Center Conversation: From a Steward’s Point of View (John Bornholdt)

This episode is part of our HISTORY OF MOTORSPORTS SERIES and is sponsored in part by: The International Motor Racing Research Center (IMRRC), The Society of Automotive Historians (SAH), The Watkins Glen Area Chamber of Commerce, and the Argetsinger Family – and was recorded in front of a live studio audience.

[00:00:00] Breakfix’s History of Motorsports series is brought to you in part by the International Motor Racing Research Center, as well as the Society of Automotive Historians, the Watkins Glen Area Chamber of Commerce, and the Argettsinger family. We’re happy to have you join us today for the center conversation from the steward’s point of view.

This series of talks covering a broad range of interests in motorsports is sponsored in part by a grant from the Watkins Glen Chamber of Commerce, and we are grateful for their support. John Bordholt, known familiarly as Johnny B. John was a race steward for more than 50 years starting in 1952 at Sebring.

He worked in race series ranging from the SCCA to Formula One. Currently, a member of the SCCA’s Professional Court of Appeals, Bornholt is one of only two people who have been honored with the Wolf Bonato, David Morell, and the SCCA Hall of Fame Awards. Pretty impressive. Back in 1951, BH Holt [00:01:00] was a spectator at open road races here in Watkins Glen and in Bridge Hampton, and started his officiating as a pit steward at Sebring in 1952.

Didn’t take him long. 51 to 52. Continuing there for the next 10 years, he joined the Fcca a’s Washington DC region in 1955, working as a pit steward at the first Marlboro Speedway race. He’s the founding regional executive of the South Jersey SCCA. Bornholt worked at virtually all races in the Vineland Speedway road course from 1958 on.

He was steward at the United States road racing championship races, then chairman of stewards for many Can Am, Trans Am, And formula 5, 000 races in the mid 1950s, he was a pit crew member of the triple a Eastern sprint team. Bornholtz was the American steward at us formula one races from 1970 through 1991.

He was series chief steward for the single seat five liter Can Am, and then spent 17 years as series chief steward for the Toyota [00:02:00] Atlantic series. He was also a judge for cart and champ car additionally, but wait, there’s more. Bornholt was briefly series chief steward for the Oldsmobile sports car race series.

He held various positions in SCCA club racing stewards organizations, including divisional executive steward and director of stewards. He also put in time as a flagger and chief timing and scoring during his career in racing. Bornholt worked for 45 years at RCA, becoming program manager of large radar projects, retiring in 1996.

Ladies and gentlemen. Johnny B.

I’d be, or I’d be standing up here as they did at a lot of driver’s meetings, cause you get better attention that way. I’d like this to be a talk. It’s not a presentation. And by the difference in my book is that a talk is for me to let you get as much information as you can absorb what we’re talking about, which means that you can ask questions [00:03:00] at any time.

And I like that because it makes it flow better and it’s more informative for you. A presentation to stand up, tell them what you told them, and leave. I’ve done hundreds of those in my business, and I don’t like them. That said, what are we going to talk about today? I looked around, and I thought around, and I thought, you know, there’s several things.

Most of us that go to races, we watch the cars go around, but we really don’t know what’s going on out there behind the scenes. And I thought I’d try and give you a peek into race organization, racing organizations, and particularly the stewards organization, because they’re the ones that can affect the outcome of the race.

As it is officially published over the last four or five or six weeks, I wrote a whole series of notes and I came here and I find out with my lousy macular degeneration, which is one reason why I’m not an operating steward anymore that I can’t read my own notes, but haven’t written them. I should know what’s in them.

Let’s start at the top. Automobile racing is a huge area to talk about. I’m going [00:04:00] to talk about the part of it. That has to do with what happens on track from the official’s viewpoint. I’m going to leave out of it, the whole aspects of the organizing of the event before the event, which is a whole world in itself, I’m going to leave out of it, the press I’m going to leave out of it, the driving side of it, because I’m not a driver.

And I’ve never purported to be one because I found out very early on that I was a lousy one. Which is why I’m an official. So let’s talk about the organizational side of it. First of all, in auto racing, in most of the world, there’s only one organization in each country that runs the auto races. United States, I believe is unique, or at least one of the few that has many organizations running automobile racing.

And not all of them are underneath the aegis of the international organization, the Federation International of the Automobile. The FIA. It sets the tone for racing for those clubs that belong to it. How did [00:05:00] this happen in America? How many people know what happened in 1955 in auto racing? Okay, for the rest of you, in 1955 at the Le Mans race, Pierre Levesque went into the crowd in the grandstands in front of the Mustard finish line because he ran in the back of another car.

And it’s controversial, I think, to this day, exactly what happened and how that happened. But the results are certainly not controversial. Upwards of 90 people were killed. God knows how many were injured. The race continued. The stewards decided that it had an impact on racing that you just can’t imagine.

In the United States up until that time, the American Automobile Association. Randall organized racing that amounted to anything. There were many, many other racing organizations in the United States, but they were outlawed. What does that mean? That means their drivers could not participate in AAA races, nor could they participate internationally.

The FIA recognized AAA and only [00:06:00] AAA. After 1955, when that happened, within days after it happened, AAA said, we’re out of here, boys, in automobile racing. America needed to have an organization representing itself for its international races, and so it formed the Automobile Competition Committee of the United States.

And ACUS in turn had membership of the major racing organizations and still does to this day. You have USAC, you have SECA, you have NASCAR, you have NHRA, AMSA, and you have others. The organization below that level is by each club. Each club then, NASCAR, SCCA, IndyCar, they sanction races, and when they sanction a race, they appoint the officials.

They appoint them, but they not originally name them. Often the names of the officials at a race are chosen by the local organization, submitted to the sanctioning body for approval, the [00:07:00] sanctioning body approves them, and then appoints them to the race. Amongst those officials at a race, you have various kinds of stewards and other specialties.

I’ll do the other specialties first because we’re not going to talk about them. We have tech, we have timing and scoring, we have registration, safety, and we have steward organizations, but they’re not the same as the ones I want to spend my time with. We have pit stewards, we have paddock stewards, we have safety stewards.

Their jobs are mainly. To assist drivers and entrance and to monitor the drivers and entrance and performance, the remaining stewards are fall into two categories, judicial ones and operational ones. The operational ones are your chief steward. And he goes by a lot of titles in SCCA club racing. He’s a chief steward, or he may be the series chief steward in IndyCar.

He’s known as the race director. I believe [00:08:00] in FIA now has a race director. It used to be that he was called the clerk of the course. In any case, those names mean he’s the boss once the racetrack and the organization of pre race from the race chairman or the sanctioning body or somebody tells him, okay, here’s who’s running.

Here’s what’s on the schedule. You do it. And so the chief steward’s job is to. Do it. He controls everybody that’s at the racetrack that weekend. He has some limited control. It depends on which organization. In IndyCar, he has a back of him, the judges. And I’ll talk about that in a moment. In NASCAR and in AAA racing before 1955 and in SCCA racing until sometime after 1955.

The chief steward has control period. If there’s any recourse that a contestant, and that means an entrant or a driver, has with what went on, he [00:09:00] has to go to a higher authority, which in NASCAR they appoint an appeals court. In AAA before 55 was the contest board, as it was in SCCA. In SCCA racing, we have the stewards of the meeting.

In FIA racing, we have the stewards of the meeting. And their job is only to To take on protests by somebody, some entrant as to what happened. They can accept the protest or they can reject it. And if they accept it, then they have a hearing and they adjudicate as to what happened. And if the people feel unhappy about that result, in the case of, I don’t know what it is today, but when I was with court, they can tell the chief judge, well, I, we don’t agree with your finding.

And he says, well, you got 48 hours. To cough up 25, 000 in a written reason why it should be appealed. And so it goes to appeal, if they accept it. That’s the general idea of how the organization works from the top down. When the race is over and the checkered flag falls, the chief steward [00:10:00] is out of a job.

Then the stewards take over again because, at least in SCCA and in ChampCar, which is the last pro racing I worked, contestants had a half hour from the time the checker fell to get a piece of paper, and in the case of ChampCar, 5, 000. protest fee and to protest something that they felt was incorrect that affected them.

That’s a key word in there, affected them. In the past years, we had protests in SCCA from amongst the officials. That’s no longer allowed in any organizations that I know. Written out of it by the rulebook, because the rulebook will spell out what exactly can be done. So there you have the overall organization of how a race is run.

Okay, you got stewards, and you got a chief steward, and you got a chairman of stewards, and you told me how they’re going to be appointed, and you kind of told me what they do. Tell me some other things about them. How do they get to be there? Stewards organizations have a decision to make. On [00:11:00] the makeup of the kind of people that they want to make stewards.

There was at one time, a very strong push that a steward had to be a driver. I was not, not long enough to qualify anyway. And several others were not, I believe Charlie Whiting, who’s race director for FIA for the last umpty ump years. I don’t believe Charlie was a racer. He might’ve been, but I don’t believe so.

