Critical Mass - Blind Man's Bluff = SPLIT THREAD

[bluffman]

Re: Critical Mass - Blind Man's Bluff = SPLIT THREAD

I forgot, in 1970 they ran Langhorne, Pennsylvania before Milwaukee, though that would be the last time they ran Indy cars there .Langhorne had been a “D” shaped dirt track for many years, with many fatalities there, it had a dip in the backstretch that was known as “puke hollow”, and was very treacherous. Paving the track didn’t help matters at all. In fact it made it worse. The line that the Indy cars ran there made it like there was no straightaway at all, the cars were always in a turn, loading the right front so heavily that the suspension and front bulkheads were buckeling from the constant “G” forces. Johnny Rutherford crashed trying to qualify. Dockery made the show, and with the Ford 4 cammer engine, we had none of the previous problems. Early in the race, Sammy Sessions crashed coming off what would be turn four, he hit the wall hard, and in those days the cars held 75 gallons of methanol fuel, and when he hit the wall, it was like a water balloon bursting. There was fuel everywhere, and caught fire. Sammy’s feet were pinned in the car, and he kept pointing there. His car had an access panel just above the foot petals, and some brave soul got it open, and got his feet free so that he could get out of the car. Firemen, and also pit crewmen were using fire extinguishers to keep the fire away from Sammy even as the plexiglass windshield was melting. They got Sammy clear of the fire, but by then the grass area between the track and the grandstands was burning, and fuel was running across the track and into the pit area, and other cars were driving through the burning fuel , other cars were trying to stop causing several cars behind to crash, and Darrell was involved in that mess, and smashed the nose, radiator and oil tank. We were not able to restart the race due to the damage. Luckily Sammy was not injured. They got the mess cleaned up, and restarted the race. Bobby Unser won the race followed by his brother Al.

We took our car back to our garage 10 at Indy and made the necessary repairs so that we could run the next race that was at Milwaukee. We got the car there, and Darrell qualified good enough to make the show, and was running pretty good, but later in the race he got tail- ended and spun into the infield, and was done for the day. Back to garage 10 we went again, and Darrell said that he was ready to call it quits, and head for home. I packed up and went back to California, and home. I found out later that Dockery had decided to run another race, this one at Raceway Park in Indianapolis, on the road course there. The Ford engine blew up there, and Darrell and Gordon went home after that. We had done the best we could with what we had, Dockery had completed the rookie test, and had run with the big dogs, and he was content with that. He never tried to run Indy cars again. I went to work for Bill Simpson again with my pal Jim Ward to get a car ready for the Indy car race in Argentina. Simpson had a 67 Gurney Eagle that we would modify, and run a Turbo Offy. This race was scheduled for February 1971, and Jim and I had a lot to do to get the Eagle which was now going to be renamed a “Beagle” ready for this fiasco. The “Beagle” was because it was going to be a Burton modified Eagle, and we thought it was a clever idea, and I made a decal (name plate) for the nose of the car with “Snoopy” on it, and it was entered as a “Simpson Beagle.” I have several photos that I can add to my posts along with the story of this trip to Argentina.
Larry

[Ken Dwelle]

Re: Critical Mass - Blind Man's Bluff = SPLIT THREAD

Larry, I hate to interrupt your amazing story but a few folks are asking for an update on the restoration of your airplane so here is a quick one:

The fuselage is now in the re-skinning jig in the shop at Sanders. There are some projects in front of us but I think they are close to starting in earnest. The wing center section is down the street at Powerpac engineering and it is making fine progress. Once the paint and bondo were removed there was more damage than we knew. I have completed painting all of the hydraulic pipes and components, finally and am onto the control rods and fuel system next. The plan is to have all of the components done so that when the wing center section arrives we can bolt in the pieces fairly quickly. The fuselage should arrive later and go right onto the wing. The project has several years left at a minimum.

