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TVR:
Any idea how many wins you had overall?
Rick:
No. I know that I had 26 straight wins in Formula Vee. I don't think
anyone's matched that. There was a minimum of 40 cars in each race. We
were torn down like
every other race for a while, until they got tired of tearing us down.
They found out we were really legal. Normally, the people who were having
us torn down were illegal. <laughs> You know how that goes. But, we
just concentrated on driving hard.
TVR:
I'm going to throw some names at you, so you can tell us your thoughts
about them.
Rick:
Okay...
TVR:
Let's start with Buck Guilfoy.
Rick:
Nice guy! Good driver... I was running sports cars, then all of a sudden
I'm on dirt. You know, umm... he passed me on a start one time and I
learned a big lesson! <laughs> I didn't know exactly when to get the
hammer down. <laughs> Bucky's just a good friend, good racer, good all round
guy.
TVR:
Ray Cable?
Rick: Just a real nice guy... got his engines from Holman &
Moody. His wife was the ticket collector when you'd go into Lincoln
Speedway. She was very nice.
TVR:
Johnny Roberts?
Rick: He was just a great
driver. He was killed at Lincoln. Sort of a freak kind of a thing.
TVR:
Mark Donohue?
Rick: Mark was a Brown
Graduate, had an engineering degree. He was a round faced kid. This guy,
Dr. Ben Poster, he was a dentist who lived a block down from my mother's
house. Ho sort of like took Mark in. Mark was doing okay, but he ran out
of money. He sort of set up Archway Ford and he drove a 350 GT at first.
Before that, he drove a couple cars. Not too many people know that he
drove a Daimler. A Daimler didn't have any brakes. He built that motor
down at Ben Poster's garage. Up at Reading, we were racing up there and he
ended up on the back of a Porsche, he couldn't stop the car and that's
what ended his career there, for a little while.
A fellow named Walt Hanston was a big
driver for Cunningham in those days. He was also the test driver for the
GT 40's and for Ford. When he was killed, Mark sort of took over his
position, as it were. Penske had the opportunity to either be a businessman, or
a racer, and decided to be a businessman. They teamed up and of course the
rest is history.
TVR:
Paul Newman?
Rick: Interesting guy. He came
out of the hills when I was racing up at Lime Rock. He wanted to know
about racing. He'd always been interested in racing. He had shorts on and
a black and white striped shirt on, looked like a prison shirt, and we
just got talking. Then he came down to Summit Point and went through
school, got his license. If he'd started when he was 21, he probably be
one of the very best drivers. He's by far the very best driver, as far as
a movie star type driver. Dick Smothers was probably the worst. Steve
McQueen wasn't too bad.
But, Paul was sort of a person you
wouldn't think... he wasn't that kind of a showman, or anything. He just
did his thing. When he did the movie Grand Prix, with James Garner, he
surprised a lot of drivers, a lot of professional drivers... Formula 1
drivers. He did most of his own driving. Of course during the race, I
think it was Chris Aimen that was really driving the Grand Prix's. He was a
pretty good driver. But, Paul Newman by far was... is the best.
He didn't like people hovering over him
for autographs, he was there to race. One time, a friend of mine had
bought Ed Lowther's old Cobra. He had burned a piston, we had the engine
apart, we were gonna fix it. We were trying to hide Newman, so we just
flopped him over a fender and stuck his head in the engine bay and he fell
asleep for a couple of hours. <laughs> Nobody bothered him.
Yeah, he's really interesting. He use to
have these T-shirts, if you looked real close they had these little sexual
orgies on them.
He was running his Datsun, Bob Sharp's
Datsun, and he was sponsored by Pioneer ... radios. My car was close to
his on the starting grid and when I climbed into my car, he had put a
Pioneer sticker where the radio should be on my dash. I could see him
laughing in my rear view mirror. It was kind of funny.
TVR: Jackie
Stewart?
Rick: The guy
was a safety conscious guy... overly safety conscious. In fact, since I
belonged to the Marlboro... Washington, DC Region and I was helping out,
as well as driving. He demanded that umm... he could not see the edge of
the track at night time, for the 12-hour. So, here I am with a can of
white paint and brush, painting the outside of the track, on the edges of
the track so that Jackie Stewart could see the track. It didn't help him
in the race.
TVR:
Any other notable people from your career that come to mind?
There was a guy named Bob Johnson from the mid-west. He was a Cobra
driver.
When I ran the Cobras,
that was for Jim Sutter. We had early sponsorship... you were only allowed
200 square inches of sponsor space on your car. After we came back from
Daytona one time, the car was just loaded with stickers. They never made
us take them off.
Jim Sutter would get
sponsorship... a little bit from Ford and a little bit from Autolite...
and tire sponsorships. He was really... he taught me a lot about
sponsorship. Jim Sutter was the guy who really catapulted my career. In
fact, if it weren't for him... later on, that Mustang... I thought he'd
sold that car to the guy I was driving for. As it turns out, that was just
on loan, just so I would have a ride. He was a driver as well, but I could
drive as fast as I wanted. There were certain driver's
"sponsors", if you will, that they'll sponsor you as long as you
didn't drive faster than them. That was kind of hard to contain... truly.
Tom Heyser was another one. It wouldn't dent their ego. So, I had free
reign, but there were times I didn't have free reign. Of course, those
people we wont mention. <laughs>
Jim got us sponsorship
from Hank Manley, Manley Speed Equipment. He gave us a tour of his
facilities up in Pennsylvania and showed us how they made valves, which
was really interesting. Each valve has three pieces, I didn't know that.