So that criteria has been changed. However, it’s very, very important for the stewards, all of them, to have the driver’s viewpoint because that’s what you’re dealing with. You’re dealing with issues that happened on the racetrack. So, how do you get that? Well, in my case, I got it because I did a lot of flagging, I worked on a crew, and I was around the racing a lot, and I understood what was going on.

I learned a hell of a lot more about stewarding after I was one than before I was one, I can tell you that. Mainly what you can and can’t do and should and should not do. We’ll talk a little bit about that too. Now you’ve got some background on what do we expect from these guys? [00:12:00] Your judicial stewards are that they deal after the fact.

They don’t do anything until they get a protest. It used to be in the FIA, GCR, General Competition Regulations, that the stewards could replace the chief steward. I don’t believe that’s in there anymore. That’s certainly not in the FIA code. The code is the name for the regulations that the FIA uses to run their races.

Which brings up an interesting subject is how the code comes about. It’s written by people in the sanctioning body, almost always reviewed by the senior stewards in the organization, because they’re the ones that are going to have to work with it. And sometimes, it has input from the competitors themselves.

Right now, I know that the FIA has gone round and round and round and round on what they’re going to do about engines in, uh, I think it’s 2020. Involving the manufacturers in their decision making, which is the proper way to do it, I think. Now you’ve got The stewards there, you’ve got the chief steward, you’ve got a rule book sitting on the table.

[00:13:00] Issues come up. Now how do the stewards handle that? Well, the stewards have a hearing on a protest that’s been entered, and that has been handled properly, etc. And they call in the protestor, and they call in the protestee, and they have, or should have, already notified both parties when and where they’re going to meet, etc.

We do not allow, and when I say we do not for FIA, I’m talking about 1991 and previously because I’ve not been on a committee since, but I don’t think it’s changed. We do not allow what’s allowed in courts, in our court system, and that is cross examination. We call a person in, we ask him his questions, why he’s brought the matter up, why he thinks we ought to hear it, pertinent issues there are, we let him talk, and then we send him out of the room.

Thank you. We hear the protested party. We may call both back, we may not. Depends on what we’ve heard and what evidence has been presented. And then we make a decision. And we announce that decision. Sometimes it’s announced on the spot. [00:14:00] Sometimes we say, don’t come back but in 72 hours we’ll give you a letter that tells you what our results will.

And your appeal period starts at the time that you receive the letter. The protest hearing is an interesting, a really interesting experience. If you’re at all into how people interact and how people act, that’s a great place to learn. You get all kinds of people come in with all kinds of problems based on a rule book.

The whole world in racing revolves around that rule book, which then tells you what the philosophy should be. We follow the rule book. If it ain’t in a rule book, it doesn’t exist. I used to start driver’s meetings in Atlantic series at the first race, when we get a bunch of new guys come in, much of them usually young coming up the ladder.

And I’d say there’s three simple rules. Regarding the rulebook you follow it. You don’t like what’s in the rulebook go and get the rulebook changed But while you’re doing that the rulebook [00:15:00] exists as is written and follow it And if you can’t do one and you can’t do two get out of here. It’s that simple.

And why is it that simple? Well, if we didn’t have a rulebook I can tell you we’d have chaos. It’s difficult enough with a rulebook There are so many circumstances that can come up that affect the outcome of a competition. You can’t have it that I’ll judge it on the spot. Because then, at the next event, and the same thing happens, how does the contestant know that stewards or the judges are going to come up with the same findings on the same, exactly same circumstances?

The only way you can know is to have continuity. Two kinds of continuity. Continuity in officialdom, and if not in the person, at least in their training. And continuity and having a rule book that’s clear and says, you can do this and you can’t do that. One of the problems we have, I have it with a very, very good friend of mine.

And I won’t tell you who it is, who is excellent at writing rules, but damn poor at [00:16:00] enforcing them. In my book, you should not do that. Rule books should never have the word should, may, can. Rule books in my book should say must, shall, then you’ve got no question about whether or not. You’re asking people to sit down and make a decision.

A decision is based on the facts as they can find them. And if you make it equivocal, then you’re going to get different answers every time you have a meeting. Write the rule book and you won’t have that problem. You may have other ones, but you ain’t going to have that one. Let’s go back to the conquer.

I plan to do this talk. At first, to tell you about the overall organization of things and that kind of stuff, and then get into some specifics, and also tell a couple, I think, humorous situations at tracks that I was at, none of which has ever been published to my knowledge. But I think maybe this is a good time to get, because of this particular question, and because it deals with what we’re talking about, about rules, rules interpretation, rules preparation, [00:17:00] and that sort of thing.

We had a race on the west coast in Long Beach in Formula one, Colin Chapman, who in my humble opinion was probably one of the most brilliant automotive engineers that I was ever born. He was also your classic entrepreneur, which means that rule books don’t really exist. They’re sort of guidelines. He came out with his team, cars, and he also brought two new cars, the Lotus 88.

Now at that time, sliding skirts were legal, and they rested on the ground. Now why did they have live sliding skirts? Because they found out if they used sliding skirts made out of Lexan, which raised hell with the racetrack, but kept the air out from underneath the car, that the air pressure underneath the car was less than it was outside.

What’s that mean? That means whatever that pressure differential was, Existed for every square inch on the top of that car, including the tires and everything you could see looking down. And if that was four or five pounds across that number of square inches, you got a hell of a force when you were putting the brakes on or you were going through a [00:18:00] corner.

That means that the tires, which are the only four points that car touches the road, and their friction is going to go up by the amount of that force. But it’s not car weight. So the car is still the same light car that it was when it was sitting still, but now effectively it weighs 6, 000 pounds more.

And that means it gets huge traction. That means you get four or five Gs at very high speeds in some corners in Formula One, which means the car is essentially making right angle turns, which means you get through the corner faster. What’s that mean? Lap speed faster. Oh, I win. Now, the problem with that was.

The poor devil behind the steering wheel, because they had to put springs in there to allow the wheels to move up and down because the racetracks are not perfectly smooth, God knows. Every time the wheel hit one of those, it had to bump up and down. Well, it had to bump up and down at low speeds. Which, when the car was only getting a few pounds of pressure on, from aerodynamic effect, and at high speeds, when it might, as I [00:19:00] said, may have three tons pushing on it.

And so the springs were like virtually solid bars sitting there. Which meant that when the car hit a bump, bang, into the driver. So bad that they would come into the pits after qualifying complaining of vertigo. That’s a problem. And the FIA had the problem that they were in their own rules and in their organization, they can’t change the rule race to race.

So, what did Colin do? Brilliant, brilliant move. He said, we’ll design a car just like we’ve always designed a car. The springs are the same 8, 000 pounds springs they’ve always been. But, we’ll put the driver in a separate capsule. And we’ll put a set of springs between him and the car. And he won’t feel those shocks anymore, but the car will sit on the ground like it’s supposed to.

And he brought the car to Long Beach built that way. And Ferrari took one look at it and said, No, no, no, no, no, no, no. And I believe they were the ones that instigated, I don’t remember exactly, but I think they were the ones that instigated the protest that came to the Stewart. The chairman was John, rest his soul, John Korsman from Holland.

And we looked at the car, and we looked at the [00:20:00] rule book, and we looked at everything else, and we finally decided, No. Why did we say no? The rule book was quite clear to us, It said that the springing system, so and so and so and so. The book did not say the springing systems. And so we ruled no. Well, Cullen didn’t sit square with that one.

He immediately filed an appeal on the spot. And it went to the FIA appeals court and they upheld us. And they ruled that one letter made a difference in racing. The letter S. That’s an example of how some of those things get handled. Let me give another example of Colin Chapman. Bertie Martin was the clerk of the course.

Bertie was my mentor. He was the first president of SCCA Professional Racing. I’m sorry, he was the second one. Jim Kayser was the first. Bertie was the clerk of the course. Wally Reese from Ohio was assistant clerk of the course. In those days, the standing start allowed the teams to send their cars out of [00:21:00] the pits and go around the racetrack for a 15 minute period.

At the end of that 15 minute period, the pit gate was closed. The out gate was closed and cars in the pits at that time had to stay in the pits until they were rolled out to the grid, Reggazoni racing for Lotus at that time. Went out on his 15 minute tour, and either the pits didn’t notify him, I never know, I never found out why, he didn’t come in, but he didn’t come in, he stayed out, the pit gate wasn’t closed, he comes into the pits, nowhere near starting time yet, as I remember, it used to be about a half an hour window in between, he decides to go out of the pits again, Wally Reese is the assistant clerk, the court says, no, no, no, you don’t, puts his hand out, puts his foot out, Regazzoni runs over his foot, Calls up and tells Bertie what happened.

Bertie comes to us and said, what do you want to do about it? I looked over at John. I said, simple. I think, what do you think? He said, yeah, we find them 10, 000. That kind of a penalty action by the stewards did not require a hearing. It’s [00:22:00] the kind of thing that we could decide by their rule book. In Formula One, everything is done in writing.

If you have a new notice to the teams about something, it gets in writing. When it goes to each team, it’s carried around by hand, and the master copy, the goddard carries it around, gets a team manager to sign it, and that goes in the race record. So there’s no question after the race about, Oh no, I wasn’t told.

