeping it as it was, keeping the staff, the legend-wrapped T. E. "Pop" Myers, who ran the place, Steve Hannagan, the press agent: and when Rickenbacker gave over, in 1945, to Anton Hulman, Jr., who still owns the plant, it was Shaw who set up the deal and served as president and general manager until 1954, when a private plane in which he and three others were flying from Detroit iced up and went in.

Shaw had seen a lot of it go by, he saw the Miller-Duesenberg era give over to the Offenhauser-powered roadsters. The year he went over the wall, a Cummins diesel ran the whole way without a stop on 33 gallons of furnace oil and finished 13th. He was second in 1933, when the iron-faced Rickenbacker put down another driver's rebellion. Five men died that year, two in 1934, four in 1935. Sometimes a car would come back, next year, and kill again. Sometimes a 50-cent bit would fall off a car and smash the driver; sometimes luck would spin around: In 1941, Shaw knew he'd win, but in putting out a big garage fire that year, firemen washed the chalked markings off his spare wheels and he couldn't pick out a bad one he knew was among the 12, hadn't time to retest them. A wheel broke in the race, put him into the wall and spilled 50 gallons of methanol all around him. For some reason, it didn't flash, a good thing, since Shaw had three vertebra fractures, was paralyzed from the waist down. By this time, the cars weren't going bytheir right names, they were Something Specials, whatever the men who put up the money wanted to call them.

World War Two came and went, leaving the place weed-grown and ragged. Strange cars came up, like Lou Fageol's twin-engine, and the utterly unlucky but much-loved Novi cars, first run by Lew Welch of Novi. Michigan (tollgate Number 6 on the Grand River Plank Road out of Detroit). Mauri Rose, a careful, planning man, a superb driver, came up, won three times and went away whole and with the money. The drivers tried to get 40 percent of the gate receipts, which other tracks were paying them, but Shaw said no and won in the end, as Fisher and Rickenbacker had. They started giving the pace car to the winner. Great ones died, like "Shorty" Cantlon and Ralph Hepburn. (Heat exhaustion killed a driver in 1953, Carl Scarborough.) New hard-try owners like J.C. Agajanian came up, drivers like Bill Vukovich appeared from nowhere and ran wild. Anton Hulman. who doesn't need to make money on Indy, plowed hundreds of thousands back, in new stands, tunnels under the track, asphalt paving on the whole circuit except for a ritual yard-wide strip at the finish. A. J. Foyt and Rodger Ward, and Parnelli Jones, who were really to take money out of Indy, showed from the minor leagues. Offenhauser made all the engines, Watson, Epperly, Kuzma, Kurtis, Lesovsky built the chassis. The form had been stabilized into the "roadster," beginning when George Salih, chief mechanic on Lee Wallard's winning car in 1951, modified an Offy engine to run lying on its side instead of straight up. This gave a lower center of gravity and smaller frontal area.

Came 1961, the Golden Anniversary Year. The definitive history of the race was published. 500 Miles to Go, by Al Bloemker. Jack Brabham, a Grand Prix driver out of England via Australia, shipped in a Cooper G. P. car running a rear-mounted Coventry Climax engine. When he tested, he had road-race tires on and his engine was 85 cubic inches smaller than the Indy type. He lapped at a steady 145.144. The handwriting was up there, but few saw it. One who did was among the owners of the fleet of big standard Offy-engined roadsters, Art Lathrop. He said, "Gentlemen, you are looking at a million dollars' worth of junk." In the 1961 race, Brabham finished ninth. He wasn't bothered by the fact that his car hadn't been designed with a left-turn weight bias, like all the others. He could make ground easily on them in the turns, but on the straights, when the big four-cylinder Offies started to put out, he just didn't have the power. The track itself gave him no problems. He'd come off the back-country dirt tracks of Australia, he'd driven the wickedly demanding Grand Prix courses in Europe. All a driver needed to beat the roadsters, he knew, was a Grand Prix chassis with enough engine stuffed into its rear end.

