20 Questions Willy T. Ribbs

Ok, now, real quick: What popular American sport introduced its first black competitor 43 years after Jackie Robinson entered major-league baseball? If you said Indy-car racing, you qualify for an official Willy T. Ribbs Flying Tiger fan club T-shirt. Ribbs, who started racing as an amateur in Europe in 1977, has become a minor legend in racing circles since breaking into professional racing in America in 1981. The San Jose native has notched 17 victories in the Sports Car Club of America's Trans-Am series and seven victories for Dan Gurney's team in the International Motor Sports Association's (IMSA) Camel GTO series; he was IMSA Driver of the Year in 1987 and 1988. Despite that impressive record, Ribbs never got the break every driver lives for—the invitation to race for an lndy-car team. That is, not until last November, when Bill Cosby joined the Raynor Motorsports Racing Team, renamed the Raynor/Cosby Racing Team, and committed himself to raising approximately $5,000,000 needed to put Ribbs on the CART/Indy circuit in a computerized Lola-Judd. Cosby said he first took an interest in the charismatic Ribbs when he saw him do his patented "victory shuffle" atop his car following a Trans-Am race. As for Ribbs, he's unflustered by being the Jackie Robinson of race-car drivers. As Contributing Editor Walter Lowe, Jr., who interviewed Ribbs at his home, says, "Willy Ribbs exudes charisma and confidence like a young Muhammad Ali but without the clowning. And, like the young Ali, you have a sense that it's not a matter of if he's going to be one of the greatest of all time but merely how long it will take."

1.

[Q] Playboy: At the age of thirty-four, are you considered an old rookie in Indy-car racing?

[A] Ribbs: Are you kidding? Do you know how old Graham Hill was when he first ran at Indy? Thirty-seven. And he won. Physically, I'm the best athlete in the sport. And I'm not bragging. Just ask my peers.

2.

[Q] Playboy: What do you do differently from other drivers to stay in shape?

[A] Ribbs: No other driver trains like a boxer. I've trained at Garden City Boxing Club [in San Jose] for the past six years. Early in my career, Muhammad Ali convinced me that boxing was the best training for a race driver. Fighters are the best athletes in the world. No other sport comes close in terms of the strength, speed and durability it takes to be a champion. It's easy to dish out punches and not run out of gas if you're not getting hit. But the great fighters train to take punches. The g forces in a race car are tremendous. When a driver goes around a corner at Indy, his cornering speed is between two hundred ten and two hundred eighteen miles per hour, and right in the middle of that turn, the g force on your neck can be about five. That's a phenomenal amount of lateral force on your body for three hours. To prepare for that, a lot of drivers train in Nautilus rooms. I do Nautilus work, but I also give myself an extra edge by training in the boxing gym.

3.

[Q] Playboy: When a baseball player or a football player starts to get too old to perform his best, they say he has "lost a step." Is there an equivalent of losing a step in racing?

[A] Ribbs: Yeah, but it's a lot later in auto racing. Normally, it starts to happen around the age of fifty. For instance, I respect Mario Andretti more than any other driver in the world, because he's forty-eight or forty-nine years old and he's just as fast now as he was when he was twenty-eight. He's a tiger. When he walks into a room, if you didn't know who he was, you'd know he was somebody. But the main reason drivers start to lose something when they reach their fifties is primarily a matter of eyesight and, to some extent, reflexes. Eyesight is crucial, particularly depth perception when you're going into turns. But genetics also plays an important role. Some guys are born with eyesight and reflexes that hold up longer. But I think that's true of any sport.

4.

[Q] Playboy: What makes a young African-American boy want to grow up to be a professional race-car driver? Can you point to specific events or people responsible for putting you on the fast track?

[A] Ribbs: My grandfather went from Louisiana to California in 1921, and at the time he left Louisiana, his father, my great-grandfather Felix, was the wealthiest black man in the state. He had more than three thousand acres of farmland that he leased to sharecroppers. So our family was, from the turn of the century, a very business-minded people.

[A] When my grandfather got to California, he went into the plumbing business in Santa Clara County, and I don't have to tell you how hard it was back then for a black man to get a license to do business. He did very well and eventually bought a lot of real estate. He started building housing complexes and retired at fifty.