Ken

[luscombe]

Re: Critical Mass - Blind Man's Bluff = SPLIT THREAD

Thanks for the up date on the progress of Critical Mass Ken great to see the work progressing along not to take away anything from Larry's amazing story as i am as intralled with it as anyone else but still good to get a update thanks again

[bluffman]

Re: Critical Mass - Blind Man's Bluff = SPLIT THREAD

Ken, I have been hoping that you would give an update on CM. Needless to say, I am very interested in your progress. That proud bird was a very important part of my life,and I hope I have an opportunity to see her fly again. Thanks again, Larry

[bluffman]

Re: Critical Mass - Blind Man's Bluff = SPLIT THREAD

There was this fellow from Argentina who was an avid Indy 500 fan, and attended the races for many years, he was Dr. Alvarez, don’t know what kind of doctor, but I guess that didn’t matter. Everybody called him Doctor Alvarez, and he came up with an idea to build a race track in Rafaela, Argentina that was a duplicate of the Indianapolis Speedway, and convinced USAC that they should have a “Indy 500 de Rafaela. It was a nice track, but it ended up being 1.8 miles around instead of 1.5 miles like Indy. He had built a nice garage area for us to work out of, and all in all it was a pretty nice facility. I will get back to this, because there were some problems that came up after we got there.

There were 26 cars “invited” to go there, quite a mixed bag of racers. There were Turbo- Fords, Turbo- Offys, a Turbo- Rambler, (Barney Navarro’s, who had pulled my tooth at Indy), an Allison Turbine car, normally aspirated Ford 4- cammers, and Chevys, and an assortment of chassis, some as old as 1964. I don’t recall Foyt, Andretti or Bobby Unser being there as well as other top drivers, but Al Unser Lloyd Ruby, Johnny Rutherford, Gordon Johncock, and several other known drivers, even Cale Yarborough, who was a NASCAR driver who had ran Indy also. There were some drivers that had not ran at Indy, but had either passed the rookie test, or at least had run some Indy car races at some of the smaller tracks. Some of the lesser drivers had friends and or neighbors as their pit crews. I know of a couple of teams whose “crew members” had never worked on race cars, and had never even been out of their home state, let alone out of the United States. This was going to be quite an adventure!

I don’t remember exactly how the cars were shipped, but I think it was by boat, because I’m kind of sure that Jim Ward took our car, Simpson’s, to the docks in Los Angeles or Long Beach, California. All of the drivers and crews flew out of Miami, Florida on Argentina Airlines, because we had to overfly Cuba, and they would shoot down an American airplane. I think it was a 14 hour or so flight. When we got to Rafaela we were in for quite a surprise.

Larry

[Bob]

Re: Critical Mass - Blind Man's Bluff = SPLIT THREAD

I cant wait for this caper!
Larry, Thank you for writing these wonderful stories.

[GR7Racer]

Re: Critical Mass - Blind Man's Bluff = SPLIT THREAD

A small correction to your post Larry....Indy is 2.5 miles long. Was the Argentina track longer or shorter?

[bluffman]

Re: Critical Mass - Blind Man's Bluff = SPLIT THREAD

A freudian slip there on my part. Of course Indy is 2.5 miles and Rafaela was longer, 2.8 miles. It was late when I did that post, and I had brain fade. Thanks for bringing it to my attention. Larry

[bluffman]

