<VV> A Long Racing Story, only the most minor Corvair content

[vairtec at optonline.net]

THE DAY THE STOCKS TUMBLED ON A MAKESHIFT NEW JERSEY TRACK IN 1954, NASCAR SUFFERED ITS ONLY FOREIGN-MADE DEFEAT

The Star-Ledger, 7.22.07

My lord, Conrad Janis thought. Another car just used me as brakes. 

Janis was a Broadway and film actor with a thing for racing sports cars against guys with names like Briggs S. Cunningham, Freddie Wacker and Erwin Goldschmidt. They were gentlemen drivers: social, Connecticut types who could afford to race for thrills and not money. 

But there he was on June 13, 1954, driving his Jaguar XK120 -- with red paint and a biscuit-colored leather interior -- at an airport in Linden, heading deep into a turn against professional stock car drivers who would rap your door handles and shove you out of the way. 

Riding his tail was a Hudson Hornet, a hulking piece of American steel bearing down on his foreign-made aluminum convertible -- an ocean liner in his rearview mirror. And as he started his turn, the Hudson slammed into him, putting a huge dent in his left rear fender. 

This wasn't the kind of racing Janis knew, the kind where you respected your fellow drivers and the polish on their automobiles. 

"We all felt we were a superior breed," Janis says 53 years later. "I mean, we were driving sports cars! European imports! English imports! These were the great cars. We weren't driving Buicks, and Hudsons, and Nashes and whatever, Fords. That was for the hoi palloi." 

The stock car drivers -- pioneers like Lee Petty, Buck Baker, Jack Smith and Herb Thomas -- didn't see it that way. They wouldn't hesitate to scrape the paint off the Jags. 

"They proved it by knocking us around," Janis says. "These guys were good old boys, and who knows how many moonshine runs they'd made?" 

Janis would go on to fame as a character actor including a stint as Mindy's father on the television show "Mork & Mindy." But on this day, he was making history at the tiny airport just off Routes 1&9. 

Twenty-one European sports cars were going fender-to-fender with 22 stock cars in the first-ever NASCAR road race. For the first time, NASCAR ran its top-level stock cars on something other than an oval: a track with the first right-handed turns in the circuit's history. And when Al Keller crossed the finish line after 100 miles in his Jaguar, it became the first -- and only -- top-level NASCAR event won by a foreign car. 

"I just thought it was another race," Janis says. "I just wanted to race because without a woman, its almost the most fun you can have." 

Today, NASCAR is a multibillion-dollar industry with the second-highest television viewership among American sports behind the NFL. It sells billions of dollars in merchandise at racetracks from Daytona, Fla., up to Loudon, N.H., and across to Fontana, Calif. It has the logos of Fortune 500 companies painted on its cars and celebrity drivers who do Subway commercials (Tony Stewart, meet Jared Fogle).

But in 1954, NASCAR wasn't even NASCAR. 

Just six years earlier Bill France Sr., a racing promoter in Daytona, had formed a circuit under the name Strictly Stock, which evolved into the Grand National Series. Legend says he drew up the original points system on a cocktail napkin. 

The top drivers had visited the old Morristown Speedway from 1951 to 1953, but now Grand National vice president Ed Otto had a different idea. 

"He was kind of a showman -- maybe he would've been a carnival barker in another time -- but he was looking for new ways to pique the interest of race fans and people in general," says Buz McKim, born in Hackensack and the historian at the NASCAR Hall of Fame in Charlotte, N.C. 

The idea was to pit Detroit's finest against Jaguars and MGs, fancy imports that weighed 1,000 pounds less and were better suited for the ins-and-outs of road courses. What's more, the race, on a makeshift two-mile course, counted: It was the 18th race on the Grand National schedule. 

"They were bringing in the cream of the crop," McKim says. "Anybody who was in any type of contention for the championship would definitely be there." 

In the weeks leading up to the race at Linden, which was alternately known as the International 100 and the Grand National Road Race, Janis got a call from a friend named Bill Claren. 

Janis, who now lives in Los Angeles, was no gentleman driver. It cost him a pretty penny to race his Jaguar, and Claren told him there was an airport race that could help him buy a new set of tires if he finished in the money. 

Claren, a Montclair native who ran a professional sports car circuit called SCODA (Sports Car Owners and Drivers Association), had been told of the airport race by Otto, the Grand National executive. 

"He knew the appeal of sports cars, says Claren, now retired in Port St. Lucie, Fla. "And as I've said many times, they figured they were just going to clean up and blow us away, but it didn't happen that way." 