The same idea had come to someone else: Daniel Sexton Gurney, a young California driver who was uniquely equipped to lake the large view. Gurney had started driving sports cars early in the 1950s, had got a good ride in a Ferrari in 1957 and the next year ran at Le Mans. By 1961, Gurney's tall (6'2") and rather startlingly good-looking presence was a fixture on the Grand Prix circuit, and not only there. Alone among Americans, he is equally facile with sports cars, Grand Prix, track cars and stocks. He could bridge the then-tremendous gap between the Indy and the Grand Prix people. It really was a gap, and something more: Hostility and disdain were the watchwords in each camp. The Grand Prix drivers felt that theirs was the classic form of the sport, the form in which it had been born, driving on roads or winding circuits formed like roads, a new and different one every week, usually in a different country, from South Africa around the world through Europe to Australia. The Grand Prix or Formula I car, they believed, demanded a skill the American track drivers knew nothing about. The Americans, for their part, thought die G.P. people a gaggle of aesthetes in "sporty cars" who waved each other through the corners and would cave in the first time they came against hard-nosed wheel-to-wheel competition. Said the G.P. faction in riposte, "And these are drivers who run for the pits if there's a sprinkle of rain!" (Even a tropical cloudburst won't stop a G.P. race.) European drivers who had come to Indy down the years hadn't fared well: Rudolf Caracciola hit a bird; Alberto As-cari had a wheel collapse; Nino Farina and Juan Manuel Fangio tried with poor cars. A special race at Monza in 1957 that brought the two factions together for the first time did nothing to make them all buddies together. The race had been set up to make all concessions to the Americans: run on a banked track, counterclockwise, in heats to allow repair on the cars, called in case of rain, and so on. Needing nothing but straight-line power, the Americans won as they pleased.

But in 1962, the British designer Colin Chapman, taking up the rear-engine design John Cooper had revived, built a monocoque Lotus, very light, very strong, incredibly handy and full of sticking power. His number-one driver was Jimmy Clark, champion of the world and probably the greatest G.P. driver of all time--he has won 25 G.P. races. more than anyone else ever. But Chapman's Coventry Climax engines, built to the International Formula I, could not deliver the 400-odd horsepower of an Offy. The answer, Gurney thought, would be a Ford. Ford alone of U.S. makers was interested in racing. In 1962, Gurney brought Chapman together with Ford in the persons of Leo Beebe and Lee Iacocca. aggressive and forward-looking top-rankers in the executive echelon.

The Chapman-Gurney proposition was simple: The rear-engined car was now the world standard, whether the moguls of the Indianapolis establishment knew it or not (they didn't); the light, immensely strong Lotus, running on sophisticated G.P. suspension, could outstick any Indy roadster in the turns, and a 350-horsepower engine, running on gasoline, could beat the 40O-hp Offies that burned methanol and nitromethane at a much higher miles-per-gallon rate. On this factor alone, the Lotus would save a good deal of time on pit stops. In the autumn of 1962, Clark won the Grand Prix of the United States at Watkins Glen and then took the car to Indianapolis for testing. Leo Levine quotes him in The Dust and the Glory, a remarkable history of Ford racing:

Remember, the car had come straight from Watkins Glen so it was running on normal road-racing tires and was not set up for left-hand turns only and the banking. I did about 100 laps on that occasion and I remember thinking that it was all a bit dull. My fastest lap of 143 mph average made most people sit up and take notice but what made them even more interested was the speed at which 1 was taking the turns. The Indy cars rely on their acceleration between the bends to give them their high lap times and the fastest time an Indy car had recorded in the turns was something like 138 mph. Our Lotus was doing over 140 in the corners.