Kind of thing. We sent one down to Colan. A written record said you’ve been fined 10, 000 for Clay Rega’s only car number so and so. For going out of the pit gate after the pit gate was closed. Period. So Colan comes charging into the meeting. Raving and all that. Fine, 10, 000. Now this is back in the early 80s.

So 10, 000 was what? Three times what it is now? Whoa, whoa, how did you ever come up with 10, 000? And I looked at him and I said, he ran over Wally Reese’s foot. Wally Reese’s foot’s got five toes on it, it’s 2, 000 a toe. He looked at me, he burst out laughing and he walked out. [00:23:00] True story. Uh, let’s see, let’s get back on the track.

We were talking about stewards, we were talking about stewards training. I can talk about two organizations because I work for them. I work for CART and CHAMPCAR. I worked for them first as a chief steward when the Atlantic Series, which was owned by the greatest ra If you, if you, anybody in this audience gets a crazy idea you want to run a race series, you want to hire Vicki O’Connor.

She knows how to run a race series from start to finish, anything to do with it. The press, the publicity, the guarantee, the support, anything, she’s the lady. So I worked for CART. CART bought the promotion agency, which is Vicki O’Connor, and in doing so, they wanted to be also to be the sanctioning body, obviously, and so they made a deal with SCCA, who were the sanctioning body before, and so I became an employee, or a non paid employee of CART.

And then CART went bankrupt, [00:24:00] and the assets were bought by a group, called themselves ChampCAR. Atlantic ran underneath that until the last ChampCAR race, I believe, at Long Beach. I was with SCCA, obviously, I’m still a member, so I know how that’s done. SCCA runs a training program for stewards. I can remember when somebody like me, when I was an exec steward, would look around in the paddock and say, you know, that guy not only has a decent driver, but he’s got the right kind of mind to be a steward.

I think we ought to have him in a program. Walk up to him and take his arm and bend it up close to his collarbone and say, we need you. One of those guys sitting here, Ray Stone, that’s how it started. I don’t know how it works today because I haven’t been in that position. And then you went into the program as a steward in training.

You are allowed to sit in on stewards meetings, you are allowed to ask questions, but you weren’t allowed to vote. That may still be in place. And then it grew from there. They started to think, well, you know, we really ought to have a set of guidelines for the stewards, aside from the rule [00:25:00] book. The rule book tells you what and when and how to run competitions, but doesn’t tell you how to be a steward.

I can remember my predecessor as executive steward for all of SCCA. He was asked by the board of directors to prepare. a manual for the stewards, and he said, I can’t write a book about common sense. And that’s really the truth, because that’s what you’re supposed to be doing, using common sense. But common sense, it turns out, ain’t so common.

And so today we have a manual, we have training courses and that kind of thing. Has it made the stewarding any better? I couldn’t answer that question. You’d have to ask the competitors that have been around long enough whether it’s better today than it was before. In kart, the judges were picked by the management of kart.

When I was chief steward for the Atlantic said I was getting a little tired of sitting in the hot seat. I’d made enough mistakes that nobody had caught me yet. I didn’t want to make one and get caught, but I don’t want to walk away from the scene. I really love racing and I still do. Deeply. I don’t wanna be outta the race control and I don’t, I was in one last [00:26:00] week, but I wanna be involved.

And so they said, well, we’ll make you one of the judges. And their judges and our stewards in the meeting are very similar and their responsibilities in the way they act and that, except they have one thing that I think was brilliant. They have one judge at the racetrack, but they have two judges that are, he is in touch with by telephone.

So they don’t have to pay for two guys sitting at the racetrack doing nothing except ogling girls and watching cars go by. Which is what the judge does nine times out of ten, maybe more than nine times out of ten. Very rare in professional racing at that level do you get protests. But when you get a race protest at that level, it’s not kidding around.

It’s something serious. Something that’s going to have an impact beyond that day. I remember Trans Am, I was a chairman of the stewards at a Trans Am, I believe at Lime Rock. Jim Hall came to me with a protest, and the protest had to do with the Ford team that was run by Bud Moore. I said to Jim, who by the way is another brilliant racing engineer, [00:27:00] besides being a pretty fast driver, I said, Jim, the FIA, in those days, Trans Am’s where FIA won full international races, and so they are required.

That each car that was entered by a manufacturer or a private entry affiliated with a factory have a book about that car with pictures of all the engine parts and pictures of the suspension systems and specification numbers and measurements and weights and God knows all what. And I said, Jim, you know that we’ve got a book on that Ford and you know that John Tomatis John, another God rest his soul, probably the best Czech guy I ever worked with, went over these cars and made sure that they were to that book.

And he said, yeah, I know that too, he said, but Chevy wants me to give a Ford a hard time. That happens occasionally, very occasionally. That reminds me of something though. Let me tell you about two things having to do with the rules. The first one is a Concord Agreement was mentioned earlier. I got a call from Paris, the headquarters of [00:28:00] FIA, in my office one day, not too long before a Long Beach Formula One race, and I was asked to share a meeting of all the entrants at Long Beach to straighten out something in the rules.

And at that time anyway, the Concord Agreement required that every team agree to a change before it could be made. 100%. I don’t know whether that’s true. When I worked at RCA, I used to, towards my end, I would sit in on the negotiations with the government, our government or foreign government, when we sold them a radar system.

And I’d sit in there and when the contract was signed, I didn’t sign it. The contracting officer signed it for the government and our contracts guy would sign it for a company. But I’d be right there at his elbow because it was either me or one of my people that was going to have to live with it, sign the last page and date it and all that kind of stuff.

Not the Concord agreement. The Concord agreement is signed and dated on every page. Okay. I’d never seen that done before. Anyway, they asked me to do it. And so I said, okay. And I call up Christopher Robin Pook, who was at that time, the major domo for [00:29:00] Long Beach now it’s Jim McAleon. Really neat guy. Chris is an interesting one to work with.

He’s a brilliant guy. He said, I’ll set you up in a meeting in the mayor’s office. There’s a nice, big, long table. So I went back to Paris and I told them what arrangements had been made and they let the teams know. I go up to about, oh, 10, 15 minutes early to the meeting and I walk in the room and there’s two guys sitting on the opposite side.

I can see them like they’re sitting there in front of me. They’re sitting there towards the back of it from me, and I’m up at the head of it. And they’re yelling at one another, and one of them is standing over there with his finger pointing at the other one. And I had a copy of the rule book, which at that time is yellow.

Picked it up and slammed it down on the top of the table. Got their attention, they both turned around and I said, From this moment on, no team talks to no team without they come to me. You talk to me, I’ll talk to the other team. Understand? And they understood. And this is before the meeting even started.

So, the meeting starts, and we went on for hours. I don’t [00:30:00] remember what paragraph of the rule book we were dealing with. I have no idea as I sit up here. But I sure remember how it ended. At the end of the meeting, I said, okay, I think I hear an a total agreement. Am I correct? We have 100 percent unanimous Agreement on what we’ve talked about here.

If we need to, I’ll reread it because I had just read what I thought was, was, and it was silence. And then this curly blonde haired guy sits up one of the other sides of the table and it was Marco Piccinini. And he was the manager at that time for Scuderia Ferrari. And he said, and I think I can quote from memory.

And by the way, he was a trained lawyer. I believe he’s a JD from Columbia university, impeccable English. He said, well. If the others all agree, Ferrari disagrees. And I looked at that, and I thought, I had a hell with it. I said, meeting’s just over, and I called Paris and [00:31:00] said, you gotta get yourself another boy.

I couldn’t do it. That’s a true story. There had been a race at Monza, Italian Grand Prix, we’re going to bring me your daughter Italia. At that time, the drivers on their warm up lap was a different requirement than it is today. And, Ricardo Patrici was a first time driver in Formula One. I believe he was with Alfa Romeo, if I’m not mistaken.

He came up to the grid at speed, before the green flag had fell, which was legal. And the green flag fell and he moved up several rows. Well, Things happened at the back of the grid and a couple cars collided on a start and one of them was hit hard and that was Ronnie Peterson. Ronnie died in that accident.

The driver’s next race was Watkins Glen. The drivers unanimously wrote a letter to the FIA and to Mal Currie, I believe. The drivers unanimously stated that if Ricardo Patrici was in that race, they were out of it. Now, if you were the promoter, and you had a [00:32:00] rookie, on one hand, and you had 20 some in those days, 26, 28, other cars on the other hand, that ain’t a hell of a lot of a decision to make, and he made that, and so, they notified Patrese he couldn’t run.

Patrese ran into New York and he hired three lawyers from New York. I can still see them, young guys, and they were top talent from one of the big law firms in New York. You know, multi hundreds of dollars per hour, including travel time. Only one thing wrong, they didn’t know a damn thing about motor racing.

And they showed up, court hearing was held here. And the courthouse called the judge in off the golf course, I believe, which didn’t make him very happy because they had entered an injunction against the promoter for disallowing the entry of Ricardo Patrici. Judge notified Malcolm that we’re going to have a hearing at some time in the afternoon.

