Against Death and Time: One Fatal Season in Racing's Glory Years Read Online Free PDF

with the now-defunct Stutz motor
company. He planned to race in the vaunted 500, but like many, this
courageous and skilled driver simply could not get comfortable in the
vast arena. After attempting to run competitively in two different
cars, he left quietly to return to the amateur sports car world, whose drivers Rodger Ward and other pros lampooned as "strokers and bro-
kers"-i.e., rich playboys lacking the cojones to run with "real" men.

    This was surely unfair, although in Fitch's case, it was true that
he was unable to exceed 129 mph in a new Kurtis roadster while
forty-six-year-old Bill Holland, who had been suspended from the
Speedway for two years after running a so-called outlaw (unsanctioned) race, easily qualified the car at 137 mph. Holland, a former
winner of the 500, was clearly someone who had no trouble running
the big track at record speeds. Yet Fitch's career in motor sports would
be long and distinguished, despite his failure to crack the mental barrier at Indianapolis.
    Somehow an eastern Brahmin was at a massive disadvantage in
professional automobile racing. Of the thirty-three men who made
up the starting field in 1953, more than half were native Californians.
Eight had either won the 500 or were destined to win it during the
fifties.
    All were working-class Anglo-Saxons, with the exception of
Vukovich. All had been trained in the crucible of competition like the
booming midget racing leagues, where competition was carried on
around the Los Angeles basin seven nights a week, or in the crazed
California Roadster Association, where wheel-to-wheel hot-rod racing took place at the elemental level of survival of the fittest.
    They were hardly boys of summer. Of the thirty-three, only two,
at twenty-four years of age, were young enough to play major
league baseball in their prime. A few others were in their late twenties or early thirties. Three were in their forties, bringing the average age to twenty-eight. All had been in racing since their teenage
years, bouncing around the dirt and asphalt bullrings of the nation,
honing their skills behind the wheels of lethal, unhinged semiwrecks owned and campaigned by local gas station and garage
owners, all dreaming of a shot at Indianapolis. All had suffered
injuries ranging from broken noses and teeth and cheekbones, to horrific arm bruises from flying clots of dirt, to multiple fractures
and burns. Many were unmarried, content to live out their lives
drifting from racetrack to racetrack, with cheap hotels and tourist
homes offering the only respite from the noise and violence. Weeks
on end might be spent sleeping in the backseat of a car towing a
race car known simply as "the Ford motel."

    A man of Fitch's background, where gentlemanly amateur motor
sports was the fashion, could not easily adjust to the fanatic level of
driving to be found among the Californians. So it would come to pass
that Golden Staters like Johnny Parsons, Oklahoma transplant Troy
Ruttman (absent from the 1953 starters due to an arm injury),
Vukovich, Bob Sweikert, Sam Hanks, Rodger Ward, and Jim
Rathmann would win at Indianapolis while gentlemen sports car racers, the "teabaggers" and "strokers and brokers," were resigned to secondary status, at least in the deadly game being played out each May
at Indianapolis.
    As an example of how unforgiving professional racing at the
Indianapolis level was: among the thirty-three men who started
the 1953 Indianapolis Motor Speedway International Sweepstakes
(the official name of the event), seventeen would die in racing accidents. Another would be permanently disabled. Four would meet
death at Indianapolis, while the rest would die at various dirt track
and asphalt speedways around the nation. By contrast, in Fitch's
world of sports cars, death and injury were both rare. The racing
speeds were slower, and the environment was more relaxed.
    Medley and I ate dinner the night before the big race with a few