20:15 (From Wikipedia) On the 127th lap, Eddie Johnson spun out in turn four, but did not suffer significant damage and he was not injured. A small fire broke out on the car. A safety fire truck went to his aid. John Masariu, 41(Or 38), father of 6, of Danville, Indiana, who was the Principal of Ben Davis Junior High and was serving as a fire/safety worker, fell or jumped off the back of the fire truck. A moment later, the truck driven by James (Johnny) Williams accidentally backed over him, and he was fatally injured.
Aussie Jack Brabham drove the first rear engine car at Indy. I got a pic I found online of him on the straight in the cooper, I got it printed and he signed it just a short while before his passing in 2014... Brabham also was the first and only man to win a F1 season in a car of his own construction . A driver never really credited with his achievements
He certainly drove the first of the modern-era rear engine cars, but there was an attempt to put a rear engine car in the field at Indy as far back as 1938, but that attempt failed, so Brabham was almost certainly the first driver to race one in the Indianapolis 500. One of the ironies of that was that, from 1950-'60, the Indianapolis 500 was actually an official race on the F1 calendar, awarding full points, but only one European driver made the Indianapolis 500 during those years, Italian great Alberto Ascari, in the only Ferrari ever to qualify for the Indianapolis 500 back in 1952, but he didn't last long and never returned to Indy. Brabham drove well in a car that was uncompetitive against the much more powerful Offy roadsters, yet somehow was able to nurse his lightweight car to the finish in the last race with the old brick front straightaway. He finished ninth of the ten cars that made it to the finish. However, his best race at Indy was also his last race there in 1970, as he charged from 26th into contention, at least for second and third place, even leading briefly during one of the sequences of pit stops. (Ironically, his son Geoff's best race also came when he also started 26th in the 1983 race, but ran as high as second in a year-old Penske car and eventually had to settle for fourth place at the finish.)
Actually, that car is shown, though not mentioned by name from 3:28-3:47 during the qualifying recap. One reason the Cooper-Climax is ignored in the film, aside from that 19 seconds during the qualifying recap coverage, is because the car was so underpowered that it was uncompetitive with the front-engine roadsters, despite the handling advantage it's smaller size gave it. The car finished next-to-last among the ten cars that completed the full 500 miles, though the fact that the Cooper-Climax ran the full 500 miles was, itself, an accomplishment.
This was the 3rd consecutive year the roadster cars put on a great show.1961 was almost as good as the year before.Parnelli Jones very well may have won as a rookie had he not caught a rock in the face about midway through the race.He still led 27 laps.
Actually, the racing at Indy with the roadsters was competitive from 1955-'61. In 1955, Jack McGrath and Bill Vukovich had a great duel before McGrath dropped out with magneto problems, and then we know what happened to Vuky. The 1956 race was a competitive affair between all the spin outs and crashes before Pat Flaherty took over in the second half of the race. In 1957, Sam Hanks had battles with Paul Russo's Novi in the first half of the race and then with Jim Rathmann in the second half of the race. Then after the tragic first lap crash that involved 15 cars, eliminating seven, and taking the life of 1957 pole sitter Pat O'Connor, the 1958 race was extremely competitive, featuring a great battle between four or five cars before Jimmy Bryan took over in the second half of the race. The 1959 race featured a four-car battle between Rodger Ward, Rathmann, Flaherty, and pole sitter Johnny Thomson before Ward took over in the second half of the race, and Ward and Rathmann were again omnipresent in the 1960 race, exchanging the lead the entire second half of that race before badly worn tires forced Ward to slow down and settle for second, and this race from 1961 was also settled much the same way, with the duel between A.J. Foyt and Eddie Sachs being decided by Sachs having to pit for tires with just three laps remaining. When they repaved the track following the 1961 race, including paving over the entire main straightaway, except for a yard of bricks at the S/F line, everything changed because tire wear was no longer a factor because the track was billiard table-smooth, and speeds went up some 3-5 MPH, with Parnelli becoming the first driver to turn an official 150 MPH lap. Parnelli also discovered a secret about driving that track with those narrow tires that gave him a huge advantage for two years, hence his dominant runs in 1962 and '63. What he did was to let the car drift a little in the corners and then punch the throttle, and what he discovered was that letting the car drift slightly and punching the throttle with those narrow tires would actually propel him off the corners and that's what gave him his edge before his key competition caught on to what he was doing.
