Tomb Raiding on the Monterey Peninsula
It’s August, and it’s tomb-raiding time on the Monterey Peninsula again. This year
I once again swore-off the lawn shows as I’ve always been partial to the upper-
register of the rev range and prefer the smell of brakes to that of ostrich hide. This
year Steve Earle mined an important vein of American racing history (that was
somewhat alien to his home-base of Laguna Seca) by featuring the Indy roadsters
of the 1952-1964 era. This tribute to the cars of a half century ago was a good fit
with the current crop of entrants, most of whom are graybeards contemporary with
the pre-1970 cars making up thirteen of the fourteen race groups.
My neighbor Toyopet…
The good people from Toyota Motor Sales USA again sponsored the event and yet
again shamed every other previous marquee sponsor. Those Indy Roadsters
may have been contemporary with the doofy Toyopet Crown, but Toyota filled the
place with feel-good, including free chilled water, SPF-15 lip balm, and the largest
gathering of 2000 GT’s ever seen. Toyota doesn’t currently offer us anything even
remotely sporty and limit their North American competition to the France family-
branded NASCAR and Grand-Am, but on Thursday they gathered at great expense
a panel of motorsports luminaries under the moderation of Speed Channel’s
Dave Despain to discuss “Evolution to Revolution,” the past, present, and future of
motorsport.
In atypical fashion the discussion wasn’t limited to media. The public were
welcomed and were catered finger-sandwiches and beverages. The panel was
itself impressive: Richard Cregan of Toyota Motorsport, Pierre Dupasquier recently
retired from Michelin racing, Herb Fischel, recently “retired” from GM Racing, Mario
Illien of Ilmor Engineering, Richard Karlstetter of Shell Global Technology Group,
and California fabricator Phil Remington. Later, a cast of old-timers drafted to race
front-drive Scions in a Toyota celebrity race joined in: Derek Bell, Johnny
Rutheford, Parnelli Jones, Vic Elford, Ove Andersson, Al Unser, Jr., and his brother
Bobby.
The discussion was opened with a question about which technical innovation in
the past 25 years was most significant in motorsport. After talking about
innovations in driver, circuit, and spectator safety, tire development, and engine
and engine management, the panelists who represented manufacturing and
engineering got into a sparring match with the drivers. I’ve been watching The
Bronx is Burning on ESPN and I was reminded of George Steinbrenner and Billy
Martin going at it for Miller Lite: “Tastes great!” “Less filling!” “The rules should
give us more freedom to innovate!” “The cars should be equal so that the drivers
can be the stars!”
If dogs run free….
The general consensus of the panelists was that safety of cars and circuits was
the biggest improvement over the past decades, with tires and electronics
providing huge gains as well. Herb Fischel also noted how the entertainment
value of racing has been enhanced by the development of the technology behind
how races are telecast. The discussion by the panelists seemed to polarize on
ovals in North America and Formula 1 in Europe, with Fischel and Karlstetter
occasionally steering the discussion to sports cars. Fischel stated that his
greatest mistake was underestimating what it would take to win Le Mans with the
Cadillac LMP program.
The discussion then turned to the future. The technical-side panelists were
unable to agree on where to go. They saw a clear need for racing to go back to
being a place for the industry to develop and market technical innovations and to
train engineers how to think. What they couldn’t agree on was how much leeway
there should be for innovation. Cregan of course wants Toyota to be able to use
hybrids, Karlstetter hyped diesel and fuels featuring renewable and alternative
components. Mario Illien warned that the problem is regulation and balance
because a multi-fuel formula makes it too easy to cheat. Fischel stated his belief
is that there is life beyond NASCAR and F-1 and that road racing is the future.
Again and again the panelists spoke of what “they” needed to do to the “rules” to
encourage players like automobile manufacturers, tire companies, and fuel and
lubricant conglomerates to have more attractive series. The discussion never
seemed to quite focus on the “balance of performance” issues with which the
ACO and IMSA are at the forefront, grappling with competition between the diesel
P1 Audi and the P2 gasoline Porsches and Acuras. Strange, as Toyota brought its
panel to Laguna Seca, not exactly a NASCAR or F-1 venue, in front of a hard-core
road racing crowd (and on Thursday right before Steve Earle’s pre-party with heavy
audience representation by entrants in the MHAR).
Once upon a time in the west….
Despain was, as is his habit, well-prepared and a good discussion leader, but as
things wore on I realized that the most important participants in a discussion of
the future of our favorite sport were absent from the panel: “they” who make the
“rules.” I was frustrated that the discussion never confronted what I saw as the
most important factor in the development of motorsport over the past century: the
evolution of circuit ownership and infrastructure and the influence of circuit-owners
and promoters on the “rules.” In my view, the type of racing circuit available to
manufacturers and drivers has had more to do with the evolution of racing than
any other factor, explaining why racing and “rules” are different on the two sides of
the Atlantic and why they are different today than they were forty years ago.
As Despain pointed out, automobile racing in Europe and America got underway
at about the same time, shortly after the turn of the twentieth century. Europe, and
especially France, had already developed a fairly elaborate infrastructure of public
roads, largely to accommodate mass movements of the troops of national armies
which had expanded in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars. Automobile racing
began as great city-to-city competitions along these public roads, closed for
competition. When the carnage from open-road events became unacceptable, the
auto clubs promoting them began to create circuits made up of closed roads
where crowd control and road conditions could be better managed for the safety of
both spectators and concourants.
