Speed With Style

Revson said he wanted to walk down to the Paddock Club. There was a one-man show of motor-racing paintings he wanted to see. He seemed unaware or unconcerned that he would have to walk half a mile or more through the crowds, and that when he got there he would be facing a window that looked out upon the spot where Cevert had died.

Revson paused during lunch to ponder Cevert's crash. He speculated about its cause: he talked about Cevert's considerable ability as a driver, wondering about the possibility of human error. He spoke almost as though Cevert had been a man he'd never known. He didn't mention Cevert's death again.

That afternoon I turned on the radio and heard the first sketchy reports of the Yom Kippur war. I stood with a beer in my hand, watching the pits, and I wondered about the racers and their world. It seemed to me they were so out of touch with everything that did not concern racing that they were taking a terrible chance. One of these days, I thought, these people are going to drive down a racetrack access road that leads to the main highway, and when they get there they are going to find the highway is gone. There will be nothing but wisps of smoke, some blackened fields and a twisted tree. While World War III had started and ended, these people will have been playing their reckless game, unaware they are the last humans left alive. Only the racers, their crews and their hangers-on would remain to wind out their lives gossiping about automobiles and racing. It would probably serve them right to have to spend the rest of their lives in each other's company, I thought.

The same day the Yom Kippur war started in the Middle East, the Mets were playing Cincinnati and the Orioles were at Oakland. "How's the war going?" I asked Revson.

"The war. Oh, the war." He looked at his watch. "You're right. The ball game's on."

"No, no," I said. "I mean the war. The goddamn war, Peter, the war between the Jews and the Arabs."

"Oh, that war. The Jews will win the war," he said positively and put his head to the side almost as though he were denying what he had just said. "The Jews always win when they play at home, don't they?"

Revson met his father on Sunday after the race. Taking only time to accept the cup awarded for the best combined finishes in the Canadian and U.S. GPs, he spent half an hour in close conversation with Martin Revson just outside the garage. After 30 minutes or so, he looked up to see they were tightly ringed by spectators, most of them with pens and scraps of paper. "You're too famous, Dad," he said, and led his father into the garage.

In the stall next to the McLarens was a medium-sized wooden crate, perhaps 5'x3'x3', its sides covered only by some rough cross-members with an address in England scrawled on them. Inside the crate were the remains of Cevert's Tyrrell. The last Grand Prix of an unremarkable year was over.