The following is a story from Car & Driver Magazine. I sat high in the grandstand that night and remember it like it was yesterday.
I hope D.O. will enjoy it
Night Race (1965 Reading PA)
"Scratch" Daniels was from St. Paul, Minnesota and he had just come up to the
United States Auto Club from the International Motor Contest Association,
known simply as "IMCA"-- the oldest and roughest sprint car circuit in the
country. Tough guys like Dutch Schrader and Frank Luptow and Pete Folse and
Buzz Barton had given the IMCA a reputation for slam-bang race driving that
meant something on every track from Sioux City to Winchester. It was against
strong men like Folse and Barton and their four-by-four Chevys and their Ranger
aircraft engines that "Scratch" Daniels had learned his lessons and now it was
time to take on the hotshots in USAC.
The crowd responded before Daniels was ten feet into the first turn and a great
moan of expectation passed through them. "Woweee, he's running high!"
somebody shouted. Daniels was out near the fence, "on the marbles," as they say,
and his Chevy engine was sending volleys of raw noise ricocheting into the
enclosure of the grandstand. He'd rejected the low groove--the one that took the
earlier qualifiers over the deep ruts near the inside rail--and had chosen to run
high on the rim in a wide, spectacular arc through the narrow turns. His car was
cocked in a vicious power slide as he entered the main straight and a barrage of
cheers escorted him past the grandstands. He lifted his foot a split second before
he entered the first turn and his engine went BLAM! in a massive, resonant
backfire and two globes of red flame the size of basketballs spewed out of his
exhaust pipes. He was streaking down the back straight when they announced his
time, "twenty-four and seventy-eight one-hundredths seconds." Two seconds
faster than anybody else and the crowd broke into cheering as he came by again.
They were with him, hollering and yelling and stomping their feet for ol' Scratch
Daniels to manhandle that bucking mean mother of a Chevrolet around those ruts
and on to an even quicker time. Give her hell, Daniels, GO, GO, GO! He went,
he did, though not quite as fast as the first lap, and when he steered his car out of
the light and into the darkened pits, they all clapped. They clapped because they
had seen a man with guts put on a brilliant display of driving, and that's what they
had paid to see.
Then a few others went faster, including a smart kid from Kansas City named
Greg Weld and canny old Jud Larson in A.J. Watson's own Offy and Daniel's
team mate Jerry Richert, who runs out of Forest Lake, Minnesota. But the crowd
remembered "Scratch" Daniels, because he had been the first man to ride the rim,
and they knew enough about this sport to realize that each successive man to use
that groove would find it smoother.
"And now, ladies and gentlemen, here he is, the National driving Champion,
Aaaay Jaaay Foyt!" An unnumbered white sprinter burst out of the pits and
roared through the first and second turns. It was Foyt, alright, sitting in that
familiar erect position with his head thrown back, and part of the crowd stood up.
It was his first sprint car race since a nasty stock car accident, and some people
had said that his friends and his family had convinced him to stay away from the
sprinters because they were too dangerous. But there he was, on this chill night in
Pennsylvania, out to show those Dutchmen and the smart guys from the IMCA
and the newcomers like Andretti and Stapp that he was still the toughest guy on
the block. He wasn't necessarily their favorite, they didn't love him like they
loved some of the others, but they knew he was the best--maybe the best they
would ever see in their lifetimes--and for the singular reason of witnessing a great
champion do something extraordinary, they wanted to see A.J. Foyt break his
own track record. What a comeback! But it never happened, because Foyt's car
was sick with an illness that wouldn't be cured until another day and his role in
the evening's action was a minor one.
"Move back the fences!" somebody yelled when Mario Andretti began his run.
He was a little Italian from nearby Nazareth that everyone considered to be one
of the brightest driving prospects anywhere, but the Reading crowd was
skeptical. A few weeks earlier, in another sprint show, Andretti had encountered
awesome handling problems with his new car and spun several times before he
brushed the retaining wall in front of the grandstand and quit in disgust. They
knew he had guts and they knew he had the ability to make the big time, but
maybe they didn't like to see it come too fast and too easy for him, and nobody
seemed to sad when he clocked a rather mediocre time.