I believe it was on Friday, but I’m not sure of that. Maybe it might have been on the Thursday before, but in any event, he notified us and we went into the courthouse. I can still remember, I walked out, I got in the car coming in with Mal and the tractor. [00:33:00] Ownership at that time was the Franzisi family, and one of their members was there, and I’m sitting in the car, and I go, Oh, shoot, I didn’t bring a rule book.

And I said, Mal, do you have a rule book? And he said, yeah. I said, let me have it, because I knew as soon as I got in there, the judge was going to ask me, What’s your role? And then he’s going to ask me about the rule book, and then he’s going to ask me for it. So sure enough, I get in there, and he asked me, and I said, please, your honor, I have essentially the same role at the racetrack.

that you do here in court. I’m the chairman of the stewards for this event, the chief judge, if you will. And he looked at me and he said, I see you have a rule book. May I have it? And I, I bit my tongue because I was going to say, no, I can’t give it to you. It’s my, it’s not mine. And then I thought, don’t play judicial with the judge.

And I said, yes, sir. And I gave him, he gave it back. He made a very, very important ruling. That’s held up in racing a lot of times since. And another case that I was involved in, I won’t go into because it’s germane. He said, in effect, to the appellant in this case [00:34:00] for betraysing, that they had not applied themselves to the remedies within the sport.

And therefore, the court Would not have jurisdiction, which meant that anything that happens at the racetrack gets settled at the racetrack. And that’s held up in other courts in other places. Well, it was legal precedent. That happened at Watkins Glen. When I was out of that courtroom, I was done as far as that issue was concerned.

Who’s in race control? That’s an interesting question. Depends on the racetrack. Depends on the race. Professional racing, pretty much the same. I’ve been in 24s at Daytona, which I don’t really know who sanctions that. I would guess it’s probably IMSA. Does anybody know how IMSA was formed? This is complete aside from this, but it might be interesting because we’re all racing fans.

IMSA, way back when, there was a tremendous fight within SCCA over whether they would allow professional drivers. In SCCA, in the early days when I first joined, you had to be an amateur. If you were a professional racing driver, in [00:35:00] any event, any kind, from dirt track in Podunk, Kansas to anything, you were not allowed to be an amateur.

to be an SCCA driver. They didn’t want to race against pros. Jim Kazer came along and saw that the future of racing was on road racing, in his opinion. He said, we need to change the club’s bylaws and rules and that, and he did allow for that. There was a tremendous fight over that. And John Bishop was on the amateur only, club only.

And the fight went on, and John went to the Board of Directors, and I have this from Bertie Morton, went to the Board of Directors, at those times, they were Board of Governors, and said, either he goes, or I go. Because, at that time, Kaiser reported to him. The Board of Governors said to him, come back in the morning.

And Bertie told me, whenever they said that, that meant goodbye. And he did come back in the morning, and yes it did. And so John got fired. You read your magazine’s sports cards from that day, it’ll talk about how he left the organization. Well, that’s the truth of it. And so, at that [00:36:00] time, SCCA was a powerhouse.

A K& M. was rivaling Formula One when I was associated with it. And this is in the time of the K& M Unlimiteds. We had a 100, 000 purse, and it was more than some Formula One races at the time. We had all the names in the world in the K& M. And there was a fledgling outfit that ran pseudo stock cars down South called NASCAR.

And it was USAC that ran all the Ovals, including 500. USAC and SEC had their battles, and we did, over who’s going to run road racing, but that battle had been ended. We kind of saw eye to eye about things, and NASCAR said, whoops, them is one, and them is two, and me is one. And I’m going to go into ACUS meetings with a lost position before I start.

And lo and behold, John Bishop gets fired. Aha! What I ought to do. This is Bill France Sr., his former racing organization, for road racing, because NASCAR didn’t have anything approaching that. I’ll fund it, I’ll keep it going, and [00:37:00] what I really want it for is I’ll make it an independent organization, apply to a sanctioning agreement from ACUS, and now I got two votes.

And that’s how that happened. And John Bishop was the director for many years. I was the guy that wrote the paperwork that nominated Jim Kaser for the SCCA Hall of Fame. And that’s how I found some of this stuff out. I didn’t know it. This was going on way above my pay grade. Final Selection Committee in the Hall of Fame approved Kaser to be one of the people selected for the Hall of Fame.

Also being nominated from another group was the only guy that I know of that was ever formally tossed out of SCCA from the Midwest. And why was he tossed out? Because Larry Dent got word. that SCCA behind the scenes was negotiating with USAC for a joint operation of all professional road racing in North America.

I’m sorry, in the United States. And that negotiation was held by two people from SCCA and two people from USAC. And the [00:38:00] two people from SCCA did not include the Chairman of the Board of Governors. One was Jim Kaser, and I’ve forgotten who the other one was. The Board of Governors knew nothing about this.

Larry Dent somehow got word of what was going on and he blew the whistle on him. He blew it in a way such that he wasn’t involved and he didn’t, certainly blew it in a way that whoever was leaking it to him was not involved. And it was a tremendous sure invite. And, and he had said some, he said some things and written some things that he shouldn’t have, and so the Board of Governors voted him out of the club.

To this day, you can look in the records and he wasn’t voted outta the club, but at the time he was. He was later allowed back in after making suitable apologies to certain people. And he and Jim Kayser now, 50 years later, are going to be sitting on the same panel of selectees to the Hall of Fame. And I wanted to be in Las Vegas to see those two meet for the first time in 50 years.

Because he blew Kayser’s job. Kayser was done after that. [00:39:00] Unfortunately, Jim died before he got to sit on the stage at Las Vegas. That has nothing to do with stewards, but I thought it’s interesting. Let me give you some racing situations. I asked Bill Green when he asked me if I do this, how long, who’s the audience?

He said, well, a racing enthusiast. And I go, okay, that takes care of that. How long? He said, well, Bill Davidson talked about two hours. I said, well, yeah, but he’s a pro. And so I wrote these notes hoping that I could go through them. I can’t read them, but I hope that I could get through them in a reasonably short time.

So, I’ll tell you about some of the things that happened along the way that I think you might find interesting. None of them, to my knowledge, were ever published. A couple of them are humorous. John Korismit, God rest his soul, from Holland. was for several years the chairman of the stewards at Formula One races throughout the world.

Which I thought was an excellent idea. He was a great guy, understood racing, he was a lot older than I am. He had a fundamental feeling for what’s right in racing. [00:40:00] And he was a stickler, a stickler to do by the rules. One of the rules is, for the stewards, is that the stewards shall, but not the clerk of the course, come to think of it.

I never thought of that. The stewards shall do a tour of the course before the green flag is shown at any session at a Formula One race. That’s practice, qualifying, if there’s a warm up, and a race. So here we are, and I don’t remember, but I kinda think it was Phoenix, one of the two years at Phoenix we were in a race, and we’re going around and waving to the flag stations we go by, and I look up ahead, and here the flag station people are lined up at the edge of the track, except the first one is mooning us.

And the next one is a woman, and she’s got her braless shirt up. And the next one, I don’t know whether it’s male or female, you can’t tell from the back, is, is mooning us, and so on. Well John sees it in about a millisecond after I see it, and he [00:41:00] erupts. BORTLED! What in the world is going on here? What are you doing?

What are you doing? I’m the American steward, so who else is he going to yell to? And I’m sitting right next to him, and in the back seat of the pace car, and uh, his big smile. And I said, John, they’re singing a song to us. And he said, I said, look at it! Rump titty, rump titty, rump, rump, rump. True.

I’ll tell a story I wasn’t planning on telling. I was executive steward, I think, three times up here. Ray Stone is here, Ray and I go back years and years and years. He was executive steward after me, I think, for the New England division. And Floyd Stone, his father, was my predecessor. And Floyd did something that bothered the Board of Governors.

And so they decided that he’s not going to get the job again. Maybe Ray knows why. So they came to me, and I was his deputy for Area 2, which is south of here. [00:42:00] They asked me if I would take it over. If I’d be exec for the following year. I said under one condition that Floyd is my deputy for area one, which is up here.

And they hemmed and hawed and said, well, okay, so I was. Well, the PS to that was I did something they didn’t like and they fired me and he went back in. I don’t know if you know that story. Anyway, and then I got out again a third time, sometime later, I don’t remember. Normal circumstances. I was exec steward up here.

I didn’t mention this. You know, you have a pace car. Well, who drives a pace car nowadays? It’s required that he’d be a driver. And that’s a real good requirement because. You drive the track, you ought to drive it the way the guys are going to drive it. People are going to be following you, uh, even though they’ve been out in practice and qualifying.

It doesn’t matter. You don’t want to look sloppy out there. Secondly, he has a feel for the track, and it’s just a damn good idea. Almost always, he has his shotgun, and the shotgun’s got a radio, and the radio is in contact with the chief steward. So that’s a normal situation. Well, a nice [00:43:00] perk is to allow people to ride in the pace car on the pace laps.

So, we’re at Watkins Glen and it’s a six hour race, and I’m, I think I was chairman that year too. And, I’m walking by Pace Cars in Pitland, I’m walking on, used to be called a paddock club, overlooked the lead in to the uphill right hander. And in those days, the lead in to it, Had been chicaned. Francois was killed on that turn, hitting the guardrail and let drivers left.