The project was put in hand at Ford. It was madly complicated, unbelievably difficult. Only the merest handful of the tens of thousands of Ford workers were concerned, and the priorities on the Indianapolis effort were not the highest. There were 48-hour workdays, hopeless frustrations spiraling on endlessly, temper explosions. When they did get a Lotus to Indianapolis for testing, they had one engine for it and it wasn't complete, pieces had to be cannibalized from stock Ford Fairlanes to make it go. But it did go, 146 for Clark, who then had to jet back to Europe to meet a racing commitment, 150.501 for Gurney, the second-fastest average in Speedway history. The establishment owners and drivers, fortunes in money, total careers tied up in the Offy-engined roadsters, were not happy. They didn't like anything about the car, including the color of it, green. Indianapolis people are superstitious, and green, like women in the pits or peanuts, was held to be deadly bad luck for one and all. You had to get killed if you drove a green car. Standing next to Parnelli Jones and A.J. Foyt, Jimmy Clark, small, slight, boyish, didn't even look like a driver. His soaring reputation everywhere else race cars run meant nothing.

When qualifying time came around in May 1963, there were 200,000 people watching. Clark qualified his Lotus, toy-like beside the big roadsters, at 149.7 and Gurney did a hair less, then they ran for the jet to Europe and the G.P. of Monaco. Parnelli Jones and A.J. Foyt ran their roadsters faster, 151 and 150. Came the day. Jim Hurtubise, in a Novi, ran away at the start, but Parnelli Jones came up hard and took over. Fifty miles into the race he was 22 seconds ahead. Gurney and Clark were tenth and eleventh and apparently content to stay there, but after the 67th lap, when Jones and Roger McCluskey, who'd succeeded him on top, had made pit stops, Clark and Gurney were first and second. At lap 93. Gurney had to come in for tires, an unlooked-for eventuality apparently due to a bad chassis setup. He was in the pits for a long 42 seconds. Clark came in for fuel and another very long pit stop: 33 seconds, but he came out second to Jones. Gurney had dropped to ninth. Jones came in again for more fuel (the alcohol-burning Offies had to make three stops) and as he went out, an accident brought out the yellow caution flag, holding cars in position. The flags were out several times during the race and Clark was interpreting the Indianapolis rule literally: reduced speed and no passing anywhere on the track. (In Europe, yellow means caution only at the site of the accident or whatever has brought it out.) But Indy drivers habitually do pass other cars under the yellow if they're notably slower, and they do run fast down the backstretch where official observation isn't so tight. Jones made time under the yellow, but when he came out after his third and last fuel stop, Clark was only 11 seconds behind and charging. He got the interval down to 4.5 seconds on the 178th lap. with 22 still to go. Then The Great 1963 Oil Hassle started.

The drivers had been told that anyone dropping oil on the track would be summarily black-flagged, brought in, and when Jim Hurtubise's car had shown oil. it was done. Now Jones' roadster began to show a clear oil leak out of an outboard-mounted tank. Everyone saw it. Colin Chapman and J. C. Agajanian, Jones' sponsor, got to Harlan Fengler, chief steward, practically simultaneously, Chapman demanding the black flag, Agajanian denouncing the very idea. It was a rough spot for Fengler, the Ford Motor Company on one side and Indy's biggest, one of the mainstays of the establishment, on the other. Before he made up his mind, someone pointed out that Jones was no longer throwing oil, because the level in the tank had dropped below the end of the crack it was leaking through. They let him run on and he won by 39 seconds. Clark was second and Gurney brought the other Ford in seventh, held down by his tire change and by long pit stops. Clark said afterward that he thought he had been beaten by the yellow flag and the oil. Chapman figured Clark had lost 59 seconds under the yellow flag. "We should have lapped Parnelli," Clark said. Cries of "Foul!" rang through the land. The veteran Eddie Sachs, who felt that both he and Roger McCluskey had spun out on Jones' oil, called the winner a liar to his face and when, on Jones' request, he repeated it, Jones knocked him down. (Later, Sachs, a volatile and amusing man, obligingly posed for photographers flat on his back with a little black flag in his mouth.) But the point had been made. Rear engines were mandatory and the Offy roadsters were headed for the edge of oblivion's cliff. Jimmy Clark could drive with anybody and would take all but the topmost as he pleased. And a major American manufacturer was in big-league racing for the first time in decades.