By the dawn of the automobile, America had yet to develop the sort of road network
enjoyed by Europe. As social anthropologists now believe, the preceding two
hundred years had seen the continent largely depopulated by epidemics among
the indigenous population, finished off by the U.S. cavalry. There was no need for
mass movement of troops after the Civil War, but the rapid growth of the
European immigrant population and generally large distances between
population centers had encouraged the development of the railroads. Roads
were limited to the urban centers and largely made up of dust in summer and
mud the rest of the year. While road racing was established on Long Island and
in California, most parts of the country lacked roads, and automotive competition
instead took advantage of the existing equine infrastructure. Barnstormers such
as Barney Oldfield moved cars like the Blitzen Benz and the Golden Submarine
from horse-oval to horse-oval via the railroad.
The Europeans continued their tradition of racing on public roads until Jackie
Stewart’s driver safety movement took hold in the early Seventies. Le Mans and
Spa are vestiges of this tradition dating to the dawn of the automobile. In America
bad roads and cheap real estate conspired to morph the hippodromes into
autodromes such as the Speedway at Indianapolis built in 1909 and the great
board tracks in the erstwhile road racing venues of Long Island and Southern
California. Current motorsport infrastructure largely mirrors these developments
of the Twentieth Century. In Europe, where there is a tradition of turning both left
and right, the safety movement led to dedicated natural terrain circuits which have
now evolved into the surgically smooth and operating room sterile “designed”
circuits dedicated to modern F-1 kart racing. In North America we have seen
massive construction of super-speedways while natural terrain circuit construction
has largely been limited to club-level tracks.
Don’t question the little man….
What this has meant is that the “rules” are largely in the hands of track owners
and promoters. NASCAR’s France family control International Speedway
Corporation, which has holdings coast-to-coast; the IRL is a subsidiary of Tony
George, who owns Indianapolis Motor Speedway and has partnerships with ISC
(ChampCar’s attempt to compete with George using tax-subsidized street circuits
appears to be going down the tubes as of this writing); the FIA is masterminded by
promoter Bernie Ecclestone and his lawyer Max Mosley, who control the series by
providing access to the product but who haven’t been involved in racing cars for
decades; the Automobile Club de l’Ouest controls Le Mans and through it the
shape of sportscar racing (the France family’s control of Daytona and the Daytona
Prototype formula hasn’t changed the shape of sportscar racing; it merely
redistributed the size of the fields).
During the panel discussion Herb Fischel openly questioned why any
manufacturer would go spec racing. To market engineering and technology those
in the automobile business need to work with a series that is dedicated to more
than rolling billboards. NASCAR, IRL, and F-1 have become little more. Only
sportscar racing, and its tradition of endurance racing, can provide the platform
which justifies their investment. Its rules are a natural development of its base at
the oldest closed-road event in the world, Le Mans, and a continuing tradition of
encouraging technological development, such as the current diesel prototypes. If
sportscar racing’s rule-makers don’t screw it up, it’s the way forward. If not, a
whole new racing infrastructure may be in order. Allan McNish was recently
quoted that the racing car he currently most wants to drive is a Volkswagen
Touareg TDI Dakar Raid car.
The days run away like wild horses over the hills…
As for the Historics themselves, the impressive gathering of Indy roadsters
emphasized the “horses for courses” nature of circuit-driven rules and
development. The roadsters were hobbled by having to lumber around Laguna
instead of being able to stretch out their legs on a speedway. An Offy is a
wonderful engine, but it sounds a bit agricultural straining to gain revs out of the
corners through a two-speed transmission. Our own Kerry Morse was a young
juvenile delinquent in this crowd of old crockery, driving Matt Drendel’s mere 27
year-old Porsche 924 GTP Le Mans car in the Historic IMSA group that was tagged
onto the end of the weekend. At least until a head gasket let go. This was the very
same car that served to introduce Derek Bell to the Porsche factory when Peter
Gregg was forced to scratch from the 1980 race.
The high-point of the weekend for me was wandering across trash-and-trinket
island and running into the great Tony Adamowicz. He told me that he is in the
final stages of completing his historic 1969 F5000 championship-winning Eagle
with its current owner. In my opinion the L&M F5000 Championship was the most
exciting open-wheel series of all time, and I look forward to seeing Tony reliving
his title. Again, the legendary racer wasn’t in the show (he complained that he and
John Morton weren’t in the “Legends” race, either), but he has a new business
venture to apply the focus he has used to finish near the top a Le Mans so many
times: a2z Racer Gear.
His first product besides PRDA paraphernalia was a version of the popular
“Michael Delaney” overalls jacket with Gulf, Heuer, and Firestone patches. Nice,
but a bit too “poseur” for me (Morse has another word for them which I won’t
repeat here…). Tony pulled out his latest addition for me, a version of the blue
fleece-lined “Team Gulf” winter jacket worn by Steve McQueen during the night
scenes in the Le Mans movie. It was cribbed from the real thing that hung in the
back of Kerry Morse’s shop for the past quarter century until he let it go at
Bonham’s McQueen auction where it fetched silly money. A-to-Z turned fashion
model and haberdasher as he pointed out the authentic features and several
subtle design changes that make the garment more practical than the throw-away
original. I mean, how can you resist a guy who tells you how much better his
waterproofing is by recounting seeing Steve McQueen in the original at Le Mans in
1970, soaked to the bone? Since I didn’t have 2.3 mil for the McQueen Lusso at
Christie’s, I took one home (no plug; the price is quite reasonable).
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