And so they paved super bump strips in the racetrack to make a chicane going up there. That’s part of the story. So here I am, I’m walking over to paddock club to get lunch, fat, dumb, and happy cause in a six hour race, nothing ever happens. So they’re not going to need me. I left word with the tower where I was going to be in case something did happen, but nothing’s going to happen.

And I go buy the pace car. Yeah. And Morrow Decker was sitting in shotgun. That’s important. I forgot who the driver was, but the driver said to me, I’m stuck here for six hours and I’m hungry and you ain’t doing [00:44:00] anything. I know you stewards. Cause he’s another one at that time. And he said, I got to get some lunch.

Would you drive the pace car? You know, nothing’s going to happen in the six hours. So I said, stupidly, yeah, yeah, I’ll take it. So I got by it, never driven the car before. It was a Datsun five speed manual should never do in a pace car. Cause you got other things to be doing other than doing this. So I’m sitting there, I didn’t get through lunch period.

Pace car roll! Pace car roll! So, okay, well, we go. Well, I go out of the pits. And I can remember, there were nine 35s that were in the front at the race at that time. Turbo Porsche. What, 600, 700 horsepower, I guess they had. They didn’t like going slow. Well, neither did I, but I found out that in 4th and 5th gears, this car wouldn’t do more than 65 miles an hour if you whistled Dixie.

And I’m sitting in there now, starting to row, row, row, row, and I go up, turn around a 90, and I’m still feeling around it, and I suddenly realize, we’re in a chicane, boom, boom, boom, boom, [00:45:00] boom. Okay. And go around. And go up the street and I can’t get this thing going uphill to go over 65. The nine 30 fives are going, yeah, I past the window and back and they’re giving me the message.

I’ve received it, but I ain’t doing anything about it. We were running a long course. We come around, go down and down around, and I’m fiddling with this thing and I damn near. Hit the BMW that it was the course of the all course which is sitting square in the middle of the racetrack About that time. I look over in my shotgun Morrow and he’s white with what’s been going on I screamed at him.

I said you tell control to fix whatever they gotta fix, but get me out of here We made one more lap and we came in I swore never Never drive a pace car, especially when you haven’t driven one before. Found out later on the car had been borrowed from Bridgehampton. Hadn’t been run for two years. It hadn’t been serviced.

It hadn’t been anything. It was lucky it ran. [00:46:00] So, sometime later, I’m down at Nazareth. Well, you know it’s a road course that runs only to the left. Cause it runs uphill and downhill, and it’s got more than four turns to it. So, they were running a Super V race. Roger E. Andy was the series chief for it, and he had a Scirocco that VW supplied.

As the pace car, and I don’t know what happened, but he asked me to drive the pace car, and I don’t remember the circumstances of it, but I got in this stupid thing. I have to remember what happened up here. I hadn’t driven it again, and I’ve come to find out it’s a turbo ed Scirocco, which I didn’t, which was not a car that they built.

And the throttle on this thing had two positions, full on and nothing. And on that oval, that’s not the kind of thing you want to be fooling around with. That was the last pace car I ever drove. Little Al answer. Little Al come up out of midgets and sprint cars. When he came into, must have been Super V at that time, he had the reputation of [00:47:00] passing yellows and reds in his pro racing.

And he was just a kid at the time. And then George Cousins was the president of SCCA Pro Racing. He called me up and asked me to go to Riverside. And be the chairman of the stewards, and in particular, keep an eye on Little Al in the Superview race. Sure enough, he passed out of yellow. I didn’t black flag him or do anything, but I announced that there was a 500 fine.

I don’t know if anybody here was ever at Riverside, but the control was at the outside of the track, at the top of the stands, and the concession stands were on the inside in the paddock. So at lunchtime, I Went on downstairs, and I’m walking down, and there’s this chunky, blonde haired guy walking towards me from the other side.

I didn’t pay any attention to it. It was quite a walk. But as the longer I walked, the longer I realized, this guy is not looking at the stands, he’s not looking at anything, he’s looking at me. Finally, we get within yelling distance to one another, and he said, Are you the Chief Steward? And I said, Yes. And he starts in about the 500 fine.

And he goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on [00:48:00] and on and on. And finally he runs out of breath and he says to me, you didn’t say anything. And I said to him, The next thing I say is, this is a thousand, and he did the same thing. He burst out laughing. That was Rick Gallus. I’d never met him before.

Rick was Little Al’s sponsor for a number of years. We got to be good friends. Great guy to work with. Before we came up here, We looked at a video called Circuit. I’m in it, okay? It was a movie made about one year in K& M 2, the 5 liter single seater K& M, about Danny Sullivan, primarily. It was about following the exploits of Danny Sullivan.

And I’m in it in the beginning, when the credits are rolling. I’m holding a driver’s meeting at Mosport. When the movie came out, they sent me a complimentary copy. And I watched it. And I learned more about what happened in the Can Am that I never knew. And I was the series chief steward. Things were happening on the track and in the paddock I never heard about.

We had a race, an Atlantic race [00:49:00] at Mosport. We always did standing starts, which I love, by the way, for a lot of reasons. People think, oh, aren’t they dangerous? No, I think they’re safer than rolling starts. We had a start, and not too long, like maybe lap two or so, I got a call from the pits that number so and so jumped the start.

I black flagged him, made him do a pit through. When all was said and done, it turned out that it was not car numbers so and so, it was pit start position numbers so and so. But it hadn’t been announced to me that way. I had presumed that it was car numbers so and so. We made two rule changes after that.

One very significant and one operational. The operational one was the judges at the start, which you have for standing starts, they are to always say car number or always say one or the other. For me, it was car number because that’s what I deal with is car numbers. The other rule was much more significant.

We made a rule change. If anything had happened on a racetrack like that, where you were going to affect the [00:50:00] competition, you let the team know that at that point, that there’d been an infraction and that you were going to inflict a penalty. And they had an option of taking that penalty now or a 30 second penalty after the race was over.

And we had opportunity to talk about it and look into it. And that was, I think, a very significant change in favor of the competitor. Because there’s a lot of times. The chief steward makes decisions based on what other people are telling him, and he comes to find out that that ain’t the way it was sold, especially passing under the yellow flag.

That’s a very contentious issue. Where does this zone start? I know what the rule book says. I’ve also been a flagger and ain’t easy to judge and you may misjudge it. There’s a big thing going on in SCCA right now about in the rule book getting changed on pass under the yellow. And where does it start and where does it stop?

FIA has a very simple rule. It starts at the first station before the incident, and ends at the first station after the incident. That’s a flag station. You look across the track, is he in front of him or isn’t he? Simple, black or [00:51:00] white. SCCA can’t do that, and they were honest enough to admit why. Cause they don’t man all the stations all the times.

And some of the stations that are the first station after the incident are pretty damn far away and you don’t want to map the situation of trying to maintain it all the way through. People ask me, what’s the difference between pro racing and club racing? Obviously they’re similar, but there’s some fundamental differences, very fundamental that affect the way in which you look at things in club racing.

Everything has to do with the participants, the drivers. The entrance, mechanics, the flag workers, everybody who’s doing something that weekend, that’s a club member. They’re all involved. That’s not the case in pro racing. In pro racing, everything has to do with the drivers, and the entrance, and the spectators.

And the TV and the press and the promoter. Don’t forget the sponsors. Good Lord. Don’t forget the sponsors. You wouldn’t be there if they weren’t there. And [00:52:00] so that’s a philosophical difference that you’d sometimes have to break. FIA has a very, at least when I was in it, had a very interesting attitude towards those things.

They recognized that there’s going to be conflicts between those two kinds of approaches to things. And what they said was there’s the sporting side of the issues and there’s the commercial side of the issues and they have to be balanced, one can’t. Totally overruled the other one. I like that. Now you look at racing today, I think NASCAR is all hardest over on the commercial side, club racing is the opposite.

It’s all the way over on the sporting side. And I think that’s properly so because that’s what it’s for. It’s for the people that are there to have fun at the races. There are some other differences in that you didn’t get as many driver to driver protests, another major differences in pro racing, you got the same officials at every race.

This year, maybe every race for the next egg and n number of years contestants. know [00:53:00] the officials, mostly by first name, and know how they operate, and know what to expect from them. In club racing, they’re almost always different, a very little overlap. Club racing attempts to solve part of that problem with a red book, which is, I think, unique to Northeast Division, which is, there’s a book that goes to every race and goes to the chief steward, and it has, uh, There’s notes in it from the previous race, Chief Steward, and the previous and the previous and the previous.

So that he can get some idea of what went on from the Chief Steward’s viewpoint at previous events. I don’t know if they still do that or not. I have not and will not sit in a chair. I was invited to sit in a chair last weekend and I said three things. I said, been there, done that, no. I think that was pretty emphatic.

Funny situation. George Falmer, Dirty George, to those of us know, familiar, neat guy, great race driver, had a very bad accident. Totally out of his control. I never talked to George about it. [00:54:00] At Laguna and the backstretch is a famous. Corkscrew turn, which is sharply downhill with a pair of turns at the same time.