A year isn't a long time as race-car building goes, but for the 1964 Indy, six rear-engined Offenhausers showed up, with 18 of the old roadsters, three of the perennial Novis and six Ford-powered cars. The Lotus entrants, of course, were Clark and Gurney; Ford engines had been made available as well to Bobby Marshman, Eddie Johnson, Dave Mac-Donald and Eddie Sachs. (At first, the V8 engines cost S31,400 apiece to build; later, Ford got it down to $22,800.) They were flying: Clark and Marshman had qualified at 158 and 157 and had the two top places; Gurney was in the second row at 154 beside Foyt and Jones, who had chosen to stick with the roadsters, at 154 and 155.

When the flag fell, Clark, long known in Europe as the fastest starter in racing, grabbed a 100-yard lead, with Marshman behind him. The rest of the pack, coming through the turn at the head of the straight, was led by Dave MacDonald, driving his first Indianapolis race. He was trying too hard, he spun, hit the inside wall, burst into flame, rocketed back into the straight in front of Eddie Sachs, who had nowhere to go and probably never got his foot on the brake. Sachs' fuel tank went up in a yellow ball of flame and a black mushroom of smoke towered into the sky to be seen miles away. Eddie Sachs died instantly, MacDonald, burned over his entire body, lived an hour. His father said later that MacDonald hadn't liked the car's handling and hadn't wanted to drive it. Many mourned Sachs, too. He had lived for Indianapolis. One year, sitting in his car before the start, he was in tears. He wanted one win, then he'd quit. He had been second in 1961, third in 1962.

An hour and 45 minutes later, the 26 cars that could still run started in the order they'd been in when MacDonald spun. Bobby Marshman, running at 156 mph, challenged Clark for the lead and Clark let him go. On the 39th lap, diving for the infield to avoid a car ahead, Marshman knocked the oil plug off his engine and that finished him. Clark stayed in the lead for eight laps, until one of his tires threw a tread, wrecking his rear suspension. Parnelli Jones took over and led until his car caught fire in a fuel stop, and A. J. Foyt, in what he called his antique roadster, ran on to take the money: $153,650. The unlucky Dan Gurney had been pulled in in fear that his tires, too, would let go.

Seventeen rear-engine Fords ran in 1965. Jimmy Clark and Colin Chapman and Ford now had everything sorted out. They were running on the right rubber, they knew the rules and every hairline local interpretation of them, they had hired the fastest pit crew in the world, the legendary Woods brothers off the Southern stock-car tracks, and they had even designed a fuel nozzle for the required gravity system that actually accelerated the stuff as it poured through. Clark, who had qualified at 160, went as he liked, almost cruising--he drove hard only twice, and then briefly--and won at 151. Parnelli Jones, swerving his car from side to side to pump the last drops of fuel to the engine from a nearly bonedry tank, came second, and the remarkably talented Mario Andretti, running for the first time in the 500, was third.

All but nine cars in the field of 33 were Ford-engined in 1966, which saw a spectacular 11-car pile-up on the first lap, with no one hurt but all 11 cars out of the race. After the restart, an hour and 40 minutes later, Andretti led, then Clark, who hit oil and spun. Lloyd Ruby led in one of Dan Gurney's new All-American Racers until the 166th lap. The Scot Grand Prix driver Jackie Stewart ran in front until his car lost its oil pressure with ten laps remaining. Graham Hill, a former world champion, came in to win, with Clark second. There were five Fords in the first six places and the name was up forever beside Duesenberg, Miller, Offenhauser.