[A] My father and my uncle took over the plumbing and real-estate businesses from my grandfather when they were relatively young, and my father had enough money to pursue his hobby, which was sports-car racing at the amateur level. He was already racing when I was born.

[A] My grandfather has a three-hundred-acre ranch in the Sacramento Valley, and when I was twelve, my parents sent me there to live with him and learn some discipline, because I'd already learned how to drive and was going wild, driving on the streets of San Jose. At my grandfather's ranch, I had room to drive without getting into trouble. But more important was my grandfather's work ethic. He didn't stand for any fooling around. When I first got there, he gave me a whipping every day. He just didn't stand for any nonsense. He shaped me more than anyone. He made me realize that to be the best at anything, you have to work hard.

[A] At any rate, I was born into the sport and I know it better than most of my critics; and because of the way I was raised, I wasn't going to settle for anything less than what the top drivers got.

5.

[Q] Playboy: Speaking of your critics, you had a reputation for being very outspoken earlier in your career. Yet, since Bill Cosby has become one of your major backers, you seem to have become a kinder, gentler Willy T. Ribbs. Have you been Huxtableized?

[A] Ribbs: Well, first of all, I don't know what you mean by outspoken. Sure, if I thought I was being treated differently from other drivers, I was going to talk about it and still will. And then you have to realize that there are certain people out there in the racing community who aren't ever going to be Willy T. fans, even if I never say another word.

6.

[Q] Playboy: Well, one incident that may have earned you the reputation of having a quick temper was when you slugged driver Scott Pruitt after he bumped you during a race in Portland, Oregon, in 1987. Did he deserve it?

[A] Ribbs: That's an example of what I'm talking about when I say I've been treated differently from other drivers. I'll explain what happened and let your readers decide for themselves.

[A] We were racing for the lead and a quarter of the way through the race, we were lapping a slower car at the same time. As we raced to the corner, I took the other car on the inside, Pruitt took him on the outside. I made the lap, but Pruitt's move didn't work. He got bumped by the other car and knocked off the track into the dirt. He had to make two pit stops to repair the damage, which put him two laps behind me. I held on to the lead, and toward the last part of the race—when there was no way he could have caught me—I made a routine pit stop for gas and tires and just happened to come out of the pit right in front of him. He stayed on my tail and then, a few laps later, he cut a corner, ran into the right rear of my car, spun me around and damaged my car, knocking me out of any chance to win the race.

[A] I finished second, and after the race was over, I went to the officials. I expected them to fine him for unnecessary rough driving, just as they had fined me in the past. And none of my infractions were as bad as his, since the only times I was fined I was racing for the lead and he wasn't. But IMSA turned a blind eye to his vengeful act and I was really steamed.

[A] So after the race, I put on my clothes, packed up and left and I happened to see Pruitt in the parking lot driving out with a friend. He was sitting in the passenger seat with the window down. I went over to his car, reached in and gave him a little palm-reading lesson upside his head. Then he did what any crybaby would do, which was go to the officials. I knew that the majority of officials were not fans of mine, and Pruitt's complaint gave them an excuse to do what they wanted to do anyway, which was suspend me for a month. The press ate it up like hot boardinghouse pie.

7.

[Q] Playboy: It has taken the Indianapolis 500 longer to integrate than it took major-league baseball, and when Cosby announced that he was backing you, you were quoted as saying, "There were two people who could make this happen: God and Bill Cosby." Cosby, in his ever-diplomatic way, has said that he sees unfairness when it comes to the racing world's acceptance of Willy T. Ribbs. When you press down the pedal at Indy, will you be trying to prove a point?

[A] Ribbs: I try to win every race, and I'll be doing just that at Indy. No matter what the obstacles are, the whole point is to win. Raynor/Cosby and I and the mechanics and the engineers are all going for one thing: a winning team—not just at Indy but over the whole CART [Championship Auto Racing Team] season and for seasons to come. Anybody who asks me what my philosophy on race is, I tell him: Success comes in one color—green. If you win, it speaks for itself.