Following the corkscrew is a short straight, sort of like the 90 to the uphill here. About the same, but downhill, so you can accelerate pretty quick. And then a left hand turn, and another straight, and then a right, and then a left in front of the pits. George came out of the corkscrew, and accelerated, and accelerated, and accelerated!

And accelerated. He never backed off. He hit the bank. He went over the heads of the crowd. Went over the tops of the safety vehicles, bang, he ended up side because that was a hill like that. He was in the hospital for quite a while. He came back to see us, but not race the following year at Charlotte. We ran the Can Am single seater, five liters at Charlotte motor speedway using the infield track and most of the oval two years in a row.

Okay. With the NASCAR 600. I can tell you the last thing in the world you want to [00:55:00] be is a chief steward of a support race for the 600 cause there ain’t no time on anything on anybody’s part for you get lost. We really wish you weren’t here. Now that I got that off my chest, George is there. Visiting, in the infield, in the paddock area.

Somehow, WBT TV, which is the big station in Charlotte, got word that he’d come back. And so they sent a cameraman out to interview him. So here’s George, and here’s the cameraman, and the announcer, and the cameraman’s assistant. In those days, they had a battery pack with the cameraman. Unbeknownst to the announcer and the camera man and the camera man’s battery man, standing in back of them, but facing George, was Dallas Heiser Dunn.

Johnny Dunn ran K& M. Well, Johnny Dunn ran K& M, but he also had a business called Guns Goodies. He sold racing parts out of Miami, Florida. Dallas wore a t shirt with Guns [00:56:00] Goodies. Dallas never wore a bra. And when she had her badge made by SCCA to get into the racetrack, it was not from here up, it was from here down.

You got the picture? She’s back at the two camera guy. She is standing there, slowly raising her George is looking at the The announcer is asking perfectly legitimate questions, and getting weird looks out of George, and very slow answers. I happen to be staying alongside Dallas Cole quits when she got her effect on him.

That’s a true story. These are all true stories. I said that reminded me, Laguna, after you got all through going down the hill, you came out on the pit straight. In those days, The beginning of it, which was a 90 degree turn, was carved out of a hill, so you didn’t need a guardrail. You had two miles of dirt in front of you.

The last lap of [00:57:00] the featured Can Am five liter race, Danny Sullivan took the lead, somewhere in the back stretch, maybe at the corkscrew, maybe at that turn, and promptly went off course into the wall at, I think it’s turn nine, just before the finish line, just before the checkered flag. Well, it’s a race.

And in fact, he stayed there, so he’s one of the last finishers. They got him up on the stand after the race was over, and people are still wandering around leaving. And they asked Danny, Danny, what happened? Danny said, damn racetrack didn’t go where I was driving. You know, he’s, I think, the only man that ever spun and won at Indianapolis.

Just spinning at Indianapolis is a scary thought in itself. You talk about steward’s hearings. I was here at the Glenn, a Formula V race years ago, when Formula V was the event. The Seatta of today. The Formula Ford of 10 or 15 years ago. You weren’t a real competitive Formula V driver unless you had tire [00:58:00] tracks on your helmet.

I mean, that kind of thing. I’m up in race control. This kid comes running up to me, ranting and raving, and I get him out on the back porch. And I said, what’s your problem? He said, I want you to do so and so and so and so and so. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I said, first of all, I don’t have any actions called into me that weren’t me doing any actions.

So this is a problem you have with your competitor, which means that you, I’m going to have to write a protest and you’re going to have to bring that protest to me with any data that you have that supports your position and 25. And he says to me, I don’t have $25. I’ve got a, a tire gauge and, and an infrared thing to use.

Measure tire temperatures. I said, son, I’m running a race, not a hawk shop. Go find $25 and go bring it up. So he goes away. When he comes back, he hands me a five and 20 singles. It’s obvious he’s gone around to talk to people. So he’s driving the white car. What’s the protest about? He’s driving a white car [00:59:00] on the opening lap, leaving the start rolling start.

He gets hit in the back by the black car and forced off the course. He never gets to the 90. He never gets to run his race. I want that guy in that black car banned for the rest of this year. I want him. I said, thank you very much. We’ll hear it. So we hear him and he tells us the same story. So we call the guy in a black car and tell him what happened.

We read him the protest and he says, Hey, I never hit him. In fact, I could have hit him. I think he missed the shift or something. I never saw him after the start. He was back there someplace when I got to the 90. Okay, how do we solve this one? Well, it happened within view of the 90. Let’s call the flag captain in.

The flag captain comes in and said, no. Black car never hit the white car. Black car was far in advance of him before they even got anywhere near the corner. Hmm. Then we get a guy comes in and says, well, I was witnessed that I was in the red car right behind him. I saw it all. And that black car, obviously he’d been sent in by [01:00:00] the black car.

The black car never had anything to do with it. And anyone in there would tirade about how dangerous Formula V was turning out to be with all these accidents that were happening at every racetrack. And these guys can get away, but nobody ever does anything about it, and he does it week after week. If you’re ever a steward, you hear those stories.

And we let him run on, and we finally said thank you, and he was the driver of the red car. And so we called the flag station back in for some reason or other, and we asked them, well, who did hit the guy in the white car? Well, the guy in the red car.

Another difference between pro racing and club racing, that that reminds me of. In club racing, almost always, you’re using the flag stations for your eyes. Why? Because they’re going to tell you what’s happening out on the racetrack. In pro racing, most of the time, you’ve got cameras. Road America, the last time I was there, they had their communications, data, and TV on On fiber optics [01:01:00] and they had the cameras on the corners remotely controllable from race control.

So God bless whoever put that in the race chief could go and look at the corner in question to see, for example, where is the car sitting? So do I need to stop the race? Do I need to put out all course yellow? Do I need to go local yellow or what? And that camera is focused on the corner when you’re not moving around.

And it’s recorded. And you got on a tape from every corner what went on. Boy, I gotta tell you, the club guys never had that luxury. You could solve some protests and hearing matters and that kind of stuff like that. Which is why a lot of them never happen. Because the guys driving the cars know they’re under somebody’s eyes.

But the camera angle isn’t great. And sometimes you could equivocate about, you know, did it see it right or didn’t see it? And I used to say, boy, what I want There’s a camera, God’s eye in the sky, directly above the track, and high enough [01:02:00] up, so I don’t have to worry about angles or anything, and then I can tell what’s really happened on there.

Did he move over on him? Did he turn in on him before? Did he move over on him and say he moved on me? On me? This kind of thing. Did he really break Jackham? Those things do happen, you know. But I found out something very interesting. You watch TV and you watch, up until recently anyway, you watch the National Football League and you notice that all the cameras, you never, ever see a shot from directly above.

Because the teams all agreed that they would not allow camera shots from directly above because it might reveal some secrets on formations that they don’t want. And I thought, that’s not interesting. That has nothing to do with automobile racing, but it’s interesting. It’s interesting. Let them talk. I think more drivers have talked themselves in their penalties than they realize.

If you let them talk and let them talk, they’ll say things that they should never have talked. In racing, we do not allow them to bring anybody in as their counsel. They have to appear. In person, represent themselves, and that’s [01:03:00] it. They can bring people in as additional witnesses, but only the witness comes in alone.

Hey, no connivance in front of me, thank you. I didn’t have it on my list, but here at Watkins Glen, there was a six hour race, and the rule was it was five over the wall on the pits on stops, and six was not allowed. And I don’t remember whether that included the team manager or not. Anyway, there was a rule, and the Alfa Romeo team violated the rule.

They had one or two guys over that should have been over. He was also later the design engineer for Ferrari. I sent somebody down to tell him, you know, one more time on that. We gave him a break and there’ll be a penalty. And he told the pit guy that he didn’t speak English. You know, no speakers, na na na na na na na, don’t understand what you’re telling me, na na na.

He was a big guy, as I remember. The big guy told me that. I said to him, tell him the next time it’s 25, 000. And he told him that, and he said, gee, he suddenly understood English. That’s a true story. Who’s in race control? Most of the pro [01:04:00] races, and the only real pro races I ran were kart and champ car events.

You had the race director, you had an operational chief steward, and there was a flag marshal alongside of him. There was a lady, or guy, recorder, recording what was being said. Beside which, an actual recorder, recording everything that was said on the phone network. There was also the chief of safety and cart safety was a number one to work with.

That’s why, what’s his name was alive. He got his legs severed in an oval in Germany. And if they hadn’t gotten to him as quickly and as thoroughly and as efficiently as that, he’d have been dead door nail. These guys were great. And their chief was a really neat, laid back, quiet guy. You never knew he was there, but he was the boss.

Run Romney. Boy, they were great to work with. Which brings me back to another story. Another rule change. In Atlantics, when we first started, we ran virtually club rules. And as time went on, and things we learned, we decided to have our own [01:05:00] rules. And one of them was, we never put out any vehicle on the racetrack, other than racecars, without the course being under Full course yellow and a pace car.

And why at Lime Rock, we had a car off course and a car getting towed from off the back, the front of the field came around. And it came in as the one wrecker is crossing the track to get to the car that’s off course and the other wrecker that’s towing the car is crossing the track to go into the pits.

