True Grit To The Last Lap

The place bludgeons the senses: sprint cars rip through the turns, blurring the vision with violet slides and battering the eardrums with their wicked detonations. But the setting is familiar. There is the sweet aroma of fresh hay and manure rising from the livestock barns, the temptation of the midway concessions, the distant chatter of carnival hawkers. This is the Florida State Fair Grounds, tucked in the center of Tampa at the confluence of interstate highways, and its locus is the shady bulk of the grandstand presiding over the rich textures of the half-mile dirt track.

Every year since the winter of 1921 the sprint cars have come here, testing men as few other machines can—slinging them around a rude oval lined with cement and corrugated steel in defiance of the laws of reason and physics. Sixty-six of the muscular racers have been brought to the 55th annual Tampa Winter National Sprints. They have come from the Midwest and the Great Plains and the heartland of the sprinters, the Pennsylvania Dutch country.

It has been part of the litany of effete motor sports enthusiasts to downgrade dirt-track racing as the high-speed groping of brave but dull antediluvians. These purists reason that if one does not whisk over hill and dale aboard a gossamer-frail formula machine, playing a fugue on a five-speed gearbox, gracefully veering both right and left, one is a primitive. Yet breeding runs as strong in sprinters as in the most advanced European Grand Prix car. European racing grew on networks of blocked-off public roads, while American competition was adapted to a different kind of venue, the half-and one-mile dirt horse-racing ovals of the towns and villages. Our domestic racing heritage, often sublimated by a provincial fascination for things continental, includes a thoroughbred lineage of makes such as Miller and Duesenberg and Offenhauser and Kurtis, and drivers on the order of Ralph DePalma and Jimmy Murphy (the first American to win a European Grand Prix) and Wilbur Shaw. A. J. Foyt, three-time winner of the Indianapolis 500, considers sprint racing on dirt the supreme driving challenge, as does Mario Andretti, another talented veteran of all types of competition.

"This is real Wild West racing," says Kenny Weld, a compact young man who has made a brilliant record on the rugged Pennsylvania circuit. "It's really more of an art than a craft. Some guys can do it for years and never go fast. If I didn't think it was the best racing in the world, I wouldn't be here," he says, climbing into his 550-hp, Chevy-powered sprinter with its classic high profile (the low-to-the-track rear-engine cars that run at Indianapolis and in Formula I are unsuitable for dirt-track competition). His car is the embodiment of function—a lean trusswork of chrome-steel tubing housing little more than the engine, a seat for the driver and the fuel cell. The tough, exquisitely basic suspension system composed of four torsion bars is perfectly suited to the brutal pounding of the rutted and furrowed track.

"There's not much money at Tampa," says Weld. "The track is miserable. It's unlike any other in the world; the surface changes from lap to lap and the dust has a gummy quality that sticks to your goggles. If you try to rub it off, it smears and the granules of sand scratch the lenses. Half the problem is vision, the other half is setting up the chassis, which is about impossible because the car is airborne most of the time. This is a pure ego thing. The best sprint car drivers in the nation are here, and if you win, you've done something. That's why we all come, but I'll tell you, this place is so rough I head north as fast as I can when it's over. I've got the thing blanked out of my mind by the time I hit the Georgia border."

When the oldtimers gather at Tampa, or at the other major sprint car championships in Phoenix or at Knoxville, Iowa, idle talk often escalates into arguments about the greatest sprint car driver of them all. The names of Gus Schrader, eight-time International Motor Contest Association champion; Tommy Hinnershitz, the smiling, iron-jawed Pennsylvania Dutchman; and Foyt are bandied about with noisy ardor. But more and more a new name is being heard, that of Jan Opperman, a shaggy, bead-draped Jesus freak from the wilds of Montana. This free spirit has given masterful exhibitions of controlling a car on dirt, and each day more and more sprint car men are admitting that this "durned hippie" is the best they have ever seen. Opperman, who temporarily left racing a number of years ago for the solitude of the California mountains, there to contemplate the more cosmic aspects of life, came back driving better than most of the heroes of the United States Auto Club's sprint car division and often winning—especially in races on dirt. He made his first appearance in the Indianapolis 500 last year and ran well, if briefly. But he will not go back because he refuses to "knock on every dude's door just to get a ride in his car." Opperman won three of five feature races in the 1974 Tampa Winter Nationals and returned this year with a new machine incorporating many things of his own design, including a Maltese (or Maltese-type) cross engraved on the nose. "Sprinters are the toughest full-tilt racing in the world and Tampa is neutral ground," he says. "Nobody has an edge at Tampa."

"This crazy place can assume four different personalities in one afternoon," says driver Chuck Amati, a dapper Alabaman with patent leather racing boots who endeared himself to Tampa fans with such hairy feats as flipping his car upside down—then plopping it back on its wheels and continuing with the race. "It will start out smooth and tacky, then it'll develop a soft dirt cushion. After that, the ruts will get so deep you can hardly keep the car right side up. Finally the sun will bake the surface hard and slick as asphalt. The worst thing is that damned sticky dust. We use layers of plastic lenses on our helmets called tearaways and when one gets dirty you just rip it off to expose the clean ones underneath. At most tracks you'll use three or four, but last year I started a race in this place with eight and I still ran the last few laps flyin' blind."

The races at Tampa unreel before packed grandstands, cars screeching through the narrow corners three abreast, flinging gouts of clay against the high fences. There are some accidents, one an awesome pileup in the third turn as four cars tumble and swivel through the air like wind-driven leaves, but, thanks to stout roll cages, no one is hurt. Considering the intensity of the competition and the clutter of machinery on the track, the drivers—who pump like mad organists on the throttles to maintain their incredible broadslides—must rank with the best in the world.

It takes Opperman a few rounds to get his new machine "cooked up"—sprinter parlance for making a car handle. He flirts with the leaders in the opening races, finishing high, but losing successive main events to Rick Ferkel, a veteran from Ohio, Bill Utz, defending national IMCA champion from Missouri, and Darryl Dawley, a young pro from Sioux Falls, S.D. But then, as expected, it is the hippie's turn. On a sunny Saturday afternoon, before stands packed with fans, he wins the 50-lap main. He follows it up Sunday with another main event victory and that locks up his second straight Tampa title.

When the sprinters coast into the pits after five days of racing, their bright bodies fogged with clay, a grim silence envelops the old place. This is the end. The last race has been run at Tampa. After 55 years, pressed by the crush of the booming city, and in particular by the expanding University of Tampa, the State Fair is giving up its downtown location. The racetrack will disappear.