Start Your Engines

The same tearing roar of Meyer-Drake Offenhauser racing engines will racket above the oil-slick brick and asphalt. Once more, when the green flag drops, the wheeled buckets of power will whisk past the pace car into the first laps of the most popular sport spectacle in the U.S. Memorial Day will have come back to the Midwest with the 39th running of America's car-racing classic: the Indianapolis 500. The cars will be faster than ever this year, the drivers as daring, and the spectators will get their thrills. But for the first time in the memory of most fans, one man will be absent--the 500 will not be the same without three-time race winner and Speedway President Warren Wilbur Shaw.

Bag of Bolts. Like all U.S. race drivers, Wilbur Shaw lived for the Memorial Day 500. "May 30 is Christmas, birthday and all the other nice days rolled into one," he wrote in his autobiography. Gentlemen, Start Your Engines, published last week (Coward-McCann; $5). "If you get into the Indianapolis 500, no matter what the outcome, you feel amply repaid for a year of work." For Shaw, the big race at the Speedway was worth more than a year--it was worth his whole life. From the day he first raced (and thoroughly wrecked) his own car--a homemade "bag of bolts"--at a half-mile, fairgrounds track in Lafayette, Ind., he was headed for the 500.

By the spring of 1924, he was national light-car champion, and the days were not long enough for him to get all the racing he wanted. In his "Fronty" Ford, Shaw would race his buddies cross-country on their way to the dirt tracks where they earned their prize money. Evenings, they would celebrate. Dawn would find them racing home, their hopped-up engines shattering the morning silence, their hard tires (90 lbs. of air in motorcycle tires shellacked to the wheel rims) jolting along rutted country roads.

In 1927 Wilbur Shaw made the grade: he got a car to drive on the big brick oval at Indianapolis. It was a rebuilt Miller, 10 to 12 m.p.h. slower than most other cars in the race, and it was something of a jinx. In it, famed Jimmy Murphy, winner of the Indianapolis in 1922, had driven to his death at Syracuse, N.Y., three years before. To Wilbur Shaw the old Miller was just another car, and the cocky, mustachioed little hell-raiser drove it home in fourth place.

Beautiful Music. Now the 500 was really in his blood. He kept coming back, but for years his luck was bad. In 1931 Shaw showed up with a tiny (wheelbase: 104 in., piston displacement: 156 cu. in., weight: 1,600 lbs.) supercharged special, built by Augie Duesenberg. The sound of that little engine winding up, Shaw remembered later, "was the most beautiful music my ears had ever heard. With the engine turning 6,800 r.p.m., the supercharger was turning almost 38,000 r.p.m., and making more noise than a room full of women."

That lovely sound lasted part way through Shaw's qualifying run. Then all hell broke loose under the hood. The crankshaft broke, cut the engine completely in half. But Augie Duesenberg's brother Fred promptly offered him another bigger car to drive. It was like stepping off a motorcycle into a locomotive. Fred Duesenberg believed in big cars with non-supercharged engines. When Shaw hopped into the cockpit, he dropped out of sight. "The car definitely had been built for a man of more than average size . . . The seat was so low I couldn't possibly see over the cowling. The steering wheel felt as if it was three feet in diameter. The only way I could reach the foot accelerator was by sliding sideways on the seat and sitting on the left cheek of my rear end ... By leaning out the left side of the cockpit, I discovered that I could see ahead."

Looking out the side like that, Shaw missed a turn. He heard the "eee . . . eee . . . eee of the tires as they began to lose their grip on the bricks. The car made three or four little prancing sidesteps and then traded ends as it went into a spin like a top." The big "Duesie" hopped the retaining wall, somersaulted, and landed on its wheels in a tangle of torn and twisted metal. Ambulance attendants patched up the worst scrapes in Shaw's torn hide, coated the minor cuts with iodine and turned him loose. Moments later he was in Fred Duesenberg's second car, out of sight in the cockpit again, driving for his life. There were no more crashes, but there was no time to catch the leaders.

Heart's Desire. Wilbur Shaw never let down. He learned how to fly, but his real love was always racing autos. In 1937, '39 and '40 he achieved his heart's desire: first place in the Indianapolis 500. His three victories matched the record set by Lou Meyer (since equaled by Mauri Rose). It was Wilbur Shaw who raised the money to put the dilapidated Speedway back on its feet after the long wartime layoff, but then the rough grind finally caught up with him. In 1951, when he was 48, a heart attack took him out of the racing cockpit for good.

Every year since the war, it was Wilbur Shaw who gave the traditional Memorial Day command: "Gentlemen, start your engines." Then, last fall, his racing days behind him, Wilbur Shaw failed to walk away from a crash. He and two friends, flying in a small plane, spun in just outside Decatur, Ind. All were killed.

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