It Wasn't Cheating When Smokey Did It...Mostly
09/27/2013
PattyKay
Lilley
Since
returning to the ranks of motorsports journalism almost two years ago, I've had
many young fans ask for stories of those gone before. Last night I enjoyed a
Twitter conversation with a lovely young lady and somewhere in there, the
NASCAR Hall of Fame crept into our discussion. Once again I stated my fears
that too many of the old-timers will be passed by eventually because no one
will remember their names at the present rate of admission. She was quick to
answer that she loved going back and reading about all of them, but that there
really wasn't enough on the Internet to give a full picture most times.
That is
the case, more often than not. They want to learn, but aren't sure where to
learn or what to learn. It's the reason I started writing and the reason I returned
to it. Thinking back this morning of our conversation, one name stands out as
someone that should never, ever be forgotten, yet NASCAR shuns this man to the
point that he is not even on the Hall of Fame list of nominees. I know, and
I'll tell you right up front, that is because he and Big Bill France had a
serious disagreement many years ago... the kind of "disagreement"
that was had between the Hatfields and the McCoys, if you take my meaning. Apparently, like that pair of
feuding families, a grudge is still carried by the third generation down of the
France family against this man.
His name
is (was) Henry "Smokey" Yunick, and the admiration I have always felt
for him, no human tongue can adequately tell. What you are about to read is not
new. It was, in fact, written within a year of Smokey's death in 2001, though
it may have seen an update in spelling and grammar a time or two. Given all the
recent attention being paid to "cheating," I can think of no better
time to offer all of you once again my tribute to the greatest
"innovator" of all time. This brief résumé of his life and
accomplishments is offered in loving memory of a great man.
**
Language Warning** This article contains many direct quotes, some of which
entail language you might not deem suitable for your ten-year old, but I would
not presume to change one word this man ever spoke.
Have you
ever answered one of those infernal magazine or Internet quizzes that ask you
all sorts of probing questions? I think we probably all have. One of those
questions is quite likely to be “If you could have a conversation with one
person, living or dead, who would it be?” Most folks reply to that with answers
such as “George Washington” or “Jesus” or some great entertainer or world
leader. Well, I was a race fan long before I was a wife or mother or
grandmother, and the person I think I most regret never having met is Henry
“Smokey” Yunick.
I can
already see heads shaking and hear some asking, “Who is that?” Well, walk with
me down Memory Lane for a bit and I’ll try to tell you all about Smokey,
although there really is not enough room on this page to do him justice. To put
it concisely, he was quite simply the best auto mechanic that ever held a wrench,
and had a mind that was probably right on a par with Albert Einstein.
That’s
not only my opinion, gentle readers. If you ask anyone in the NASCAR garage or
the Indy garage, you’ll hear the same.
H.A. “Humpy Wheeler” of Charlotte Motor Speedway fame once said of
Smokey, "He was perhaps the most creative racing mechanic of the 20th
century, who not only thought outside of the box, but way up in the ionosphere.
To say he was a genius is not enough. His unique exploits in both Indy and
NASCAR are legendary, but his uncanny brain worked best when challenged by
extra horsepower. From his renowned 'secret' room at his Daytona shop where he
let no man enter, horsepower of impossible levels came forth and scored many
victories for legendary drivers like (Fireball) Roberts, (Herb) Thomas, Jim Rathmann, (Paul) Goldsmith and (Curtis) Turner."
That is
quite a surprising claim when you stop to think that we are talking of a man
who didn’t even actually own his own name. Smokey was raised in an orphanage
near Philadelphia, and the name Yunick was given to him there. He gained the
name Smokey while driving his Indian motorcycle during a race at Langhorne
Speedway. The announcer didn't know his name, but his big Indian was putting
out a lot of smoke, so he just called him, "Smokey,” and it stuck with him
for life.
[Author's note: Before you write
to correct the text, I have certainly read Smokey's epic three-volume edition
of "The Best Damn Garage in Town (The World According to Smokey)" In
it, he describes growing up on a farm with a complete set of parents. However,
long before he wrote that book, he claimed in several print publications, to
have been an orphan. That is the path I chose here, only because it made for a
better story. Please note that somewhere in the article, I refer to Smokey as a
"story teller", and he was...
~PattyKay]
He never
acquired much formal education either, stopping midway through high school, but
there is more than one means of becoming educated. Smokey himself once said,
"Some of the best books in the world can be bought for a quarter.” He not
only bought them but also read and understood every word on every page of books
dedicated to sciences far above the ken of most of us.