Re: Critical Mass - Blind Man's Bluff = SPLIT THREAD

When we landed in Argentina, maybe it was the Rafaela Airport, I’m not sure but it was several miles from Rafaela itself. There were a whole bunch of people milling around, and lots of passenger cars. This was supposed to be our transportation to a big reception in Rafaela with a Governor, Mayor, and many more “big shots”, plus many, many local people. Now I am trying to figure out how many of us Yanks would need to be driven into town. Each race team had a driver, and we were allowed three crew members, so that was probably 88, because I know there were at least a couple of guys that somehow got permission to go along. Then there were The USAC people, Director of Competition, Tech Director, and on and on. There must have been about 50 of these people, because the 707 was pretty much filled up, and so that makes about 138, and that was about the capacity for a 707, depending which dash number it was, I think, but I would almost bet there were more than that. Someone following this thread will straighten me out on this, I’m sure. I hope so anyway! At any rate this would require at least somewhere around 35 or 40 cars I reckon, depending on how we were stacked. As we motored along in this parade of cars, when we were about 2 ½ to 3 miles from the city there were people standing along both sides of the road, two and three deep waving and cheering all the way into town! This was rather unexpected, and made us all feel pretty special. Then we arrived at the reception area in this big field, maybe a park or something like that where there were lots of tables, and chairs set up, and the smell of barbecued chicken was in the air. I would not even hazzard a guess as to how many chickens gave their all for this deal! As we departed out transport vehicles the people were cheering, and going around shaking hands and all that, and suddenly I felt myself being lifted up in the air, and several locals had me and my wheelchair up on their shoulders, carrying me to a table. Man! This was really weird! Once we all got settled, they began toting these big platters of chicken, and pots of beans around and we all chowed down while the “big wigs” gave welcoming speeches. This was quite a shindig by any standard. All of this went on for quite a while, I started thinking about where we were going to be living while we were in Rafaela. I’m sure there were a lot of others thinking about the same thing. I assumed there were hotels, motels, or something like that all set up and ready for us. Funny, but I don’t recall ever being told anything about our accomodations before we left the States. It turned out that if I remember right, there was only one hotel in town, possibly two, but I don’t think so. Of course the USAC bunch had themselves covered on this. The rest of us were to live in the homes of the local citizens, as guests. Somehow, by the luck of the draw us Simpson guys went into the home of one of the wealthiest families, many were not so lucky. They had a real nice house, and had set up beds for us and it was all in all pretty comfy. We got a good nights sleep, and were anxious to locate our “Beagle” and see if there was any damage in shipping the following morning. We were taken to a big warehouse where all of the cars were parked in nice straight rows, almost military like. I have a great photo of this, but it is rather large, and I don’t know if I can get into a form to post. Incredibly we had no damage, and only a couple of other cars had some minor damage.

Next post we will go to the race track where it really gets interesting.
Larry

[bluffman]

Re: Critical Mass - Blind Man's Bluff = SPLIT THREAD

The race teams had been assigned local drivers, with their own cars, some were also interpreters since there weren’t many, if any at all among the teams that spoke Spanish. I had my trusty Spanish/ English dictionary thing, but it was not all that useful. Since I was in a wheelchair someone had made a decision that the Simpson team got two cars, which helped a lot. Some of the “big guns” may have also had rental cars, but I don’t recall seeing anything to that effect. This got to be rather terrifying, since it soon became apparent that these drivers felt as if they had to demonstrate their driving ability and skill to impress us. Each morning these guys would pick up their team, and the road to the track became their speedway of sorts. There were a few fender benders, but no one got hurt, and I think everybody got to the track at a reasonable time.

Our first time at the track to look over the garage area, and the facility in general was impressive. The garages were in a long building with a series of overhead doors that rolled up, and each bay held two teams. At the back of the garage was a workbench with a roll up door or maybe rather a window that raised up from the top of the workbench. There was also a door that led out to the pit area. After a few minutes we noticed that these doors were not like your average garage door, these things were made of heavy duty steel, almost like armor plating. This seemed strange at the time, but we would soon get an idea as to why it was done this way. Just outside the garages out by a fence was a cylindrical tank mounted on wheels, and had a real rugged looking door on one end. We had no idea what this thing was, and finally asked one of the interpreters. He informed us that it was a “bomb disposal unit.” This seemed rather ominous to us, and was a little spooky, but it got worse in a short while. There were a group of soldiers coming in carrying machine guns, and they each were stationed at one of the garage doors. Most of us knew that the political situation in Argentina was pretty unstable, but had no idea that we might be in harms way. Surely USAC wouldn’t bring us all into a place that could put us in danger. Apparently Dr. Alvarez had convinced them that we would be safe.