And that put the lead cars everywhere, but on the racetrack. Nobody got hurt, and no cars got trashed. How? I’ll never know. But when that was over, I said, that’s it. From now on, nobody goes on that racetrack except race cars. If they do, it’s all course yellow. It’s that simple. And yeah, I know, I don’t like all course yellows.

It messes up the competition. But we’re gonna do it that way, and we did. The interesting thought is, some racing organizations, and I’ll leave them via anonymous, I have [01:06:00] something called a competition yellow. And what that means is that, oh my god, he’s running away with the race. There’s dirt on the back stretcher.

It’s going to cause somebody to crash. I need a yellow flag all over. Okay, or an oval pollens, yellow, yellow, yellow. Let me talk a little bit about road courses and ovals. They are a world apart from every possible aspect. You can run an oval with a handful of people. You only need a few people out on the course, you need the normal complement in the pits in the paddock, but that’s not many.

And a couple up in race control and that’s it. On a road course you gotta have people out on the stations. The rule in racing, I hope, is still. that every flag station must be able to see the preceding and succeeding station at all times. And that’s a good rule because if they can’t, something could happen in between and they wouldn’t know it.

And you wouldn’t be able to warn the drivers on the course, and you wouldn’t be able to call for safety if somebody needed it. You have to be able to see from station to station. You have [01:07:00] to have those stations manned that you can see. And if you can’t see them, you’ll have to man them. I had two unfavored tracks, two tracks that I hated to work at for various reasons.

Top of the list by miles was Nazareth. That was the most dangerous damn place I’d ever been. Because of the layout of the track. It was fast. Think the lap speed for cars on there? I think their lap times was in the 160, 180 range for a mile, and it wasn’t a mile. I can remember Dennis Eade, one of the team managers in Atlantic, there for the first time when we ran Atlantic’s there, coming to me and saying, how long is this racetrack?

I said, it’s announced as a mile. He said, maybe announced as a mile, but it must be around the outside of the top of the stands. He said, I know from my gearing, how far it is. That brings me to Pocono. Pocono for a different reason. The racetrack was built. Hi, this one has some of the same problems. I don’t know what this elevation above sea level here is.

Pocono is up about 2, 000, 2, 100 feet. I happen to know there’s a little hill on the back. That’s [01:08:00] the highest point in Eastern Pennsylvania. And we hams used to use that for a radio contest, but that’s another old story. The problem with that is if the tracks at 2, 150. And the cloud ceiling is at 2100. You ain’t gonna run no race, cause you can’t see from here to the next guy.

We had a national race. Bob Tullius and somebody else, don’t think it was Paul Newman, but it might have been, were running for the national championship. That race was gonna decide it. And that damn cloud bank rolled in. Got a call from one of the stations. I’ve lost station so and so, but I can see so and so.

Okay, I can keep going. I’ve lost station so and so, but I can, I can see so and so. Okay, How many laps we got to go? And I ran it the last lap when one station could not see another station. After that was over, I said, you know, that was nuts. I’m never gonna do that again. Which brings another story to mind.

Tullius and Newman, who, I don’t know if you guys know this, they were great friends, but [01:09:00] terrible competitors on the track. And Paul was a very good driver. And both of them were malevolent in their thinking. We get to mid Ohio, and after the cars are paddocked on Friday, and get in on Saturday, and it was a National, alongside Tullius’s car, spanking white, garbage truck, and a With black number 44s on both sides, printed back 44s backwards.

Now, there’s a story behind that. Why the backwards 44? Bob’s first race at Marlborough, he had his girlfriend put the numbers on. She put them on wrong. She put them on backwards and he won the race. And so he said, that’s my lucky number. And so his, if you remember, he always raced the 44 with the backwards numbers.

Well, right after that was the runoffs down at Road Atlanta, which were a week long. Coming in, I expected something between them. And sure enough, here comes this Piper Cub or Arrow Oronco. One of, something of that size. Puttin across the sky with this great big flag in back [01:10:00] of it. Bobby called Mommy. I didn’t even have to ask what’s that all about.

What I wanted to find out is what was behind it. They had been talking and Tullius had made the mistake of saying it to Newman. That’s not the kind of thing I would say to my mother. And so, that went on all week, and I don’t remember what they were. I kept a record of them. And then, that racetrack, I drove home after the races were home.

800 miles. I left the damned notebook with my briefcase at the racetrack, and I lost it. Of all the funny things, it would have made a wonderful article, magazine article. Nobody else, the press guys, weren’t into most of it. Come Sunday morning, and the warm up. I’m looking at it at race control, down into the paddock.

Here comes Georgia Highway Patrol with the light going, you know, the Tijuana taxi bit to Newman’s car. And two burly cops get out to his paddock area and put him in the back seat. And I thought, whoa. Paul Newman, famous actor, the American [01:11:00] icon. And he’s being arrested at a racetrack that I’m chief steward at?

What the devil has that about? And then about five minutes later, he comes back in police car and the door opens up and Newman gets out and he’s shaking hands with the cops. And I thought, now, there is a real story. And so I find out later on, this is the end of it, that they’d been put up to it. And the charge that they charged him with that allowed them to effect an arrest was that he had unpaid debts.

He owed Tullius 50 bucks on a debt from a bar someplace. Well standin up there with us. Was the captain of the blimp, the Goodyear blimp. And this is the beginning on Sunday and he’s not aloft yet. I’m thinking one of those two clowns is going to get in touch with him. And I don’t know which one, but I’m sure they’re going to do something.

So I turned to him and I, and I didn’t know him from Adam, but I know who he was. I said, are you in on this? So either one of them, and you know, that kind of discussion. And he [01:12:00] looked at me real serious. He says, do you know? What the market is for an unemployed limb captain.

Anyway, that would have made a great story. One of my philosophies, if I was chairman and probably if I was a chair, one of the stewards was really never to question. A chief steward’s judgment on those kinds of matters in which he had zero time to make a call. Should I put out an all course yellow or a yellow?

For a couple reasons. First of all, you don’t know what information he was acting upon. And secondly, you weren’t sitting in the chair at the time. Carr very wisely put in their rule book, many of the decisions of the chief steward or race director are non protestable. It’s like, first base, or the umpire, behind the plate, he may be bow legged and blind, but whatever he calls, that’s the way Charlie it is.

Live with it. SCCA rightly so, however, in [01:13:00] club racing, does not say that. And the reason is, they recognize that sometimes, they have circumstances, Where the Chief Steward shouldn’t have done what he did, either because poor judgment on his part, which can occasionally happen, or he had bad information that he should have had, meaning that it was available to him, but he didn’t take it, kind of thing.

So, SECA, and it’s writing the club rules, said, no, no, no. The Chief Steward has no authority that’s non protestable. And he can’t declare himself non protestable, too. They thought of that. The philosophy there, again, is different in operating one and operating the other. Let me tell you a tough one, Vancouver, which by the way was a site of a track performance kind of change.

After Vancouver cart race a number of years ago, cart ruled that no flag station personnel are allowed on the racetrack at any time the cars are on the course, period. The only personnel allowed on a racetrack where cars are on the track [01:14:00] are the cart safety people. The reason for that was a very good one.

Two guys went out to help move a car and they got hit by another race car and they didn’t make it. And I can tell you, you don’t want to be the chief steward to have that happen. I had one fatality as a chief steward. It happened very early in my career. It happened in the Vineland Speedway. It was a minor club race.

It wasn’t anything. It was just guys out having fun, almost next to track days where you can almost run what you’re running. Off the street, Barry Fearon, I’ll never forget his name though, I get put in a grave. Was running, he was running last, plopping around at the back of the field. Couldn’t have been having too much fun.

Something happened, I don’t know what. He turned turtle. We had a roll bar and he had helmets in those days. I go back to before roll bars. I’ve witnessed races when we didn’t have helmets, when we didn’t have safety belts. When you race with a cloth cap on your head, crazy. Barry died of a depressed skull fracture because he borrowed that damn helmet from somebody else and it was four [01:15:00] sizes too big.

Bunch of bad stories there, isn’t there? My story is I don’t let guys plop around. If they’re markedly off race speed, they come in. If it’s pro race, I call the team. I say, Hey, you got to do something. You need to bring them in and fix them or you bring them in and park them. But he ain’t running that way.

He’s not going to win any money. He’s not going to please anybody. And he could kill somebody because something could happen. Somebody could run over him kind of thing. And club racing, you think about it and you think about it and you think about it, but I will black flag. I don’t anymore. I would have black flag somebody because they’re just not a good situation.

And pro racing nowadays. They have communications between the chief steward and the team and the car. You can communicate in collaboration. You don’t have that guys come up with a car going to run it this weekend. It’s almost like in the days when you drove your. TC to the track and took the windshield off and then that kind of thing, took the back seat out.

And so the communications gap between the chief steward and the driver is huge. [01:16:00] While he’s on the track, the only way he communicated through the flag stations. And you think about that, there’s a hell of a difference. Between Chief Steward and being able to tell the crew chief, Hey, your guy, we think he’s leaking oil, you bring him in.

