#fastest lap in a car with no pace....MY GOAT

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That was so sexy' of him

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Smokey Stories: Skipping the ’70 Indy 500 to Regroup

After the 1969 Indy 500, Smokey returns to Daytona to regroup and reassess engine programs.

When we left Smokey last month, he’d just experienced the 1969 event. “might have been the sorriest Indy race ever run,” Smokey Yunick says. “Only four cars ran the complete 200 laps, Fifth Place was three laps down and Seventh Place was down 10 laps.” But even as crippled as the cars turned out to be as the race terminated, there was one bright spot worth mentioning. “Dan Gurney with his Weslake stock block Ford engine finished Second in the same lap and on six cylinders [it was a V-8] for about 100 miles in a 1969 Gurney Eagle [same type car that Smokey and Joe had fielded in the race]. It shows what a driver Gurney was.”

Upon his return to Daytona Beach from Indy, Smokey completely dismantled his Eagle. He’d already discarded any notion that he’d run it again (“too doggy”), but he had conceived of a way to build a down-force car, using some of the Eagle parts and the rear section of a Corvette. As it turned out, the original approach he wanted to take (some of which involved a partner whose wife had run him off) didn’t materialize.

But then there were other events occurring that had an impact on Smokey’s racing plans. ” Knudsen gets fired from Ford [August 1969], I’m hot to get the hot-vapor engine invention into an Indy car,” Smokey says. “I quit Ford Motor Company. Gold and oil in Ecuador with Kenny Rich and Leonard Schorsch is wide open. I’m giving alternate energy speeches at colleges, judging alternate energy proposals, trying to get government money to get the hot-vapor engine going. I’m hobnobbing with atom smashers, space, wind and solar experts. In total, about 10 alternate energy possibilities. I’m running engines on hydrogen. I’m building them in Daytona and helping the Perry Company run a submarine on one of my hydrogen engines. I’m so busy saving the world that I lost my desire for Indy.”

On a personal note, I recall that Smokey was like perpetual motion at the time. When I’d visit his Daytona shop in 1970, his mind seemed to be in several places—all at one time.

“I’m not sure what motivated me in 1970,” Smokey says. “I was like horse crap in 1915. I was everywhere. All over the United States, South and Central America, and Europe. I thought we were gonna run out of oil by 1982, and I’m hunting for a new form of energy. Atmospherically clean energy. Indy happened, and I’m not sure I even went there during the month of May.”

It was a difficult time for Smokey. His distraction caused by his concern for an alternative source or sources for energy was consuming him. For whatever reason, he felt a responsibility to take on this challenge. During this time, he once told me that windmills could be a possibility for alternative energy (electrical) because not too far from the surface of the earth the wind never stopped blowing. In fact, he built a tower equipped with a wind-driven generator just to prove his point, which he did.

Even his high-ranking friends and contacts in the automotive Detroit O.E.M. community expressed an interest in his hot-vapor engine, but nothing concrete ever materialized from that experiment. His witch-doctor friends in South American claimed his condition was related to his previous bout with malaria. “But that hadn’t happened in 15 or 20 years at the time,” he says.

So Smokey bypassed the 1970 Indy race, and the 1971 event was approaching. “Only Indy offers I’d had were long shots, very poorly financed, no driver, and one hundred-to-one shots,” he says. “I’m still running 20 hours a day, seven days a week on alternative energy projects and South American gold and oil. Foyt calls and asks me to crew chief for Donnie Allison in a year-old Coyote. I know the car, and I know what workin’ with A.J. was like and that right there was worth two grand a week—in cash. But I really liked Donnie, and I foolishly thought maybe I could help him enough to do it to it. Little did I know what was in store for me at Indy.”

I retrospect, it could have been his absence from the 1970 race and a subconscious drive to get back into the hectic pace of Indy preparation that drove Smokey, but he later confessed his decision to return under the circumstances he faced was not one of his better choices.

“Within 48 hours after I arrived at Indy, I realized I was in the condition referred to quite frequently as the ‘Hogan’s goat’ situation,” Smokey says. “I was screwed. A.J. called all the shots. The year-old car should have been used as an example of what not to do to a chassis. Poor old Donnie was driving his balls off, and he was still at least one mile per hour short for a safe qualifying speed, and he was scaring the crap out of himself two out of every three laps. Now Donnie ran Fourth at Indy in 1970 in an Eagle and won ‘rookie of the year’, so it ain’t like he was lost.”

Given the problems with the older car and the probability that Donnie was going to get bumped by the next fastest qualifier, Foyt withdrew the “sick old car” and replaced it with a new Coyote. “Now we are in business, almost,” Smokey says. “The rear wing is too high, but we get by it for qualifying. Donnie got shoved in qualifying line with about 10 practice laps, but race morning disaster struck. The wing is too high. Well dropping the wing was like a human with a triple dose of Ex-Lax—very, very loose in the rear end. He can’t drive it. Just as soon as someone got close behind him, Donnie was like on ice, a very delicate feeling.”

“They watch pit stops like a hawk, so we can’t help him by raising the wing. But here’s what made it so tough, in this timeframe. A.J. was hands down the best, and his specialty was going fast in no handling, crappy race cars, especially if they were Coyote yellow and had Foyt engines.”

As it turned out, Foyt managed to drop the wing on race day, prior to going through inspection. At least it was reported that he did. But even with this change, Donnie had a handful during the race. “He did finish third,” Smokey says. “But in the 200 laps he ran, he ‘killed’ himself 78 times at least.”

Overall, Smokey had a variety of opinions about the Foyt Coyotes. “I called them things ‘Tasmanian Devils’ because they were untamable wild cars. These cars were built by one of Indy’s greatest car builders, Eddie Kuzma. Independent suspension and aerodynamics were two areas the old hands had trouble seeing from behind the dinosaurs. Donnie never went back to Indy. I said it was because that 1971 ride scared him so bad. But he said, ‘Nope, it thrilled him much, much more than he wanted, but had no bearing on his never coming back.’ ”

“One good thing about the deal was it didn’t raise my income tax 10 cents. But really, anybody could have done whatever I did on the crew. I was just a robot that A.J. programmed.”

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