During
World War II, Smokey was a B-17 bomber commander and flew 52 missions over
Europe, Africa and the Pacific Theater. He was wounded once, and was shot down
over Poland on another mission. While ferrying planes between Miami and New
Jersey, the young pilot was fascinated by an area he flew over repeatedly. That
area was Daytona Beach, Florida, and once back home in New Jersey after the
war, he decided that was where he wanted to settle. Never being one to waver,
Smokey packed up his belongings and headed South in 1946.
In those
days, the biggest industry in Daytona Beach was auto racing, so that was where
Smokey concentrated his efforts. Within a year, he had opened Smokey’s
Automotive, and had hung a sign outside, proclaiming it to be “The Best Damn
Garage in Town.” Smokey said that he registered that name, so that no one else
could claim to be what he knew he was.
When Big
Bill France began tossing out the idea of forming a sanctioning body for stock
car racing, Smokey was right there. As he put it, “I started in NASCAR from day
one.” He was both a car owner and a mechanic back then, and sometimes both. His
early drivers included Marshall Teague and the late, great Glenn “Fireball”
Roberts, along with Herb Thomas, Banjo Matthews and Curtis Turner.
With
Yunick preparing the cars, Herb Thomas won NASCAR Grand National (The
forerunner of Winston Cup) championships in 1951 and 1953, in addition to
finishing runner-up twice. Together that pair won 39 races over four years.
Another notable success for Smokey was capturing four of the first eight stock
car races held at Daytona, three of which featured Fireball Roberts as the
driver of that now-famous black and gold car. In 1960, he was the chief
mechanic on Jim Rathmann’s winning car in the
Indianapolis 500.
The list
of men who drove Smokey's racecars over the years is a veritable Who's Who of
American Racing. In addition to the names already mentioned, you can add A.J.
Foyt, Bobby Allison, Mario Andretti, Tony Bettenhausen,
Junior Johnson, Gordon Johncock, Lloyd Ruby, Johnny
Rutherford, Mickey Thompson, Paul Goldsmith, Billy Vukovich,
Jr., Bobby Isaac, and many others. From that list, it becomes obvious that he
spread his talents and knowledge throughout several racing venues.
Over the
years, several of those venues showed their appreciation of his many
contributions to racing and safety issues. Smokey was honored by the Indiana
Section of the Society of Automotive Engineers with its Louis Schwitzer Award for Engineering Innovation and Excellence
in 1973, for his development of the stock-block Chevy engine at the Indy 500.
In 1984, the National Motorsports Press Association inducted him into its Hall
of Fame at Darlington (SC) Raceway, and six years later, he was inducted into
the International Motorsports Hall of Fame at Talladega (AL) Superspeedway.
Most
folks are quite familiar with the Chevy “small block” V-8 engine that was
introduced in 1955 and is still in use today. That was Smokey’s design and
creation, and it remains a lasting tribute to him.
Much of
what Smokey did when NASCAR was in its infancy was subjected to suspicion and
scrutiny, with claims of cheating directed at him from all sides. Smokey
described it as being innovative.
According
to Smokey, “If you go back to 1950, you had the whole goddamn car to so-called
be creative with. All right, now we've had 50 years of racing, 50 years of
refining it, which are the collective efforts of all the smart people in the
United States, and now the things that I would get disqualified for cheating
are absolutely legal today.”
Continuing
along that train of thought he said, "Ninety percent of the so-called
cheating that was innovated, it wasn't cheating," He gave the example of a
Chevrolet he entered at the Daytona 500 in 1968. "There was no rule on how
big the gas line could be. Everyone else ran a 5/8-inch gas line. That was
adequate to supply the race engine with gas, no question about it. I chose to
run a two-inch gas line, which was obviously much too big, but it was 11 feet
long and it held five gallons of gas. Nobody ever specified size. A week after
the race, the gas line couldn't be over a half-inch in diameter. The day that I
did it, it was not illegal. That's how most all these innovations - so-called
cheating - was not cheating the day it was done."
Of
course, having told you that, it’s only fair that I give you the other side of
the coin and tell you what Smokey said in later years. He claimed to have run
an illegal supercharger for several years in the late 1950s, one of his most
successful periods as a racer.
"As
far as cheating goes, they'll never stop it. There will always be some guy
that'll think of something that's a little smarter than the average cat, but
the reason there ain't any more of it on a big scale is that the only way it
can be done successfully, only one person can know about it. And if there's
only one person to know about it, like I was running supercharged Pontiacs and
nobody knew about it. Nobody who worked for me knew it, had no idea that the
engine was supercharged.”
That
conversation went on to say that he just got too tired, staying up all night to
work when no one else was around. Whether the story of the supercharged engine
was true or fancy, I’ll leave up to you. Smokey was not above telling some good
stories that sometimes conflicted with each other.
When it
came to aerodynamics, Yunick was far ahead of his time. "Smokey was so far
ahead of all of us in the aerodynamic downforce part of it. He could take a car
and cut it all to pieces and work on it," said “Little Bud” Moore.
