Auto Racing: USAC

AUTO RACING: USAC

The founding of USAC

In the major leagues of auto racing there are two types of cars: Indianapolis, or Indy-type racers, made expressly for the race course and undrivable on public roads are the sleekest; stock cars, radically modified versions of automobiles available in dealer showrooms, run at about the same speed as the Indy racers and seem closer to life to many race fans, especially in the South. The United States Auto Club (USAC), the governing body for Indy-type racers, was formed in September 1955 by the owner of the Indianapolis Speedway, Tony Hulman. The Indianapolis 500 has since 1911 been the most respected automobile race in America, and Hulman wanted to be sure it stayed that way. USAC ran a full season of racing and named a champion each year, but the crowning event of the season was the Indianapolis 500.

New Cars for a New Age

During the 1960s Indianapolis was under assault from new kinds of cars with new kinds of engines. Colin Chapman, the respected British carmaker whose Lotus chassis had carried its drivers to Grand Prix championships in Europe, developed a revolutionary Indianapolis car; Ford brought its engineering expertise to the track and by the end of the decade had replaced the venerable Offenhauser engine; car owner Andy Granate Ili introduced the turbine engine that protesting drivers said should be outlawed because it was better suited to power airplanes than race cars.

A. J. Foyt

The most successful USAC driver of the decade was a brash, cocky, temperamental young man named A. J. Foyt, Jr., who proclaimed, "All I want to do is win. It just makes me madder than hell to lose." Foyt was twenty-six in 1960, the year he won his first USAC championship. He won that title again in 1961, 1963, 1964, and 1967. In addition, he won the Indianapolis 500 in 1961 and 1964; in 1967, twelve days after winning the twenty-four-hour race at Le Mans in a Ford Mark IV prototype, a much different car from the Indy-type racer, he won his third Indianapolis 500 in record-breaking time (averaging 151.207 MPH) in a rear-engine Coyote-Ford that he designed himself. His 1967 Indianapolis win brought him a purse of $171,227.

European "Funny Cars."

The first signs that Indy racers were about to be transformed appeared in 1961, when Australian driver Jack Brabham qualified for the race with a modified grand prix car that Foyt said looked like "a bunch of pipes lashed up with chicken wire." The car was called a European "funny car," in derision of the Formula One racers that were run on the European grand prix circuit. Before the European invasion Indy cars were more or less uniform: 96-inch wheelbase, tubular frame, solid axles front and back, with 18-inch tires on the back and 16-inch tires on the front. The engine was a four-cylinder, 256-cubic-inch Offenhauser mounted in front of the driver. The car weighed about 1,700 pounds.

Colin Chapman

Prompted by Brabham's respectable showing, grand prix driver Dan Gurney invited British designer Colin Chapman to the 1962 Indianapolis 500 as a spectator. Chapman went home and designed three cars for Indianapolis. They were rear-engine, independent-suspension cars with modified Ford Faklane engines that developed 370 horsepower, about 80 horsepower less than the Offenhausers. But Chapman's Lotus cars weighed only 1,150 pounds; in 1963 at Indianapolis they were driven by Gurney and the greatest race-car driver of the day, Scots sheep farmer Jimmy Clark. That year, in a car with a suspension not yet tuned for the two-and-a-half-mile oval at Indianapolis and on a track slippery at the end of the race with oil thrown from the engine of race leader Parnelli Jones, Clark spun out three times in the turns and showed his driving skill each time by clutching, revving his engine to prevent it from stalling while he gained control of the car, and continuing on his way to a second-place finish. In 1965, with a new Ford engine, Clark and Colin Chapman won the race. By the end of the decade Ford had replaced Offenhauser as the engine of choice, and Chapman's Lotus chassis was the most respected design at Indianapolis.

Turbine Power

In 1967 owner Andy Granatelli, who had tried for eighteen years to field an Indy winner, entered a turbine-powered car in the race. It was a revolutionary design that swooshed rather than roared down the sraightaways. Driven by Parnelli Jones, who seemed ruthless in pursuit of victory, Granatelifs car, called the STP Special, seemed clearly superior. Jones led for most of the race; then with three laps remaining a six-dollar ball bearing in the gearbox failed, and Jones was unable to continue. A month after the race, USAC changed the rules to limit the power the turbine could generate.

Source:

Charles Fox, The Great Racing Cars & Drivers (New York: Grasset & Dunlap, 1972).