There was a soft area, there was a hardened area where it rubbed the cam
and umm... it was kind of interesting because Traco, everybody thought
Traco valves were the greatest valves there were. These people set up all
these motors and it turned out they weren't Traco valves, they were Manley
valves. As time progressed, Manley's now involved in everything.
Hank Manley now runs vintage sports cars. He has a Lotus 23 that he runs.
Its kind of interesting how people still stay in the sport.
TVR:
You also taught racing, didn't you?
Rick: I was
the chief instructor for a number of years in the DC region, yeah. I
really enjoyed that. I really enjoyed teaching.
TVR: Can you tell
us a few of the more notable drivers who came through the school?
Rick: Well... Paul Newman, Bob Holbert's son, Bob Holbert Jr., he
ran Porsches. He was killed in a DC-3. There was just a lot of people.
This gal, Arlene Hiss, she tried to qualify for Indy, but couldn't. Janet
Guthrie. Over the years, there have been tons and tons of super guys who
had done very well.
I found that the females
did better than the men, most of the time. Because, they were there to
learn, where the men had this ego thing where they already knew how to
drive... until you scared the hell out of them, then they'd realize. You
didn't intentionally scare the hell out of them. But, when you go down the
straight and then they think there's no way you can possibly slow down
enough for that turn and they see the trees coming up... that gets their
attention. I always told them, "If I'm instructing you, just do it my
way. Then you develop your own style. Later on you can do it anyway you
want. You're being graded on what I'm teaching you, so you'd better do it
this way for the time being." I'd try to keep it safe... try to keep
it fast. I use to go out on the track, actually, when they were running
and point where I think they should hit the apex, which most people didn't
do at that time. Now, apparently a lot of these driving schools do.
Bill Scott use to have a
school. They use to have the Ferrari people come run on a weekend. I would
help out there and get to drive all these exotic cars. And the Porsche
people use to come out for a school. They all had their, what do you call
them...lederhosen, or something like that. <laughs> That was kind of
interesting.
TVR:
Of all the cars you drove, which was your favorite?
Rick: I had a lot of favorites. Each one was, you know... a
different personality. The 906 (Porsche), with the 917 short tail bodied car was
probably one of my favorites, simply because I went very fast in it and I
shouldn't have. It was really designed for a very small person and I had
to lay down in the seat sideways. This was very difficult to drive because
my foot would cover all 3 pedals, for one thing. It was very hot, no air
got in there and all the hot oil ran through the tubes of the chassis. It
was unbearable. Cockpit temperatures were about 165º. It had really high
gears... it had LeMans gears and so I could only run two or three gears
and yet broke the track record at Summit Point, in a minute and nine
seconds. That was pretty damn quick in those days, on tires that were 3
years old, real hardened tires. They started doing the lower profile tires
and the car would drag on the ground. We had to use the tires that were on
it. I guess it was my favorite because I had to overcome so many
things.
But, there were other
favorites. The Lola Ford was really nice. I just enjoyed driving different
cars.
TVR:
Looking back... any regrets?
Rick: Nah... I'd do it the same way. I would have to do it the same
way. I could never have gotten where I went had I not done it that
way. I truly was one of the poorest drivers out there, financially, and I
drove some of the very finest machines out there.
You run against people,
like Mrs. Bowden, who is Dupont. You run against these type of people.
There was this one time, they were backing this car out of this trailer...
enclosed trailer, which in those days as almost unheard of, and it was a
birdcage Maserati. In those days, that cost $20,000. I said, "My
God... $20,000! My house didn't cost that." I was just flabbergasted
somebody would put that much money in a car. The person next to me said,
"What's $20,000 when you got a million?" That put in proper
perspective.
They had the Roosevelt
Racing Team, they had a car carrier, like the car carriers of today. They
had 6 racecars on there. Six Fiats, those little special things. I never
drove one of them. But, they would fly. This is who we were running
against. There was a President's Cup race. The President wasn't there, but
Gen. Curtis LeMay was, who actually ran for the presidency a little bit
later. He was the head of the Air Force at that time. It was a big deal.
And umm, you know, I raced against Dick Thompson... Bob Holbert Sr.,
and this new upstart, Penske. The birdcage Maserati was driven by a guy
named Gaston Andre. It was a hell of a race. But those were the type pf
people in those days and I was 21 years old. <laughs>
When I was a kid in Utah,
I was 12 & 13 years old, I was reading in... I think it was called
Auto Magazine. On the front cover was these Cunningham cars, white with a
blue stripe. Briggs Cunningham... Next thing I know, I'm a little older
and I met Briggs Cunningham. He gave me my first ride in an XKE Jaguar. He
was an importer for them and at VIR, he drove me around in that car. It
was the first one to ever come to this country. It wasn't a race car,
but... And to think, when I was just a few years younger, I was seeing his
cars when he was running at Lemans and all that. And of course, Carroll
Shelby picked up his color scheme on his cars. When I won that national at
Marlboro in the Cobra, Carroll Shelby's advertisement mentioned my name
and where it was. I mean, I heard about all these people and all of a
sudden I was in the midst of it all. It was pretty overwhelming for a
state worker. <laughs> To say the least! <laughs>
For lots of photos of
some of the cars Rick raced,
and to learn more about his racing career visit
Rick's Scrapbook
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