Well, we were there to run a race, and so we set about getting the cars ready for practice. (I still can’t figure out how they got our cars from that warehouse to the track) It was getting late in the afternoon, and of course we all wanted to get the engines fired up, and checked for leaks and all that. Bill Findlay was the first one to do this, but I must explain something, he had a Turbo- Offy, and when these engines were fired up you lit it off, and revved it up and down, sort of : RMMMMM- POP, over and over until the water temperature came up. When the POP part came it was loud, and a ball of fire would shoot out the exhaust pipe. Findley’s first RMMMM- POP sent these machine gun toting soldiers into a panic. They hit the dirt and started looking for some bad guy to shoot at! This was not good, our first thought was, “what in hell are we doing here?” Things calmed down, and some of us even got a chuckle out of seeing those soldiers hitting the dirt. Luckily someone briefed these guys not to get overexcited when they heard these popping sounds from the engines, and we had no repeats of them hitting the ground. We started noticing that other soldiers of higher rank would come by. We could tell how high ranking they were by the amount of weapons they had. The lowest rank were the ones with a machine gun, next higher up was one with a machine gun, and a pistol, next was one with a machine gun, a pistol, and a sword, and so on. At one point one came loaded down with so many kinds of munitions that he could hardly walk, we figured that he was the “big cahoona”, maybe a General or something. This all became very humorous, and somehow we felt less in danger. Little did we know, this was only the beginning of the security measures, but for now it was, “Welcome to Argentina!”
Larry

[aircooled]

Re: Critical Mass - Blind Man's Bluff = SPLIT THREAD

Here is a link to a satellite shot the track as it is today, not much there...

Rafaela Race Track, Argentina

[bluffman]

Re: Critical Mass - Blind Man's Bluff = SPLIT THREAD

After we had got set up at the track, we were told that everything had changed. The “Indy 500 de Rafaela” was now the “Indy 300 de Rafaela, we would run two 150 mile races with an intermission after the first 150, for refueling, tire changing, adding oil, and any other maintenance that was needed. I think that it was changed due to a problem regarding fuel tanks in the pit area for refueling during the race. That was fine with me, since it was decided that I would be fueling the left side, and Ward would fuel the right side. We were still using the damned “Buckeye” fueling hose fittings, and they were a bear to get connected and unhooked after refueling. I don’t know who was going to do any tire changing or how we could even deal with that problem, since we were one man short. We were allowed a driver and three crewmen, but it was just Simpson, Ward and I that made the trip. I found out later that Simpson’s lawyer was our third man, but I guess he came down on a commercial flight on his own, and left before we did, because I’m sure he wasn’t on the airplane that the rest of left on after the race. He stayed at the home we were in while he was there though.

Our “Beagle” held the legal 75 gallons of fuel, but some of the cars held less, so there had to be pit stops for fuel to run 150 miles, but we would only need to fuel the left side tank. Even though we had 75 gallons onboard, it was doubtful that we could pick it all up, and I don’t think we could get 2 miles per gallon anyway. I am pretty sure that I had to refuel during both 150’s, because I swore that I would never refuel again. It was too dangerous to do this from a wheelchair! I am getting a little ahead of the story, but I wanted to point this out.

Before I get into the practice sessions and the strange things that happened during that, I am going to try to post some pictures of our “Beagle” to show the modifications that I did so that we could carry 75 gallons of fuel, and the aero mods.

[bluffman]

Re: Critical Mass - Blind Man's Bluff = SPLIT THREAD

The red car is the 1967 round tub Eagle that I started with, the other two pictures show the side fuel taks that were added, and the "semi- wedge" bodywork that extends the allowed 2 inches out over the rear tire. The nose was basic Eagle, but with my wings added. The bodywork over the engine added rear downforce, and the front wings balanced that out, adding front downforce. On the nose you can see my round "Beagle" decal. Maybe I can make a drawing of it and post it later. Simpson also had a "Snoopy" sewn on his drivers uniform. On the side view it can be seen in the blue section just below the Wynns patch.
Larry

[bluffman]

Re: Critical Mass - Blind Man's Bluff = SPLIT THREAD

Just in case anyone noticed my math on post 279, there was a contingent of drivers and USAC people who went early for Public Relations reasons, and I'm fairly sure it was 16 of them, and 50 USAC was sort of a humorous guess, because when we would try something sneaky, or borderline legal, 30 or so of them could make you think there was a lot more. ( should have pointed this out on that post, but sometimes when something humorous comes to mind, I start chuckling to myself, and skip a point or two.) I wish one of you airplane types would tell me how many people can fit in a 707! (more humor) I will try to constrain myself, but having been in auto racing for almost 50 years, we mechanics were always trying to pull something over on the tech people, and most of these schemes were pretty funny, not like now in NASCAR where they see no humor in such antics, and fine a crew chief $10,000.00 for a lot less than we did.
Larry

[bluffman]