The year of the Fiery Dragon was 1967. Gas-turbine cars had come to Indianapolis before: John Zink in 1962, Norman Demler in 1966. Neither made the race. The turbine engine, invented by Air Commodore Frank Whittle of the Royal Air Force in 1940, put the piston engine out of business as far as highspeed aircraft use is concerned. Running at a constant speed, in high altitudes where it is most efficient, the turbine, in its jet form, is supreme. Compared with a piston engine, it's very simple: It takes air in at the front, compresses it with one water-wheel-like device, mixes fuel with the air, ignites the mixture, which blasts out the rear end with great force, using some energy on the way to spin a bladed wheel that drives the compressor wheel up front. The airplane goes forward for the same reason a blown-up balloon does if you let go of it: reaction. A gas turbine works the same way, excepting that, to put it crudely, most of the power is used to spin the second turbine wheel, which can be hooked to a propeller, or to wheels, and the jet effect is negligible. As long ago as 1950, the Rover Company of England ran a gas-turbine automobile 150 miles an hour and even competed successfully at Le Mans. The United States Automobile Club, anticipating the eventual appearance of turbines at the Brickyard, had laid down regulations for them, including the vital one of annulus, or effective air-inlet size, which governs the amount of power a gas turbine can produce. This was set at 23 square inches; and in 1967, Andy Granatelli, a former driver, speed-shop owner and perennial Indianapolis sponsor, entered a gas-turbine single-seater under Studebaker STP sponsorship, with Parnelli Jones nominated to drive it. The engine was by Pratt & Whitney, the designer a British-trained engineer, Ken Wallis. At first, no one in the establishment was much impressed: Previous turbine entries had done nothing and Granatelli had never had a winner. The fact that Jones was up to drive shook some people, though, since he could have almost any car he wanted. Then the word got around that his fee was a flat $100,000, win or lose, and so there were those who thought he was doing it for the money. But when qualifying time came around, everyone who could hold a watch knew why he was doing it: Barring accident to the car or somebody shooting him as he sat in it, Jones was going to win. The STP had four-wheel drive, a modification of the British Ferguson system, so that the power went to the track from everywhere, not just the front or back wheels alone; it stuck in the curves as if it were nailed down, and Jones could pass anyone he liked anywhere he chose. And, the sad story ran, he was running at 65 percent of the available power.

The horsepower figure on the STP car--it was painted a Day-Glo orangey red that practically burned out the eyeballs--was cited as 550, nothing extraordinary and less than many other cars. But its torque, or effective twisting power, was 1000 foot-pounds, about three times that of the Ford and Offenhauser engines running against it. Further, while a piston engine has to be brought up to near-maximum revolutions per minute before it delivers its maximum torque, a gas-turbine engine of the free-turbine type can apply maximum torque from a standstill, within a second. There was nothing for the other drivers to do but hope the thing broke.

It went that way. Parnelli Jones jumped into the lead immediately, sitting comfortably alongside his big blowtorch, running almost in silence compared with the piston cars, and stayed there until the race was called for rain before it was well under way. For the first time ever, it wasn't restarted until the next day, when Jones ran in front monotonously, except for one little spin and two pit stops, straight to lap 197. when a six-dollar ball bearing in the transmission let go and sent it to the barn--probably forever. A. J. Foyt, riding a Ford rear-engined Coyote of his own and his father's making, was lying a canny second. He had a sure win, but he had a premonition, too: He was suddenly sure he was going to see another multi-car pile-up. He backed off to a crawl, around 100 miles an hour, and when five cars piled up in front of him on the finishing straight, he threaded through them and went to get the S171,000.

Soon enough afterward, the U.S.A.C. announced a change in gas-turbine specifications: a reduction in the annulus area from 23 to 15 square inches. Granatelli was outraged. No engine of that size exists, he said, and his own could not be modified and would not be competitive if it were. A scrapper and a persuasive man, Granatelli jumped for the rostrum and made The Case of the Outlawed Turbine into a cause célèbre. It was, he said, a simple matter of the establishment banning what they knew they couldn't beat. But the U.S.A.C. wouldn't give him an inch, much less eight square inches, and he went to court. Win or lose, he says, he'll be back this Memorial Day with turbines. So will others. Probably most competitive will be a team of two turbines sponsored by Goodyear and Carroll Shelby and designed by Ken Wallis. They, too, will be four-wheel driven, and 1967 World Champion Denis Hulme and Bruce McLaren have been nominated for the rides. If one of them runs as Parnelli Jones ran, someone will say, looking at the serried squadrons of rear-engined Fords, "Gentlemen, you are looking at a million dollars' worth of junk!" and the big wheel will start around one more time.