Very good information about Parnelli's 'advantage' in 1962-1963.Most of the other stuff is familiar to me.Bob Sweikert won the 1955 race by two laps so,although there were competitive segments,it was rare to have wheel-to-wheel competition at the finish like is so common nowadays.Rodger Ward actually led from Laps 86-200 in 1959 although,as you pointed out,it was competitive directly behind him.
One of the reasons it was so rare to have close competition at the finish back then was how the race was conducted. Prior to 1972, the field hardly slowed down during caution periods and then from 1972-'78, they had what was known as the P.A.C.E.R. light system, which slowed the cars down to less than 100 MPH, but the rules did not allow the cars to legally bunch up during caution periods. It wasn't until 1979 that USAC had the Indianapolis 500 conform to what every other major oval race in the world was doing, and bring out the pace car during caution periods. That's when the race started to become more competitive for the full distance.
Correct.USAC was also extremely inattentive to competition in how they placed the pace car during yellows prior to 1992.The pace car would come out and pick the first car up they saw..So if the leader was directly in front of the pace car,he would be able to go completely around to the back of the line,nearly a full lap ahead.Rick Mears gained a full lap on the field in 1988 in a situation similar to that.And the last thing Mears needed that year was yet another advantage.Starting in 1992 the leader was picked up and everyone else was waved around and.....despite all of the wrecks FOUR cars finished in the lead lap for,as near as I can tell,only the 3rd time in 76 races.
Or because of all the wrecks because of all the short runs and over 200 miles being run under caution. A lot of the scoring problems that took place when the caution came out was because, prior to 1992, whenever the caution came out, cars would duck into the pits, so often the pace car driver didn't even know who the leader was. NASCAR had the same problem in the 1980s, and in 1989, they solved that problem by closing the pits when the caution came out until the pace car driver could both pick up the leader and then gather the field up. Only then would the pits be opened, assuming the caution-causing incident wasn't in the pits or prior to the pit entrance or after the pit exit. 1992 was the year when they started doing that in IndyCar racing, which was why it wasn't until then that those particular scoring issues were taken care of.
***** Or more accurately, the aftermath of it, since the crash itself wasn't shown. We did see the car on fire while in the catch fencing, but not how it got there, which I think was a good thing, since there was still the fear of showing such a crash on film back then. In fact, while it was shown in the 1972 Indy film, Jim Malloy's fatal crash in practice that year was never actually mentioned.
+Joshua Peterson In fact, the one time those cars raced at Daytona, a few weeks after the first Daytona 500 in 1959, George Amick sat on the pole for that race with a qualifying AVERAGE of over 177 MPH, a mark that wouldn't be matched at Indy until 1971. Amick lost his life in that race, which was won by Jim Rathmann, and USAC quickly discovered that their cars simply could not race at Daytona, and so a planned race for around the 4th of July was cancelled, making way for the beginnings of NASCAR's mid-summer classic, the Firecracker 400, which was a 250-mile race in it's formative years.
I have no idea, but I have a hunch it was simply a case of the drivers not being used to that kind of speed on a constant basis. After all, Marshall Teague, one of NASCAR's more successful early drivers who had switched to the Indy-type cars in the mid 50s, was the first driver to be killed at Daytona driving one of those roadsters either in a test or in practice, so it might be a case of the cars going much faster than the drivers could handle, as well as the fact that the cars were being stretched well beyond their limits. There's a reason why full-bodied stock cars AVERAGED more than 150 MPH for a full 500-mile race at Daytona before any car ever turned one official lap of over 150 MPH at Indy. (Fireball Roberts won the 1962 Daytona 500 with an average speed of 152.529 MPH just a little under three months before Parnelli's landmark 150 MPH lap in qualifications for the 1962 Indianapolis 500.)