[A] All I can say about unfairness is that at every level I've raced, I've been successful. I've won record numbers of races, driver-of-the-year awards, and so on. But to compete in Indy-car championship races, you have to be picked by a CART/Indy-car team. If Roger Penske calls and asks you to drive for him, or if Carl Haas gives you a call, then you go run Indy cars. Bill simply felt that I hadn't gotten the phone call my record deserved. There were other drivers whose records were no better than mine, perhaps not as good, who were getting the opportunity to go to Indy, and I wasn't.

8.

[Q] Playboy: How much of being a successful driver is guts and speed and how much is public relations and business sense?

[A] Ribbs: You can leave guts out. Guts have nothing to do with driving at high speed. Intelligence and desire are what's important. The only time guts come into driving fast is when you don't know what you're doing. But you do have to be one hundred percent public-relations expert and one hundred percent businessman.

[A] It wasn't that way twenty, thirty years ago. Back then, rich team owners just hired drivers and paid their bills. But now racing is big corporate sponsorship, big television. You have to know how to make a deal, you have to know how to represent your sponsors well, you have to know how to make speeches, meet the press, make appearances and deal with being on TV. It's more than just being a hell of a driver.

9.

[Q] Playboy: Your Dan Gurney All-America racer with the Toyota engine has won you a lot of races over the past two and a half years. Do you have any sentimental attachment to that car?

[A] Ribbs: Not at all. Some drivers have attachments to their cars, particularly the guys who are into the mechanical side of racing. But I'm into the art of driving. When a race is over, I get on top of the car, do my victory shuffle and leave footprints on the roof, then go to the victory podium. I don't turn around to look lovingly at the car or anything like that. After all, it's just a mechanical object that can give you big joy but can give you big letdowns, too. I would venture that more drivers call their car a bitch than praise it.

10.

[Q] Playboy: Dan Gurney, a racing legend in his own right, has been your unfailing backer for five years. What's the most important lesson you've learned from him?

[A] Ribbs: The most important thing I learned from Dan was team spirit and a sense of trust. On the teams I'd raced with before Dan's, the trust factor was very low. Like, for instance, when I'd think up a different chassis combination to make my car a little bit quicker, I'd share that information with other guys on my team. But when they'd come up with an idea, I'd never see the blueprints. The idea of team became a farce to me. But Dan's attitude was that we all had to share information with one another, no exceptions. He wanted each one of us to win as badly as we wanted to win, but he also wanted each guy to have the same advantages as the other guy. That way, you were competing on sheer skill. Eventually, Dan and I became tight off the track. Part of what I loved about him was that he was a pure racer. A pure racer isn't necessarily a guy who wins a lot of races or is the fastest ever. A real racer is a guy who will spend his last nickel and his last ounce of energy to win. That's Dan Gurney.

11.

[Q] Playboy: What's a driver's worst nightmare—a crash or a fire?

[A] Ribbs: If you run straight into something at over a hundred and fifty miles per hour, that's real bad. Now, if you glance off a wall, do a spin or slam back into a wall at that speed, or even roll the car, that's normally not too bad. It's bad but not too bad. But the sudden stop of going head on into something, that's definitely not good. As far as fire, the safety equipment we have now—the suits we wear and the strength of the capsule of the race car itself—prevents serious injury. That's one of the biggest improvements in racing over the past decade. Back in the Fifties and Sixties, fire was the most dangerous problem, because a driver could survive a crash but get trapped in the car in a fire and be killed.

12.

[Q] Playboy: Apart from dangers on the track, aren't there dangers off the track, such as the lifestyle that caused the emerging star of racer Tim Richmond to be snuffed out by AIDS? When he died last year, the explanation given by his friends was that he lived an extremely promiscuous life. Is that lifestyle common among racers?

[A] Ribbs: Auto racing is a very fast-paced business, just like the music industry. I've seen it all my life, even as a kid. It's glamourous, and in any glamourous profession, there are a lot of beautiful women around.

[A] There is plenty of action on and off the track, you know? A lot of sex. And the mechanics and the engineers are just as big stars to the women who know the sport as the drivers are. After a race, they go back to their hotels and put their noses to a totally different grindstone.

13.

[Q] Playboy: Give us a quick scope on the women who hang around the pit. Can they change a tire? When they look under the hood, do they see order or chaos?

[A] Ribbs: Women who are interested in auto racing are almost always interested in the mechanical side of the sport. They can certainly change their own tires, and when they look under the hood, they know what they're looking at. That type of woman is a racer, whether she drives a race car or not.