Or he’s dragging something. Or you can even, in some cases, talk directly to the driver. I can tell you flat off, Club Racing Steward is a hell of a sight harder to do than Pro Racing. Pro Racing is a snap by comparison. And besides what you know everybody in Pro Racing, or most everybody, in Club Racing, you don’t know who you’re dealing with.

And what would the appropriate response would be? The only time in my life I’ve been bounced from a racetrack, Jackie Stewart, that Jackie Stewart. Can Am original Can Am in which you could run, almost run what you brung kind of thing, Tony Dean from England won the only time a small ball car won a Can Am race was in the pouring rain.

And I believe it was Atlanta that he won. He won it in a 908 Porsche. That’s a flat eight version of the [01:17:00] 906. Was originally designed as a hill climb car and he won it. The next race was mid Ohio. In those days, the pit straight went underneath the bridge, made a left hand turn on the 90 turn and on the outside of that turn, I can tell you how far, four feet off the pavement.

With a bunch of oak trees, Tony Dean on the Thursday driver’s practice day, hit those oak trees with his 908 Porsche. God love us, he hit it, back of him, tore the car in half, and he walked away. Well, Stewart was driving for Haas at that time, and he was driving a Lola T260, which I’m told was one of, Bromley’s not top of the drawer board designs.

And I’m also told that he was being paid 25, 000 to appear. The implication being that he would drive it. Stewart got word of the accident, saw the trees, and immediately had a press conference before Friday, before I even got there, on how dangerous the racetrack was. Well, Wally Reece, that same Wally Reece I talked about earlier, [01:18:00] was Exec.

Steward, SENDIV, the Central Division, at the time. And in those days, the Exec. Steward and the Division did track inspections. I did the track inspection the year that the Blue Tunnel was created. That’s a story I’m not going to talk about. Anyway, Wally had approved the racetrack. And it was a piece of paper that stood in race control that said he had approved the racetrack for racing.

And so I said that to Stuart when I found out he had. The owner of the track was a hard headed Dutchman like me, by the first name Les. I said, you know, you’re killing the spectators by putting that kind of thing in the public press. Which it was. That the track is dangerous. It’s dangerous. There’s some that’ll show up and a lot won’t.

And he said, well, it’s, I said, I don’t think it is, but I’ll talk to Les. So I went to Les and I talked to him and Les, I said he was hardheaded, said, I have an approved racetrack. You have no authority to tell me to do anything. I said, no, I don’t. I said, I do have authority though to talk common sense, and I do have authority to [01:19:00] talk money.

I said, you know, you could buy. For 5 a bale, hay bales, because I buy them for that money, for my daughter’s horse. And you could put those hay bales in front of those trees, and you still wouldn’t put them on the track, but you would have done something to alleviate a now known problem. We talked a little bit.

He didn’t budge that far. Oh, and then Stuart had another press conference after I left. So I went home that night. I came in on the next morning, not knowing what the heck I was going to do. Lo and behold, those trees had been leveled off with the ground. You would never know the trees had been there.

They’d been cut off the night that I was gone. And boy, that was a whew! For me. And so I held a press conference and I said, what have you done? Jackie had to have another, we wound up each old and free. I don’t remember all the circumstances. That was one of the few press conferences in racing that I ever had.

That’s where I got to meet Jackie Stewart in person because I went to him after each, the first, the second and third of his, and to learn to call him Jackie. At [01:20:00] that point, he was not sir. At that point, he’s a nice guy. He’s a great guy. He really was on the right kick racing in those days. Dangerous as hell and it need not have been we did all kinds of stupid stuff when you look back at it It was a book written by the sports editor of the New York Times Caught the cruel sport and it talked about racing and how dangerous it was and how needless it was I can remember when after the Indy race was over and the first three cars the first three finishes You might not see one of them two years later I mean now that’s stupid when you think of it, but that’s the way it was And by the way, on Monday after the race, Bertie Martin, my boss, President of Pro Racing by that time, called me up and said, You’re not allowed in mid Ohio anymore.

Won’t let you come in the racetrack. I said, Well, that’s one less race. Anyway, then the track sold to, uh, Jim Truman. A total gentleman. Great businessman. Great guy. Drove two liter car. Drove him very, very well. I got to know him because he raced in the [01:21:00] two liter class in the, in the Can Am. There were certain people that ran racetracks that I would work my damns not to have to deal with.

And there were certain racetrack people that I would make it a point to go to see first when I got in the area because they were fun to work with. Mal Currie here was one of them. And Les Richter was the other one. Les ran Riverside as general manager. And then he became, I think, director of racing for NASCAR.

But before that, he was a football player. And when you shook hands with Les Richter, you knew you’d shook hands. His hand was the size of my foot. He was the only football player in National Football League history in which he alone was traded for a total nother team. Go look your history up and you’ll find that’s true.

And yet he’s not in the Hall of Fame. And he was like five times on the winning team? All time linebacker, I believe, or tackle or linebacker, one or the other. And that was politics, pure politics. And let me tell you, there’s politics on halls of fame. And now I know [01:22:00] I was on part of one for three years.

Shouldn’t be that way. But then I remember my favorite statement, get more than two people together and you got politics. I’ll tell one more story. Phoenix racetrack, not the Grand Prix track, the oval with a kink in the back, like Trenton used to have. I’m running a 50 lap race. Rule book says, the race shall end when the checkered flag is flown.

If the checkered flag is flown before the scheduled distance, it is still a race. If the checkered flag is flown after the scheduled distance, the race finish will be deemed as the order of finish on the scheduled distance, not the checkered flag. That was the rule then. 50 lap race. I’m Chief Steward. I’m listing.

I always let the starter and the chief of timing and scoring talk because one or the other of them Better be in agreement with the other one and I’m hearing [01:23:00] 40 laps. No, it’s 39 41 laps. No, it’s 30. It’s 40 Don’t you guys do this to me. And so we ran a 51 lap race. And of course, the lead changed in that last lap.

The 51st lap. And I had to tell the guy that was the winner at the 51st lap, No, you’re second. You were second when you crossed the start finish line on the 50th lap. Two more things. You go to racetracks and you hear so many miles per hour, so many miles per hour. That’s nonsense. Pay attention to time.

Time is the whole game. Even the 500 race. When you’re sitting in the pit, I’ve never worked a race of 500. I’ve never been to the 500, but I can tell you I’ve worked a lot of old races and it’s always the same thing. They don’t measure your speed. They measure your time. And then, the press goes to [01:24:00] work and announces what the speed was.

That’s a press thing. And you think, well why is he telling me all this? Because when you watch a race, and you see a guy going into a corner, and they’re about that far apart, and then they go down a straightaway, and they’re that far apart, and you think, geez, he’s got MB. No, he doesn’t. It’s the lap time, dummy.

There were a 10th of a second apart here and there a 10th of a second apart over here, but a 10th of a second at 36 miles an hour, ain’t very far. A 10th of a second at 140, you better believe it’s pretty far. And, you know, it’s that kind of thing. It’s the timing, and where it’s timed. Timing stand at Road America used to be at the bottom of the, straightaway leading past the pits at turn 13.

Inside, almost a half a mile away from the finish line. I’d have teams come roaring up to me, My guy got so and so timed, your official time is all wrong. Where did you time him? Whoa, time not right here at the finish line. Go read your rule book, [01:25:00] or your, uh, your supplementaries for this race. Why? Because that’s a fit not, no it ain’t.

Go read it. Timing is done down at station 13. That’s where the timing’s done. And that’s the timing we use to set the grid. You time them up here. That don’t mean a thing. Their time’s different. The timing is different because the guy doesn’t drive the whole racetrack the same speed for different people.

So, it’s time. Let me tell you something. There’s two things that I learned at my age. And that is, take care of your legs. When I was a kid, the athletes always said, take care of your legs, take care of your legs. And I, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Take care of your legs, believe me. For me, it’s the first thing to go and it’s the last thing you want to go.

Because without them, you ain’t going to get very far. And the second thing is take care of your eyes. I have macular degeneration and I can’t read a newspaper. I can’t read a car number. So that’s why I am a steward. Well, I think I bored you guys long enough.[01:26:00]

I got another one for you. Last weekend, I was invited to go down to the driver’s meeting at the Trans Am at New Jersey motor sports park. And by the way, if you’ve never been there and JMP should go, there’s two racetracks at that one location. Both of them are great racetracks. Anyway, I got invited down by Terry Dale.

The Operating Chief, Wally Dollenbach Jr. is the Chief Steward for the Trans Am. And I come down and be at their drivers meeting. And be their race marshal. I asked, driver meeting, okay, I’ll come in and say hello, you know, that kind of thing. And, a race marshal? I’ve never been a race marshal. What’s he have to do?

Nothing. I’m qualified. I went to the drivers meeting and as I was walking over to the microphone, they applauded. And I said, boy, that’s a first. I never got applauded at a driver’s meeting in my life. Anyway, thank you very much. I appreciate the opportunity to share some [01:27:00] fun I’ve had. Racing is people. And boy, that is a truth.

I have friends today that I don’t think I saw at a racetrack 30 years ago that I’m still in touch with. End of preaching.

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