And a big part of that, if you could believe it, was for aerodynamics. When the roadsters came to Indianapolis in 1952, one of the things that made them superior was the aerodynamic advantage of having the wheels so close to the body of the car, especially compared to the high-centered dirt cars that won the races in 1951 and '52. Because of the aerodynamic advantage of having the wheels so lose to the bodies, the roadsters dominated immediately. Then in 1957, car owner and builder George Salih got the idea of laying the engine on it's side to get the car lower to the ground, and Salih's Belond Exhaust Special dominated the race in 1957 with Sam Hanks and won it again in 1958 with Jimmy Bryan. One idea that failed, however, was the idea that debuted in 1955 for a completely enclosed car. That idea was tested in 1955 and Jim Rathmann drove the car, but there were so many problems that it looked more like a normal roadster when when Rathmann drove it in the race.
+Bruce Brooks And I don't think those cars had roll cages, either, though I could be wrong about that. And the walls at Indy, which had been built in the 1930s, were not nearly high enough, because it was not entirely uncommon for the cars, which were big back then, to go over the walls. And that was the case all the way through to the early 90s, but when the decision to bring NASCAR to Indy was made in 1992-'93, it was evident to the people running IMS that the walls were not nearly high enough or thick enough, so they rebuilt the retaining walls higher and thicker for the first NASCAR race in 1994, but those were changes that were decades overdue.
George Bignotti explained it perfectly years later when he stated that one of the reasons why Foyt knew his car hadn't taken any fuel on that one pit stop was because, when you put in a big fuel load in those days, the car would slow down a full second, and when Foyt realized that he was going faster than he should have been going right after that pit stop, he deduced that he didn't get very much, if any fuel. What that set up was a extra pit stop later on during which his car took on fuel from another competitor's fuel tank, a practice that was apparently legal then, but was soon outlawed, something that came into play late in the 1972 race, when Jerry Grant apparently took on fuel from teammate Bobby Unser's tank, resulting in his last 12 laps not being scored. Ironically enough, it was Bignotti who spotted that infraction when he protested Grant's second-place finish, and when the USAC officials figured out what happened, they stripped Grant of the final 12 laps he ran, relegating him from second to 12th in the final standings.
It was somewhat under-powered. But thanks to it's aerodynamics and cornering, other rear-engine cars came along in the next few years with more powerful engines that began to win the "500".
For the part of the presentation derived from the speedway's official film? Yes, Dick Tufeld narrated that part of the upload. Tufeld narrated the official films of the 1961 and 1962 Indianapolis 500s that were put out by IMS and Championship Race Films. The part of the upload from 10:39-13:20, which was derived from the version of the 1961 race that aired on the old SpeedVision program "Faces of Victory: Memories of Indy" that Brock Yates hosted, was narrated by Ralph Camargo, the voice of Dynamic Films.
20:15 (From Wikipedia)
On the 127th lap, Eddie Johnson spun out in turn four, but did not suffer significant damage and he was not injured. A small fire broke out on the car. A safety fire truck went to his aid. John Masariu, 41(Or 38), father of 6, of Danville, Indiana, who was the Principal of Ben Davis Junior High and was serving as a fire/safety worker, fell or jumped off the back of the fire truck. A moment later, the truck driven by James (Johnny) Williams accidentally backed over him, and he was fatally injured.
Aussie Jack Brabham drove the first rear engine car at Indy. I got a pic I found online of him on the straight in the cooper, I got it printed and he signed it just a short while before his passing in 2014... Brabham also was the first and only man to win a F1 season in a car of his own construction .