Re: Critical Mass - Blind Man's Bluff = SPLIT THREAD

Things finally got organized, and we were allowed to go on the track for practice. There were a few spins, and small driver errors, but the only one that I recall that was a real crash, was Dick Simon. He hit the wall hard, but the worse damage was to the nosecone. It was destroyed, and there were no spares, he was the only one with Lola cars, and his second car was assigned to a local Argentina driver, and it had a different type nose anyway. Dick felt that he was done, but some local tinsmith told him that he could make him a new one out of aluminum, overnight. Yeah, sure! Everyone that knew about Simon’s plight was rather dubious that this guy could pull this off, but he must have been a magician or something, because he did just as he had said he could do. Simon was back in business.

Simpson ran a few laps, and came in and we made some adjustments, and Ward pulled the spark plugs to see how our fuel jetting was, and we sent him back out. Everything looked good, and he got some more laps of practice in. In Argentina at about noon or so they would shut everything down for what I think was about an hour. “Siesta Time”! This made us crazy, we had never heard of such a thing, we had a race to prepare for. After this was over we were allowed to go back on the track. Simpson ran a few more laps, and “Boom”, our Offy blew up, and of course we had no spare engine. Someone came by and said that Grant King had a spare, and Simpson went to see him and made a deal, so Jim and I did an engine change, so now we were back in business too, like Simon. Simpson didn’t run it very hard, but we made the show, qualifying 16th, I think. It didn’t matter where he started, because anything that was runnable was going to start the race anyway.

When you started one of these “Indy” engines you would put in a higher heat range spark plug, and once it was warmed up they would be replaced with a colder plug for running on the track. We would put the hot plugs on the workbench, and every time we did this these spark plugs would disappear, stop watches, and small tools, also. Simpson had brought along a lot of Wynns decals, ball point pens, key chains, and other promotional items, and most of the other teams had also. The locals there went bananas over this stuff. They all wanted souvenirs from the “Indy 300 de Rafael, and the more the merrier. At the house we were staying in, they had a maid, or maybe she was a housekeeper, I don’t know what they called them there, but she, ( I don’t know why, but I remember her name, Agraspina Corneyo) would also do our laundry. We noticed that our supply of Simpson T- shirts was getting smaller, and our blue jeans also. This mysterious disappearance of things would be brought to light come raceday.

I have just got to mention a couple of more things not race related, my humorous side is beckoning. It was a custom there that when you were a guest, in order to be courteous ,you had to sit on the kitchen table, and smoke a lot of cigarettes, and throw the butts on the floor. This would be a real scene when they would also invite ten or twelve “cousins”. Luckily they had tile floors. Another thing was that we always had dinner there, and the lady of the house would do the cooking. It was always pretty good, but she only served one thing at a time, first might be beans, then potatoes, then some meat dish and so on. One night we came in from the track, and she had a steak in her hand, and in Spanish, she said that tonight we would have beefsteak. The steak that she had shown us was a nice size, and we were looking forward to this dinner. While we were cleaning up (more about this after the dinner) we heard this banging noise that went on and on, it sounded like a bunch of union carpenters building something. Dinner time came, and we could hardly wait for the steak. This lady brought out what looked like a bowl of potato chips, and with a big smile said, “beefsteak”. All of that noise was her pounding that one steak so thin that it really did look like potato chips, enough to feed six of us to her thinking.

Now I’ve got to explain “cleaning up”. They had a bath tub that looked just like we have here, but the way they used it was that they would place a bucket of warm water in the tub, and you would wash yourself , and then dump it over your head to rinse the soap off, then dry off with a towel. Using my trusty Spanish/ English dictionary I explained that I wanted the tub filled with warm water up to a spot I showed them, and I would sit in that water and take a bath. They thought this was hilarious, and were sure that I must be joking. Somehow in the translation they decided that maybe I was crazy, but they would appease me by doing it my way. They heated up bucket after bucket of water and when I indicated that it was enough, I closed the door and climbed into the tub. Man, it felt great, but then the door opened, and there were these ladies looking in and pointing at me and laughing like hell. It was rather embarrassing, but I just kept on doing my crazy bath. Each night after that my tub would be filled with water, but I could always hear them snickering.
Larry