Auto Racing: Gathering of Eagles

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AUTO RACING

"Maybe," said Andy Granatelli, "somebody up there doesn't want me to win." That was the way it looked last week as Granatelli, 45, the Don Quixote of auto racing, once again was frustrated in his long and costly quest to win the Indianapolis 500. Last year, only the failure of a $6 ball bearing with eight miles to go kept Parnelli Jones from winning the 500-mile race in Granatelli's revolutionary, turbine-powered STP Special. Last week, in an uncannily similar disaster, Joe Leonard was whooshing toward apparently certain victory in a new STP turbine when—just 22 miles from the finish—a $12 fuel-pump shaft sheared off and the engine died. Granatelli could only watch helplessly as New Mexico's Bobby Unser, driving a piston-engined Eagle, swept triumphantly past the checkered flag.

Unser modestly attributed his victory to luck. "Leonard," he said, "could have outrun me any time." But the baby-faced 34-year-old from Albuquerque had skill and daring going for him too. Unser's older brother Jerry was killed during a practice run at Indy in 1959; his younger brother Al narrowly escaped injury when he lost two wheels and slammed into the wall on the 41st lap of last week's race. Worried about Al, plagued by a broken transmission that forced him to stay in high gear and therefore cost him seconds accelerating away from each pit stop, Bobby nonetheless drove the race of his life. "I was out there to root hog or die," he said afterward. "I took chances I'd never take ordinarily." When the times were announced, Unser had set a new Indy record by averaging 152.8 m.p.h. His $177,523 winner's purse was the biggest in 500 history, and by scoring his fourth straight victory on the "big car" circuit he sewed up the 1968 U.S. Auto Club championship.

One, Two & Four. Another big winner was the man who finished second: California's Dan Gurney, 37, whose All American Racers, Inc., manufactured the rugged, sweet-handling Eagles driven by Bobby, Dan himself and the fourth-place finisher, New Zealand's Denis Hulme. Long one of the world's most talented racing drivers, Gurney turned to building his own cars in 1964, and the results have been little short of sensational. Last year, in a smaller version of the Eagle, he won the Belgian Grand Prix—the first Grand Prix victory scored by a U.S. car since 1921. But "our great objective from Day One," said Dan, was Indy.