The Birds, The Bees And The Porsches

The 12 hours of Sebring is the most popular road race in the U.S. Why this should be so is not exactly clear, and probably never will be. It is neither the longest race nor the fastest, nor does it draw the most spectators, and those who attend have to go through a masochistic hellfire and damnation (the nearest commercial airport is 1� hours' drive away) even to find the track—a crumbling airstrip six miles outside a small central Florida town, located amid orange groves on top of the East Coast's largest sand box.

And when they do get there, the fun just begins. A select few hundred stay in two pastel-pink luxury hotels, circa 1920s Florida land boom-bust, and pay up to $50 a night for the privilege of hearing a sequined blonde Czechoslovakian massacre songs in nine languages. During the race, the beautiful people sip champagne in the paddock. That takes care of the Eastern white-turtleneck set. The rest, using fraternity-house ingenuity, make do in the infield and drink beer. Surprisingly, everybody smiles.

As Phil Hill, the American driver who won at Sebring three times and now does TV comment, said with a smile, "I know why I'm here, but I'm a bit prejudiced. I'm not sure why people come to see the race. It's nostalgic, I suppose."

Sebring, one of the first U.S. tracks to revive European-style road racing after World War II, held the first United States Grand Prix in 1959 and nearly every famous driver of the last 18 years has raced there at one time or another. More important, it serves as a sort of gathering of the racing clan, international division. Maybe that's all it takes.

Nostalgia or masochism or whatever, 25,000 people were at Sebring last week (about three times as many as saw the 24-hour run at the antiseptic Daytona International Speedway, Sebring's intrastate rival, seven weeks earlier) to watch the little Porsche prototypes do what everybody knew they would—win the second of the season's American sports-car endurance races. The first of Porsche's top two finishers was driven by Jo Siffert of Switzerland and Hans Herrmann of Germany, and it won at an average speed of 102.512 miles per hour, less than a mile an hour slower than last year's record, set by Mario Andretti and Bruce McLaren in the big, but now-outlawed, Mark IV Ford.

For all the 25,000 fans, the happiest fellow at Sebring was the man who started it 18 years ago, Alec Ulmann, the Russian-born MIT graduate whose "honest profession," as he puts it, is representing airplane-parts companies in Europe.

"Before World War I," Ulmann said, "American and European racing, and automobiles, were about equal, but after the war U.S. promoters wanted the most return on the littlest bit of real estate, and they naturally turned to oval racing. That killed U.S. automotive design and engineering for years.

"After World War II, I wanted to try and keep some semblance of European racing over here, and that's why I started the Sebring races. When Bill France built Daytona in 1959 I offered to go in with him—if he would build a separate road course apart from the big oval. He didn't go for it. So what's he got? Sports cars running there look like a can of worms on those banks. But he makes money and I don't."

A friend of Ulmann's, John Paul Stack, a Cornell man and former amature Bentley driver who manages the Harvard Club in New York and who has been at every Sebring race, said, " Sebring has its tradition. It's bigger now than it was in the early '50s, of course. Back then you knew everybody, but there's still a lot of the old intimacy left."

While the more traditional sports-car set held firm in the end, during the race it looked like good old American ingenuity just might take a swipe at all those European types. First to dig in was James Garner, the movie star turned racing nut, who brought out a pair of Chevrolet-powered Lolas, one of which, driven by Californians Scooter Patrick and David Jordan, actually led the race for most of the first 2� hours before a steering problem forced it to drop back.