Bill Vukovich: 'The Mad Russian'

And, with due apologies to the likes of Parnelli Jones and Rick Mears, Vookie was able to dominate the old Brickyard like nobody before or since.

He came out of a big, passionate family of eight loving brothers and sisters living hardscrabble amid the grape and raisin vineyards of dry gulch Fresno in central California’s San Joaquin Valley furnace. He and his siblings jumped into Pacific Coast midget car racing during the sport’s last hurrah decade of the 1940s.

Sometimes the brothers Vukovich raced seven nights a week — at Stockton, Sacramento, Pasadena, Culver City, Saugus, Tulare, Bakersfield, Huntington Beach, San Diego, San Bernardino and all those other long-forgotten fifth, quarter and third-mile bowls of which Gilmore Stadium in downtown LA was the jewel.

They only earned chump change — hamburger-and French-fries prize money — but this was shivering, breathless, roughhouse, no-holds-barred combat that was as all-American as Vukovich himself, his Slovakian surname notwithstanding. The gritty little dirt tacks were cramped and claustrophobic, traffic was everywhere, and holes that opened quickly slammed shut even quicker. The stone-cold act of blasting into and through a slot an inch wider than your race-car was a nightly ritual.

Vukovich won main events in the hundreds; he twice won the Pacific Coast seasonal title. When he took his act out of California and barnstormed the country in 1950, he became midget car champion of the U.S.

Master of the buzzbomb Offenhauser four-banger that he was, he learned all his moves in something far less ritzy. And far hotter, too. It was a ragamuffin little monster named, variously, the Popsicle, the Washing Machine, and Old Ironsides. An econo-brew of Franklin and Chevrolet junkyard parts, its fuel tank was a five-gallon milk container with the top cut off. Horsepower was courtesy of a banshee ‘Drake’ power plant — the bottom half of a 74-inch Harley hog bolted to a pair of water-cooled barrels jacked up to a violent compression of 15:1. The doughnut-tired hybrid shook and snarled like mad, and Vookie tamed it racing barehanded.

He hated ‘binders’, and at first refused to race with any, just like the flat-track motorbikers. But after running over the tops of too many slower cars he reluctantly added a single rear drum brake. Later he added a second drum, but he used Studebaker wheel cylinders, the tiniest available. He also did something extremely dangerous with the tyres, running a sharp outside edge that made the car prone to tipping over in corners. In fact, Vookie’s corner speeds routinely exceeded his straightaway speeds (he ran gear ratios nobody else could). The explanation was that fast qualifiers on the blazing Pacific Coast tour were inverted, meaning that Vookie always had to start at the back.

And because a typical dirt track surface glazed typical and slicked off in barely 10 miles, he required an outside edge to lean on while opening his bag of dirty tricks and gas sing through traffic faster than anybody else could or would. How Vukovich climbed out of midgets and discovered his true home in the big wagons of the Indy 500 is an amazing story. It started in 1949 when he and his baby brother Mike were stuck home in Fresno listening to the radio broadcast of the 500, vowing to go themselves in 1950. They did, taking with them Fred Gerhardt’s no45 Offy which Vookie raced at 16th Street Speedway right across from the Brickyard. Something clicked.

Seeing the winning team of car owner C Agajanian and driver Ruttman celebrating afterward, Vookie sent them his heartiest congratulations: “You, Agajanian, you square-headed Armenian, and you, Ruttman, you ignorant Okie — you lucky bastards. I just gave you guys $90,000!” That, too, was vintage Vook. But he and the Fuel Injection Special returned the following heat-struck May to vengefully eviscerate all corners in the previously described calamitous 500 204 of ’53. And next they came off the sixth row to vanquish an inspired Jimmy Bryan in ’54. What, truly, was the secret of Vukovich’s success? After all this time, nobody can really say, except that his persona and driving weren’t of this world. Soldier-of-fortune mechanic, Vem Houle, a pall-bearer at Vook’s funeral, once called him ‘the American Nuvolari’ and unlike a pop-off merchant like Stoogie Gidden, the wild and blasphemous Houle was in a position to know: in the Mexican Road Race of ’54, when Team Lincoln was conscripting mechanics to ride along as navigators and ballast for its stable of hell-bent Indycar drivers, Vem had been the only wrench crazy enough to volunteer to ride shotgun with Vook. Each man had taken a shine to the other because they both enjoyed swearing, preferably at each other, ‘shithead’ being the expletive of choice. Off the road three times on the five-day marathon’s opening day, the tremendous duo of Vukovich/Houle still finished second. On day two, they hit the tall mountains.

“Watch it, shithead, you’re losing it again!” Houle lectured, just as he and Vukovich sailed off a precipice backward, their Lincoln Town Car crash-landing onto a ledge several hundred feet below. They had to kick apart the windshield to escape, but escape they did. And Houle, who for the following 30 years continued having harum-scarum racing adventures everywhere from Indy to Pikes Peak to Le Mans, never stopped revelling in his standing as the one mechanic with the intestinal fortitude to ride with demi-god Vukovich. Sometimes Vern affirmed, and other times denied, that just as their Lincoln sailed over the lip of the mountain, Vook’s snarled words were, “Here, shithead, you drive!”

Reminded that somebody once said that in a match race between Nuvolari and the devil the smart money would be with ‘Nivola’, Houle replied that he had heard that story. But he added that in a match race between Vookie and Nivola, he would have bet on Vookie. Like Bryan’s at Langhome, Vukovich’s Indy wreck on 30 May 1955 — while he was in the lead and on the way to an unprecedented hat-trick 500 score — led some to reconsider him and even conclude that all along he had just been a bent Balkan on a suicide trip. But it was hardly that simple. For one thing — outside of the burlesque show in Mexico — it was the only ‘big one’ of his career. Nor was it of his own making. While it lasted, it had been a brawl for first between himself and Jack McGrath, ‘the nitro man’.

Locking into each other at record speeds, their heavy roadsters getting up to 170mph down the back straight away, the battling pair continued buzzing each other until McGrath saved his own life by starting to lose his engine. The ‘nitro man’, in other words, was in the pits with the hood up instead of on the back straight with Vookie when the Serb got trapped between some colliding dirt-track cars and a roadster and then went flipping end over end out of the Speedway. The accident happened at approximately 10.45am. And Billy Vukovich was such a phenomenon that, after all these decades, many people still remember exactly what they were doing when they received the incredible news.