A driver never really credited with his achievements
He certainly drove the first of the modern-era rear engine cars, but there was an attempt to put a rear engine car in the field at Indy as far back as 1938, but that attempt failed, so Brabham was almost certainly the first driver to race one in the Indianapolis 500. One of the ironies of that was that, from 1950-'60, the Indianapolis 500 was actually an official race on the F1 calendar, awarding full points, but only one European driver made the Indianapolis 500 during those years, Italian great Alberto Ascari, in the only Ferrari ever to qualify for the Indianapolis 500 back in 1952, but he didn't last long and never returned to Indy.
Brabham drove well in a car that was uncompetitive against the much more powerful Offy roadsters, yet somehow was able to nurse his lightweight car to the finish in the last race with the old brick front straightaway. He finished ninth of the ten cars that made it to the finish. However, his best race at Indy was also his last race there in 1970, as he charged from 26th into contention, at least for second and third place, even leading briefly during one of the sequences of pit stops. (Ironically, his son Geoff's best race also came when he also started 26th in the 1983 race, but ran as high as second in a year-old Penske car and eventually had to settle for fourth place at the finish.)
I was at the 500 and saw Brabham get 9th in 1961.
Roadsters' last gasp. They were the best looking cars ever to turn a lap at the Brickyard. It was a great era, and I miss it.
It is interesting to note that the film and the announcer both completely ignored the wave of the future- the rear-engine Cooper-Climax.
Actually, that car is shown, though not mentioned by name from 3:28-3:47 during the qualifying recap. One reason the Cooper-Climax is ignored in the film, aside from that 19 seconds during the qualifying recap coverage, is because the car was so underpowered that it was uncompetitive with the front-engine roadsters, despite the handling advantage it's smaller size gave it. The car finished next-to-last among the ten cars that completed the full 500 miles, though the fact that the Cooper-Climax ran the full 500 miles was, itself, an accomplishment.
The narrator is Dick Tufeld, four years before he became the voice of the Robot on "Lost In Space".
Really? Cool factoid!
This was the 3rd consecutive year the roadster cars put on a great show.1961 was almost as good as the year before.Parnelli Jones very well may have won as a rookie had he not caught a rock in the face about midway through the race.He still led 27 laps.
Actually, the racing at Indy with the roadsters was competitive from 1955-'61. In 1955, Jack McGrath and Bill Vukovich had a great duel before McGrath dropped out with magneto problems, and then we know what happened to Vuky. The 1956 race was a competitive affair between all the spin outs and crashes before Pat Flaherty took over in the second half of the race. In 1957, Sam Hanks had battles with Paul Russo's Novi in the first half of the race and then with Jim Rathmann in the second half of the race.
Then after the tragic first lap crash that involved 15 cars, eliminating seven, and taking the life of 1957 pole sitter Pat O'Connor, the 1958 race was extremely competitive, featuring a great battle between four or five cars before Jimmy Bryan took over in the second half of the race. The 1959 race featured a four-car battle between Rodger Ward, Rathmann, Flaherty, and pole sitter Johnny Thomson before Ward took over in the second half of the race, and Ward and Rathmann were again omnipresent in the 1960 race, exchanging the lead the entire second half of that race before badly worn tires forced Ward to slow down and settle for second, and this race from 1961 was also settled much the same way, with the duel between A.J. Foyt and Eddie Sachs being decided by Sachs having to pit for tires with just three laps remaining.
When they repaved the track following the 1961 race, including paving over the entire main straightaway, except for a yard of bricks at the S/F line, everything changed because tire wear was no longer a factor because the track was billiard table-smooth, and speeds went up some 3-5 MPH, with Parnelli becoming the first driver to turn an official 150 MPH lap. Parnelli also discovered a secret about driving that track with those narrow tires that gave him a huge advantage for two years, hence his dominant runs in 1962 and '63. What he did was to let the car drift a little in the corners and then punch the throttle, and what he discovered was that letting the car drift slightly and punching the throttle with those narrow tires would actually propel him off the corners and that's what gave him his edge before his key competition caught on to what he was doing.