Some of the sports-car drivers weren't race-a-week pros. In fact, you won't find any record of Janis being at the Linden race: He drove under the pseudonym J. Christopher to protect his amateur status and keep his membership in the Sports Car Club of America (SCCA). 

So, here are these drivers from the South, racing in cars you could buy off a lot, heading north to race against sports cars, and there's a guy worried about staying an amateur. 

"The wine-and-cheese group, not the beer and pork rinds," McKim says. "I think more so from the sports-car guys than the stock-car guys, because they probably looked at (the stock-car drivers) as, well, Neanderthals? That might be a harsh term, but the NASCAR drivers probably thought, 'Well, these hoighty-toity guys, drinking tea with their pinkies sticking out, they won't be too tough to beat.'" 

But no one was going to shove Al Keller out of the way. 

Keller was by all accounts a pro's pro, a living legend from Buffalo, N.Y. He raced midgets, sports cars, stock cars, Champ cars and won in all of them. 

He was about as good as you can get, says Jim Reed, who now owns a truck dealership in his native Peekskill, N.Y., and ran the Linden race in a 1954 Ford. 

Before Linden, Keller had already driven in 12 Grand National events in 1954 and won a race in Savannah, Ga. 

But when he showed up for Linden, he was behind the wheel of the Paul Whiteman Jaguar, an XK120 fixed-head coupe sponsored by the world renowned bandleader who gave Bing Crosby his start. 

They all lined up on the bumpy airport Tarmac on that Sunday afternoon in Union County: Hudsons and Oldsmobiles, Jaguars and MGs, big American models and sleek European things. A grandstand, capable of holding 15,000 fans, stood along the main straightway. It didn't take long for Janis to realize he was in a little bit over his head: Claren whirred past him on the pace lap. 

"He was hell bent for election, and I said, 'Oh, that's how it's done,'" Janis says. 

The stock-car drivers had almost no experience tuning their cars for a road course, and the sports cars could easily outmaneuver them. But the stock cars had a significant size advantage, and they were like moving road blocks in the middle of the track. 

"The Hudson was not a delicate object," McKim says. "It was kind of a brute, and the only way they're going to get those things around a road course is to throw them around the turns. They just weren't set up for that kind of thing. But they had a lot more weight to push around too." 

During the first half of the race, a Hudson crumpled Janis' fender, slashing his left rear tire and forcing him out after 23 laps. He finished 39th. 

Claren darted his way to the front of the pack, weaving in-between stock cars like they were traffic cones. 

"I knew damn well we could beat them; there wasn't a question about it," he says. "Nobody treated me like a pinball; nobody treated Al Keller like a pinball." 

Keller's average speed was only 77 mph, but that's conceding the ins-and-outs and the almost 90-degree turn after a long straightway. 

"I remember how he was stressing that thing," Janis says of Keller's Jag. "He must have been revving that thing up over 6,000 (rpm), and he'd slam it into a lower gear and use the engine to come down, and he was screaming around the course." 

Screaming so loud, and so fast, he lapped the field and crossed the finish line in 1:17:21. In first place -- a sports car taking a stock car's checkered flag. 

Keller stepped out of his Jaguar onto the hot Tarmac that would soon be a runway again, in front of a grandstand that would soon be removed, and collected his winner's check of $1,000. 

Keller died seven years later in a Champ car crash at the Arizona State Fairgrounds in 1961. NASCAR kept its focus on oval tracks and has raced only 102 road races since Linden. But on that day, Keller outmaneuvered NASCAR's finest, in a Jaguar, soaring around a small airport in New Jersey. 

In a band leader's car, no less. 

- - - - - - - - - - -

Now, the Corvair content:

Of the people named I the story, Bill Claren has been a friend of mine for 30+ years. In addition, another friend had participated in this race, so even though it had taken place when I was a mere child, I have long known of this race. Further, aside from this NASCAR race, other SCODA races had taken place at the Linden airport during the 1950s.

About 10 or 12 years ago, a local sports car club announced plans to conduct an autocross on this same airport. Well, I just HAD to run! All I had available at the time was a ratty ‘67 Monza 4-door that Brian O’Neill and I had thrown together for Lime Rock, but I flat-towed it to the airport and entered the autocross.

No, there is no fairy-tale ending, I did not win. But I do take satisfaction from having raced a Corvair on this same airport where this historically-significant NASCAR race took place so many years earlier.

--Bob from Detroit