Motorized mayhem

CanAm at the Glen (1970). (Photo by BobbaLew.)

Last night (Thursday, August 4, 2011) I witnessed a TV-ad from Watkins Glen International, an automotive road-racing course at the south end of Seneca Lake, a long Finger Lake in central New York.
“We been at this 26 years,” it said; a number I can’t make sense of since cars have been racing at Watkins Glen since 1948, and the first race I attended at the Glen was in 1964, which is 47 years ago.
I suppose 26 years is NASCAR at the Glen, one race in 1957, and then from 1986 on.
NASCAR is what I always hoped to see at the Glen, but didn’t, since back then the Glen was a sportscar course.
If there had been NASCAR there back then, it would have been Richard Petty, David Pearson, Bobby Allison, and perhaps Junior Johnson......
.....In cars that woulda been much-modified stock cars, not the dedicated racecars NASCAR has now.
The ad depicted crash after crash, machine-gun style. Cars careening into each other and disintegrating, or clobbering safety-barriers.
Of particular note was a NASCAR racer hitting a barrier of sand-filled plastic drums.
Sand flew all over everywhere; high into the sky.
I attended sportscar racing, including the Glen, almost 10 years.
Over that time I never saw one accident.
And I can only remember one near-accident.
A Canadian driver named Roger McCaig lost the brakes on his CanAm racer at the end of a long high-speed straight at Mosport (“MOE-sport”) road-racing course east of Toronto, and rode out-of-control into the boonies, a large run-off area at the end of the straight in an open field.
His car became airborne, but didn’t flip. It landed on its wheels.

Cevert.

At Watkins Glen in 1971 French Formula-One racer Francois Cevert (“say-VAIR”) was killed when his car lost control, rode up on the trackside Armco guard-rail barrier, utterly disintegrated, and he was decapitated.
We were stunned.
This wasn’t supposed to happen.
Accidents would happen, but the driver was supposed to walk away.
We stood at attention as La Marseillaise was played on the track P.A.
It was awful and utterly depressing.
It was when I began to lose interest in auto-racing.
The Glen had instituted various expensive so-called “safety-improvements,” yet drivers kept getting killed.
That Armco barrier that killed Cevert was a Glen safety-improvement.
Jo Siffert, Peter Revson, then even Mark Donohue, a really nice guy.
Ronnie Peterson, a Swedish Formula-One racer, crashed his Lotus, it caught fire, and he burned to death.
And here the Glen glorifies mayhem and carnage.
I hope that’s not what spectators want. I know it wasn’t what I wanted.

• The Sportscar Club of America’s (SCCA) CanAm championship series was a title chase of races throughout Canada and America from the late ‘60s through 1974. The cars were virtually unlimited, as long as they had fenders and two seats. Engine-size (and output) was unlimited.
• “Seneca Lake” is one of the Finger Lakes, a series of north-south lakes in Central New York that look like the imprint of a large hand. They were formed by the receding glacier.