Very good information about Parnelli's 'advantage' in 1962-1963.Most of the other stuff is familiar to me.Bob Sweikert won the 1955 race by two laps so,although there were competitive segments,it was rare to have wheel-to-wheel competition at the finish like is so common nowadays.Rodger Ward actually led from Laps 86-200 in 1959 although,as you pointed out,it was competitive directly behind him.
One of the reasons it was so rare to have close competition at the finish back then was how the race was conducted. Prior to 1972, the field hardly slowed down during caution periods and then from 1972-'78, they had what was known as the P.A.C.E.R. light system, which slowed the cars down to less than 100 MPH, but the rules did not allow the cars to legally bunch up during caution periods. It wasn't until 1979 that USAC had the Indianapolis 500 conform to what every other major oval race in the world was doing, and bring out the pace car during caution periods. That's when the race started to become more competitive for the full distance.
Correct.USAC was also extremely inattentive to competition in how they placed the pace car during yellows prior to 1992.The pace car would come out and pick the first car up they saw..So if the leader was directly in front of the pace car,he would be able to go completely around to the back of the line,nearly a full lap ahead.Rick Mears gained a full lap on the field in 1988 in a situation similar to that.And the last thing Mears needed that year was yet another advantage.Starting in 1992 the leader was picked up and everyone else was waved around and.....despite all of the wrecks FOUR cars finished in the lead lap for,as near as I can tell,only the 3rd time in 76 races.
Or because of all the wrecks because of all the short runs and over 200 miles being run under caution. A lot of the scoring problems that took place when the caution came out was because, prior to 1992, whenever the caution came out, cars would duck into the pits, so often the pace car driver didn't even know who the leader was. NASCAR had the same problem in the 1980s, and in 1989, they solved that problem by closing the pits when the caution came out until the pace car driver could both pick up the leader and then gather the field up. Only then would the pits be opened, assuming the caution-causing incident wasn't in the pits or prior to the pit entrance or after the pit exit. 1992 was the year when they started doing that in IndyCar racing, which was why it wasn't until then that those particular scoring issues were taken care of.
Eddie Sachs RIP 1964.
Tony Bettenhausen Sr's Fatal Crash @ 4:46
***** Or more accurately, the aftermath of it, since the crash itself wasn't shown. We did see the car on fire while in the catch fencing, but not how it got there, which I think was a good thing, since there was still the fear of showing such a crash on film back then. In fact, while it was shown in the 1972 Indy film, Jim Malloy's fatal crash in practice that year was never actually mentioned.
1960s: When race car speeds neared 180mph and still life was good.
+Joshua Peterson In fact, the one time those cars raced at Daytona, a few weeks after the first Daytona 500 in 1959, George Amick sat on the pole for that race with a qualifying AVERAGE of over 177 MPH, a mark that wouldn't be matched at Indy until 1971. Amick lost his life in that race, which was won by Jim Rathmann, and USAC quickly discovered that their cars simply could not race at Daytona, and so a planned race for around the 4th of July was cancelled, making way for the beginnings of NASCAR's mid-summer classic, the Firecracker 400, which was a 250-mile race in it's formative years.
So was the fatal accident blamed on downforce? or something else?
I have no idea, but I have a hunch it was simply a case of the drivers not being used to that kind of speed on a constant basis. After all, Marshall Teague, one of NASCAR's more successful early drivers who had switched to the Indy-type cars in the mid 50s, was the first driver to be killed at Daytona driving one of those roadsters either in a test or in practice, so it might be a case of the cars going much faster than the drivers could handle, as well as the fact that the cars were being stretched well beyond their limits. There's a reason why full-bodied stock cars AVERAGED more than 150 MPH for a full 500-mile race at Daytona before any car ever turned one official lap of over 150 MPH at Indy. (Fireball Roberts won the 1962 Daytona 500 with an average speed of 152.529 MPH just a little under three months before Parnelli's landmark 150 MPH lap in qualifications for the 1962 Indianapolis 500.)
indy cars at that time were very narrow, when the low rear engine cars came speeds soared!