"There's no way we could have done some of the stuff he did."
"Smokey
was real good. He did all kinds of stuff. He was smart," agreed David
Pearson. "He had a little spoiler put on top of it [his car] to keep air
from getting down on it. You could see it, but you had to look at it close. It
was back there at the rear window on the roof."
Now-deceased
NASCAR historian, Bob Latford, once said of Smokey,
"Some of the great [aerodynamic] innovations in those regards came from
Smokey. Smokey was ... running about a 15/16-scale car, just downsized so it
made a smaller hole through the wind and therefore would be quicker. He used to
take a half-inch out here and a quarter-inch out there and the car looks about
the same until it's parked right next to another one that's actual
(size)."
As good
as he had become at the science of “seeing the air” Smokey regretted that he
hadn’t figured that out years sooner than he did. "I didn't know my ass
from a hole in the ground about handling. I concentrated on horsepower,
horsepower, horsepower! I won 58 races in NASCAR, but
I would have won a lot more if it hadn't taken me until 1960 to realize there
was more to racing than horsepower. We usually had the fastest car, but in
those early days, we were probably 10 years ahead of the tires and I would wake
up many a time after dreaming about the two booms - first the tire and then the
car into the wall. It took me until '67 to do something about it," he
added, "And I only lasted three more years before I got mad with France
and quit. So about the time I learned something about a chassis, I wasn't there
anymore."
That quote
refers to the fact that after a quarrel with Big Bill France (Those two had
never seen eye to eye on most things) at the 1971 Daytona 500, Smokey
essentially retired from NASCAR racing. I say essentially, because he kept
right on coming to the races, but he never again competed as a mechanic or as a
car owner and the two rarely if ever spoke until France’s death in 1992. In
Smokey’s own words, "Bill France had total control. It was a dictatorship.
France got rich, and there was a whole bunch of us who started this thing who
didn't live through it. A lot of them died early and they didn't deserve to die
..." As caustic as that sounds (And Smokey was always that way. You always
knew where you stood at least), I’m sure that somewhere there is a quote of equal
acidity by Bill France about Smokey Yunick.
Smokey
became a bit obsessed with “the two booms” and drivers dying as what he saw as
unnecessarily. Sometime after 1964, which is often referred to as the worst
year in motorsports (because so many died in crashes that year), he turned his
many talents toward racing safety and worked diligently over the years to make
things better for “his” drivers. You see, in his mind they were all his
drivers, no matter in what venue they raced or in what country for that matter.
The man you saw at the track wearing a white flat-topped cowboy hat and a white
jacket with a blue oval on the back (Best Damn Garage in Town) was actually a
mother hen, worrying about the safety of the chicks. He felt responsible
because he had developed so much of the technology that made the cars go
faster, "But somebody," he said, "needs to save the poor, dumb
bastards from themselves."
In the
early 90’s, with the Brickyard 400 about to be added to the schedule at
Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Smokey was invited to inspect the new concrete
wall that had been erected in anticipation of the much heavier stock cars.
Smokey’s comment on that was, “What about the drivers? All you’re gonna do with
this is kill ‘em deader, quicker.”
That
motivated Smokey to go to work on creating a moveable "soft" barrier.
It would soften the blows of crashes; it would move on impact, so it wouldn't
"snag" or "catch" the cars. (Does any of that sound
familiar?) In Smokey’s version though, there was a self-replenishing supply of
the core material, used racing tires, bound tightly together in stacks, with
thin steel rods. That barrier was ignored as “unnecessary” by the entire racing
world until the death of Dale Earnhardt at the 2001 Daytona 500. Shortly before
that fatal race, an ill and dying Smokey Yunick said of his neglected
invention, “Guess nobody’s interested.” Remember, his version of the barrier
was created in the early 90’s. I wonder how the pages of history might have
been changed if someone had been interested.
As he
had all of his life, in his later days Smokey Yunick had opinions and was not
loath to share them. On latter-day NASCAR racing, he opined that it should not
be called racing. “Between 1947 and the year 2000, we had racing and then
something that came after it - whatever name you want to put on it," he
said. "I am not criticizing it. This is by far several hundred times more
successful than we were, but, if I was a racer, then these guys competing today
aren't. And if these guys are racers, then I never was.”
"That
doesn't mean I consider that we were better, nor do I
consider them better than us. The fact is this doesn't resemble what we had,
what we started out with. It doesn't mean it is bad. It is now operating as
entertainment and has nothing to do with the sport. When we started, my
pleasure was, the reason I did it, was I'd like to step out on the line Sunday
morning and pull my pants up and say, 'Let's have a race.' If I won, I was
happy. And if I didn't, I was already thinking about what I was going to change
next week to beat their ass.”