14.

[Q] Playboy: What are three things about driving that you guys know and we don't?

[A] Ribbs: Well, I can think of four things: car control; the art of driving in the rain at high speed; drafting, or high-speed slip-streaming; and how to win a braking contest. The last is when you're going down the street and you're racing somebody to a corner. Eventually, both of you are going to have to put on the brakes to make it around the corner. A braking contest determines who can go into the corner deepest and brake the latest without crashing. Your depth perception has to be paramount and your foot speed has to be like Sugar Ray Leonard's.

15.

[Q] Playboy: What's the dumbest thing we do behind the wheel that you don't?

[A] Ribbs: Rubbernecking is the dumbest thing that lay people do and pro drivers don't. If a race driver has crashed and the car's on the side of the road, we do not look at the accident. We're not trying to see if anybody's hurt. We may go by the scene of an accident at well over a hundred miles per hour, so we look where we're going.

16.

[Q] Playboy: Do you feel comfortable riding in the passenger seat?

[A] Ribbs: I don't have a problem riding in the passenger seat with anybody until he starts to go above what he's capable of handling. People who try to show off for me make me nervous. My wife is a good driver, so I feel very comfortable with her. My dad drives fast, but he knows what he's doing, so it doesn't bother me. But if somebody looks like he's taking my life in his hands, I'll definitely speak up.

17.

[Q] Playboy: Can you give us the Ribbs tips for buying a used car? And what information is gained when we kick the tires of a car we intend to buy?

[A] Ribbs: It's really simple. For my dollar, the Mercedes is the best car in the world, new or used. The car is very strong structurally, it's got good power, good handling, and those three ingredients, along with its phenomenal reliability, make it a tremendous value for the money. And I don't drive for Mercedes, so this is just my honest opinion. I don't know why anybody would kick the tires of a car, unless he wanted to break his toe. More useful is to test-drive it and let go of the steering wheel for a second to see if the car veers to the left or the right, which tells you that something's wrong.

18.

[Q] Playboy: One of the most memorable lines from the film Apocalypse Now is "I love the smell of napalm in the morning." Is there an equivalent smell at the race track that makes you tingle?

[A] Ribbs: Well, there isn't a smell, but there is a sound. When you hear the explosions of the turbochargers when the drivers shift, it's absolutely the greatest sound in the world. And it echoes across the track and kind of makes your blood pound. Some cities are trying to introduce ordinances to reduce the decibels at the race tracks, but when auto racing becomes so intimidated that it starts putting mufflers on race cars, it's going to lose a lot of its excitement.

19.

[Q] Playboy: Have you ever been, if you'll pardon the expression, ribbed about your name? And aren't you happy that your parents didn't name you Bobby Q.?

[A] Ribbs: I've never given it any thought. A lot of people have thought that my real name was something I made up. My family's name was Beck. One of the reasons my grandfather had to go to California was that his older brother Ben had a business dispute with a white man over a large amount of timber the man was buying from my great-grandfather. As a result, my granduncle beat the man up. And back in the Twenties, you didn't do that. So they had to leave Louisiana in a hurry or be lynched. America was a socially insane country at that time, and it wasn't inconceivable that some fools from Louisiana would go all the way to California to get revenge on my family. So when they moved to the West Coast, they changed their name from Beck to Ribbs. I remember hearing my granddad always talking about the Becks, how tough they were. I remember finally asking my dad when I was about thirteen, "Dad, who are the Becks?" And he answered, "The Becks are you."

20.

[Q] Playboy: Columbia Pictures has bought the rights to your life story. If you had control over the film, whom would you pick to play yourself, who would play your love interests and how would it end?

[A] Ribbs: Denzel Washington would play me, because my life has been a dramatic saga, and he's a phenomenal dramatic actor. As for my love interests, I'd like one of them to be Whitney Houston or maybe Paula Abdul. I hate the traditional ending where a guy wins the big race, with the checkered flag waving, and he rides into the sunset with a trophy in his hand. I'd like my ending to leave the audience hanging, wanting more. I'd like the movie to end on a beginning—me climbing down into a car, in slow motion, getting buckled in.