And a big part of that, if you could believe it, was for aerodynamics. When the roadsters came to Indianapolis in 1952, one of the things that made them superior was the aerodynamic advantage of having the wheels so close to the body of the car, especially compared to the high-centered dirt cars that won the races in 1951 and '52. Because of the aerodynamic advantage of having the wheels so lose to the bodies, the roadsters dominated immediately. Then in 1957, car owner and builder George Salih got the idea of laying the engine on it's side to get the car lower to the ground, and Salih's Belond Exhaust Special dominated the race in 1957 with Sam Hanks and won it again in 1958 with Jimmy Bryan.
One idea that failed, however, was the idea that debuted in 1955 for a completely enclosed car. That idea was tested in 1955 and Jim Rathmann drove the car, but there were so many problems that it looked more like a normal roadster when when Rathmann drove it in the race.
I remember when this happened. There were no Sissie Barriers then.
+Bruce Brooks And I don't think those cars had roll cages, either, though I could be wrong about that. And the walls at Indy, which had been built in the 1930s, were not nearly high enough, because it was not entirely uncommon for the cars, which were big back then, to go over the walls. And that was the case all the way through to the early 90s, but when the decision to bring NASCAR to Indy was made in 1992-'93, it was evident to the people running IMS that the walls were not nearly high enough or thick enough, so they rebuilt the retaining walls higher and thicker for the first NASCAR race in 1994, but those were changes that were decades overdue.
Are you talking about rich peoples children racing various bumper cars at the various bumper tracks?
This was the last Indy 500 before they paved asphault over the Bricks
Foyt knew he had no gas,you can feel 55 gallons
George Bignotti explained it perfectly years later when he stated that one of the reasons why Foyt knew his car hadn't taken any fuel on that one pit stop was because, when you put in a big fuel load in those days, the car would slow down a full second, and when Foyt realized that he was going faster than he should have been going right after that pit stop, he deduced that he didn't get very much, if any fuel.
What that set up was a extra pit stop later on during which his car took on fuel from another competitor's fuel tank, a practice that was apparently legal then, but was soon outlawed, something that came into play late in the 1972 race, when Jerry Grant apparently took on fuel from teammate Bobby Unser's tank, resulting in his last 12 laps not being scored. Ironically enough, it was Bignotti who spotted that infraction when he protested Grant's second-place finish, and when the USAC officials figured out what happened, they stripped Grant of the final 12 laps he ran, relegating him from second to 12th in the final standings.
Ya gotta dig the phone booth between turns 3 and 4. Wow! Who'd be making a call there? Perhaps a reporter or two, I suppose.
we miss you brabham RIP.
Shame what happened to Bettenhausen
My dad was at IMS that entire May shooting movie footage. I wonder if any of the footage in this recap was his?
Wow... That's pretty cool...
Why Jack Brabham can't win with rear engine car, is it because most of them still use the front engine roadster ?
It was somewhat under-powered.
But thanks to it's aerodynamics and cornering, other rear-engine cars came along in the next few years with more powerful engines that began to win the "500".
altfactor i see... thank you sir !
because the coventry climax was a 2,7 l only.
It was impossible to enlarge the 2,5 l more than this (2752 cc, 252 BHP @ 6250 rpm)
Was Dick Tuefeld the narrator?
For the part of the presentation derived from the speedway's official film? Yes, Dick Tufeld narrated that part of the upload. Tufeld narrated the official films of the 1961 and 1962 Indianapolis 500s that were put out by IMS and Championship Race Films. The part of the upload from 10:39-13:20, which was derived from the version of the 1961 race that aired on the old SpeedVision program "Faces of Victory: Memories of Indy" that Brock Yates hosted, was narrated by Ralph Camargo, the voice of Dynamic Films.
4:44
Cheeseberg? Great name 🍔
It’s Cheesebourg
9:00 the first GoPro?