Paul Newman, RIP

Right after I posted the previous note, I saw that Paul Newman has died.  Most people think of him as a movie star.  I know that he was also one helluva good race driver.  In 1976, I was at the SCCA championships at Road Atlanta with a bunch of my fellow gearheads from college.  We saw that this actor guy, Paul Newman, had bought himself a race car and thought he was a driver.  He was going to get his butt kicked, no question, and we were debating which one of the many better teams was going to come out on top.  

One of the teams was the Huffaker effort, which was a quasi-factory team running a Triumph TR7 with Lee Mueller driving.  They qualified up front.  Newman had an older Triumph TR6; in fact, it was the car that had won the previous year.  He qualified respectably, but not on the front row.  Once the race started, though, Newman worked his way to the front and took the lead, running just ahead of the Huffaker entry.  I mean just ahead.  There was rarely more than one carlength between them.  Every lap, they'd come by with Newman in the lead and Mueller right on his tail, doing everything in his (considerable) power to get by.  We figured that Mueller was too good and that Newman would slip up somewhere, let him by, and finish second, which was still pretty respectable.  No dice.  That last lap, they came by with Newman still in the lead and the crowd was roaring.  Newman proved that he could drive, by God.  He didn't win by having more money than anybody else, he did it by beating the best driver in the field with an older car.  It was one of the best races I've ever seen.  

Newman subsequently went on to win something like three national championships and a lot of really tough races, like the Sebring 12 hours.  But I'll always remember that race at Road Atlanta.

Godspeed, Paul.