At
another time, he offered yet another thought on the modernization of stock car
racing. “Maybe I'm not seeing it right, but I feel sorry for those coming
behind me. Looks like the freedom to do the things I did are being lost with
thousands of new laws restricting what you can or can't do. Hell, in the
beginning, race winnings weren't even taxed. Now you can't turn around without
permission. In the early days, you didn't need a lot of money to race. You
raced for the fun and for the hell of it. Big money did try to come in and take
over racing, but it always failed. Now, big money's got a good grip on auto
racing. If you are wired in, that's fine, but if you are trying to break in,
there is a mighty tough fence you're gonna have to cut through! I guess it's
really better to look at racing today in a different way. It's no longer a
sport; it's show business.”
On
“cheating”, which he was so often accused of himself, he said, "They will
find out there is no way to police creativity. No way in hell! There's always
some guy who comes along like Ray Evernham that's smarter than the average cat,
and he's going to figure out a way to get around it. The difference between
Gary Nelson's ability to think and Ray Evernham's -
well, probably there's not a lot of difference in their IQs, but Evernham
concentrates on engines and certain areas with a lot of expensive, very
educated help. For 60 hours a week, he's studying new stuff to beat the rules.
Gary Nelson is spending 50 hours a week trying to enforce the rules that were
made yesterday. They're not even in the same game."
That,
gentle readers, was Smokey Yunick, for better or worse. He was eccentric, he
was profane and he was the ultimate curmudgeon. With all that put aside, he was
brilliant! He was a genius! He did more for the sport of auto racing than any
other single man in the history of the sport.
His last
years were not kind to Smokey. He suffered from various illnesses including
bone cancer and leukemia. Nearing the end of his life, he turned up unannounced
at Charlotte and had this to say:
"I've
had a lot of trouble the past year. I've had everything diagnosed except
pregnancy. I think they don't really know what's wrong with me. I've been
treated for bone cancer, everything you could think of. Finally, about a month ago, I took all the
medicine there was and threw it in the trash can. I told the doctor, 'I'm done with this shit.'
If I'm going to die, I'm going to die. Don't even talk to me about it
anymore.'"
"I
picked up horsepower, about 70 percent. I feel 100 percent better. I came away
from wheelchairs, those things you push, canes. Now I'm walking by myself - all
that in 20 days. I just went up and down. I didn't know what was happening. I was
so weak I couldn't do nothing. I really didn't want to
live because I couldn't do nothing. I'm starting to
get back in the ballgame. I may be going to drop dead because I won't take the
medicine, but I ain't taking no more. If I'm going to die, let's get it over
with. I'm headed for 78 now, and I've had enough of everything, with no
regrets. I had a good life."
Well,
gentle readers, that life ended on May 9, 2001, less than three months after we
said “good-bye” to Dale Earnhardt. Again, one might wonder if there was a
connection. Did the best mechanic finally give up when the best driver was
taken too soon? Was that final contact with the concrete too much to bear for
the man who’d had a way to make it better leaning against a wall in his garage
for ten years? We’ll never know the answer to those moot questions. Both are
gone, so who is left to answer?
I’ll
leave the final epitaph to Championship winning crew chief (1989) Barry Dodson,
who said of Smokey Yunick, “"I think he was years ahead of his time in
some of the aerodynamic things. One of the Chevelles
he had is up in Richard Childress' museum now, and every time I go over there,
I take time to look at that car. I think how could anybody
have that mind and that ingenuity 20 years before anybody else, before we had
the use of the wind tunnels and all the data that we have from the
manufacturers. He was way, way ahead of his time."
Have I
made it clear why Smokey Yunick would be my answer to the quizzical question? I
promise you that I would happily have sat for hours at the feet of the master,
just for the privilege of hearing him speak. To be in the presence of true
genius is an awesome thing and I know I would have found it with Smokey Yunick.
I truly envy those who did.
I hope
you’ve enjoyed this trip down Memory Lane. I hope that I’ve brought back a few
pleasant recollections and perhaps a smile or two to those of you nearer my
age. To my younger readers and the newer fans, I’m happy that you decided to
take the trip with us. Stock car racing has a rich and colorful history and it
would be a shame for all of it to be left in dusty books on a library shelf.
Please, keep reading about it. Read anything and everything you can find. I
promise that you’ll enjoy seeing some of the wonderful folks who built this
sport come alive on the pages.
With all
due respect to Smokey Yunick, the racer, the mechanic, the inventor, the genius
and most of all, the man, I’ll close with Smokey’s life-long motto, “All right
you sons of bitches, let’s have a race!”
Be well gentle readers and remember to keep smiling. It looks so good on you!
~
PattyKay