They were hawking popcorn and peanuts but, sorry , no beer in the stand when
the first eight-lap heat started. Five cars were going to run. Richert and Daniels
were in the two blue and white sister cars at the rear. For the first time in many
years, USAC was trying the inverted start system in the heats, whereby the fastest
cars are placed at the back of the pack. They swooped past Fonoro, who
unleashed a green flag at the last moment, and they barreled into the first turn.
Five cars took five different lines, with Daniels up near the rail and Richert
squeezing by the slowpokes on the inside. They hit the back chute together,
locked in a dog-eat-dog battle for the lead. Past the stands and Daniels struggled
a few feet ahead of Richert. Forget about busting the cars, forget about breaking
your head, forget about the lousy forty bucks for winning the heat, just go, baby.
Money or common sense or retirement in Fort Lauderdale--to hell with all that.
Richert and Daniels were racing, hanging it out on a bumpy dirt track in Reading,
Pennsylvania for nothing more than the raw satisfaction of winning--winning--
because that's what race drivers are supposed to do.
Daniels has his teammate by fifteen feet when a straggler spun on the fourth
turn. They ran a lap under the yellow flag while they cleared the track and then
headed for Fonoro's furled green flag in Indian file. "Go!" the crowd yelled, and
the two drivers accelerated toward the wavering banner. Richert got the jump and
slanted inside the wide sweeping Daniels as they raced into the first turn. A
massive cheer went up as the two drivers powered onto the back chute nose-to-nose,
with savage licks of flames trailing them through the night. Through the
third and fourth turns, and Richert led by a yard. Sliding onto the front straight,
Richert added another three yards. The frantic voice on the loudspeaker was
smothered by the scream of the Chevy engines as they rushed past the stands and
into the next-to-last lap.
Every man, woman and child in the grandstands was up and shouting. Daniels
pulled even and stuck the low snout of his car inside as they slewed sideways into
the third turn. He had Richert and there wasn't anyway of stopping him. He took
the white *** with a few feet to spare and then stayed a little low to shut the door
on Richert, who might try to sneak by on the inside again. Twenty more seconds
of keeping the car pointed right--twenty more seconds of controlling a racing car
with a significantly better power-to-weight ratio than a Grand Prix car or even an
Indianapolis car--and he was home the winner. And they clapped, and they kept
on clapping until old Richert and Daniels were back in the pits and the engines
were turned off and they were sure that those two tough guys from Minnesota
could hear that they liked their style in Reading.
This was a crowd that was doing more than watching an automobile race. they
were deeply involved, ready to hail the good guys and hoot at the officials. Kill
the Umpire!--the crowd was the same kind of friendly enemy that you can find in
baseball parks and football stadiums. Visiting Europeans or sports car buffs have
difficulty understanding an automobile racing crowd like this; some even refuse
to believe such gatherings even exist, because they're used to seeing spectators
spread around massive road circuits in isolated, often bored little enclaves. Not so
at Reading, where they watch and they listen and they cheer and they boo. They
see good races that stink, but they come back, because this is their racing and
they know it.
Foyt ran in the second heat and when he couldn't get by a lucky midget driver
named Bob Tattersall driving an ancient old rail job, everybody knew that no A.J.
Foyt flourishes would be forthcoming on this night. Don Branson, who is 44
years old and has a grandchild in Illinois, won the third heat and Andretti won the
10-lap consolation event, which gave the slow guys their last chance to make the
30-lap feature.
