Revival Race

In the days when motoring was a major U. S. sport, its No. 1 event was the Vanderbilt Cup race--ten laps over 28 miles of Long Island's tortuous dirt roads. Last week at Westbury, L. I., the Vanderbilt Cup race was revived, with a new prize, a new course and 45 bright little racers that smelled like castor oil and sounded like machine guns.

First prize in last week's race in addition to a cup donated by young George Vanderbilt, whose Cousin William K. put up the first one, was $20,000. The course was 75 times around the brand new pretzel-shaped Roosevelt Raceway (TIME, Sept. 28). To watch the race, lured by publicity which stressed the possibility that it might produce several fatalities, went a crowd of 50,000, including a list of boxholders, at $27.50 per person, which read like a carefully abridged social register.

Automobiles caused the decline in U. S. automobile racing, when traffic made it impossible, except on speedways. In Europe, where automobiles are still a luxury, auto racing thrives because bored patricians find it amusingly dangerous. The drivers in last week's race were divided into two groups. In one group were grease-stained, speedway-trained U. S. professionals whose big, fast cars lacked the transmissions and brakes needed for road racing. In the other group were seasoned road racers like Italy's Count Antonio Brivio and Tazio Nuvolari, England's Hon. Brian Lewis and Lord Howe. For their cars, designed for up-&-downhill, cross-country racing, level curves were a minor problem.

If Roosevelt Raceway was no puzzle to Europe's aristocratic race drivers, they were a vexing riddle to Roosevelt Race way. Accustomed to building up bogus socialites, the Raceway's energetic press agents betrayed their lack of practice in dealing with real ones by describing Francis Richard Henry Penn Curzon, 5th Earl Howe, onetime Member of Parliament and Aide-de-camp to the late George V, with redundant emphasis, as "Lord" Earl Howe. Inheritor of a fabulous for tune for which a legal dispute that is still going on was sufficiently sensational a century ago to inspire Charles Dickens to write Bleak House, the 52-year-old Earl, whose stable of racing cars is Europe's most elaborate, failed to make a properly romantic impression on U. S. sportswriters. They found him in a puddle of grease, tinkering his car and fraternizing with U. S. drivers and mechanics who were not rebuked for calling him plain "Howe."

Long before the race started last week, time trials had made it apparent that U. S. drivers would be outclassed. Fastest qualifying time was made by nervous little Roman-nosed Tazio Nuvolari, who has won 87 out of the 153 races he has entered and is currently considered Europe's best driver. In a bright red Alfa-Romeo, wearing a white helmet, yellow sweater and blue denim pants, Nuvolari took the lead on the first lap. Close behind, in identical Alfa-Romeos, came his two countrymen, Count Brivio and Dr. Giuseppe Farina. After the first few laps the crack-ups and collisions which the crowd had come to see showed no signs of materializing. Instead, the monotony of a beautifully driven race on a course too difficult for real speed was punctuated only by the iron voice of the world's most powerful address system, telling the crowd, picnicking on the roof of the bright blue club house or milling around the huge infield, how far Nuvolari was ahead, and how this or that individual or firm was offering a premium on the next lap, which Nuvolari invariably won. William B. Leeds offered $500 to any U. S. driver who won a lap, did not have to pay it.

Asked about his rivals, 43-year-old Nuvolari had given out a statement: "I have great respect for several of them but I expect to win." A driver with such courage that he once won a race with his leg in a plaster cast, such endurance that he drove in another the day after a crack-up which doctors had said would keep him in bed for half a year, Nuvolari wears a little silver turtle on a string around his neck to remind him of the fable about the tortoise and the hare. Last week he remembered both the hare's boast and his own. Once, when he stopped to put imported gasoline into his car and imported mineral water down his own throat, Count Brivio took the lead. Nuvolari, on his way again long before anyone else could catch up, took it back after the next lap, kept it to the end. After his 75th trip around the four-mile course -- at 150 m.p.h. down the straightaway, less than 40 m.p.h. around the hairpin turns, for a 66 m.p.h. average -- he waved to the judges and slowed down. While France's Jean Wimille in a Bugatti passed Count Brivio, whose motor had overheated on the last ten miles just enough to cost him second place, Nuvolari paused at the end of the track to get Cup, first prize, and an extra $3,000 in lap money. Then he jogged slowly back to the pits, put on a coat, drove away in a medium-priced U. S. sedan.

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