All the ladies got up and went to the washroom underneath the stands, and the
kids trailed up and down the concrete steps with bags of popcorn and boiled hot
dogs stuffed in stale buns, while they rolled the 14 fastest cars out on the track for
the feature. Richert and been the top qualifier and it was his Chevy that sat on the
pole. Beside him was Greg weld in another Chevy, while Daniels and Larson
were in the second row. It was a strong field, sprinkled with some big names like
Bobby Unser and local favorite Red Reigel, whom the announcer kept calling the
"Lee-sport Tornado." The cars were rolled out on the dusky straightaway and
they sat there, untended, mud-spattered, while their drivers dressed for battle.
They wrapped red workmen's bandanna around their mouths to protect against
dust and flying dirt. Some of them wrapped their right forearms in cardboard to
fend off flying stones and chunks of dirt. Almost to a man they were wearing
white coveralls with stripes of assorted sizes and colors lining their arms. A few
of their helmets were plain white, but most of them were striped in garish colors
that glinted in the harsh light of the open lamps. They tucked themselves down
into their heavily-padded leather seats and tugged their shoulder harness in place.
On went the driving gloves and the goggles and they sat there for a moment, inert
and helpless, while pickup trucks were maneuvered into place for the push starts.
The feature race is the last event of the evening, the climax, and it always finds
the crowd ready to treat it like the most important race that has ever been run.
They'd been sitting there for two hours, carefully recording the qualifying times
and the heat results in their programs. By now they knew who could win, and
when themiles of Pennsylvania. they remember men like Ted Horn and Bob Sall
and Doc MacKenzie in Reading, Pennsylvania like they remember Babe Herman
and Danny Vance in Brooklyn. A paunchy man in his middle-fifties, with a
lantern jaw poking out from under a gauche old wide-brim felt hat, walked across
the track and a ripple of applause and shouts of greeting passed through the
crowd. "Hey Tommy!" somebody called, and another voice said, "that's Tommy
Hinnershitz." The Flying Dutchman, they called him. This man was maybe the
best sprint car driver ever. He had his cracks at Indianapolis and in the big cars,
but it was on the dirt, stuffed bolt-upright into the cockpit of an Offenhauser
sprint car, that Tommy Hinnershitz was a race car driver like you'd never forget.
They still talk about how he'd **** those noisy mothers sideways smack in the
middle of the straightaways and powerslide high and wide through the corners
with his rear wheels bombarding the board fences with big, moist clots of clay.
These people 14 sprint cars got pushed off for the start, there was tension like the
morning when John Glenn climbed aboard Friendship Seven.
Greg Weld is learning his lessons well. He stormed out of Kansas City in the
super-modified and now he is up among the best in the USAC sprint cars. He
won his first feature race on that night at Reading, and he had to overcome some
powerful competition to do it. First Jud Larson took his lead away from him, but
the kid refused to be shoved aside by the tough Swede who ranked second in
USAC sprint cars last season, and he promptly repassed.
A yellow flag and a re-start produced a new challenger for the kid's lead. Bobby
Unser had found the groove at mid-race and ruthlessly, methodically picked off
Daniels, Richert, Branson and Larson. He closed in on Weld, got near enough to
ride in his rooster tail of dust, but couldn't get closer. The crowd had kept track of
his charge for the lead and each lap brought him more support. Nobody really
wanted Weld to lose, nor for that matter was anybody terribly concerned about
Unser's winning. Both drivers were relatively new faces from the west and
enjoyed none of the loyalty reserved for home-towners. It's just that if Unser
could only close in another few feet, just a few lousy feet--then there'd be another
fight for the lead. Guys racing.
Weld won and he stopped in front of the stands. a couple of flashbulbs pierced
the night and then the crowd poured out of their seats and smothered his car.
They kept on coming and when they'd surrounded him five deep they peeled off
and headed for the pit area where the other cars were being loaded on trailers.
It had been a good night for racing. The cars, as usual, had been fast and noisy
and the competition had been tight. And thankfully nobody had been hurt. The
crowd was tired and ready to go home. they'd come back when the sprint cars
returned, but until then every male present would somehow share the lament of
the ten-year-old boy who said as he left the now-dark grandstands, "The drivers
are the luckiest; they get to drive in the races and watch them too.
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