A crowd estimated at 250,000 swarmed Indianapolis Motor Speedway’s grandstands, suites and infield May 12, 1973. It was Pole Day for the Indianapolis 500, a sunny Saturday bright with the promise of speed.
People came to see the storied track’s first 200-mph laps. They saw, instead, the fatal first day of the old track’s deadliest May since 1937.
“Very sad, about as sad as you can get,” Pat Patrick said 40 years later. “I still feel bad about it.”
“To me, it was a horrible year,” Andy Granatelli said. “Terrible. Empty.”
Patrick owned Patrick Racing, which fielded the winning car, driven by Gordon Johncock. Granatelli was the chief executive officer and affable pitchman of the car’s sponsor, STP oil products.
Driver Art Pollard was killed in an accident during pole day practice. Driver Salt Walther suffered disfiguring burns in a fiery first-lap crash that injured 13 spectators. Swede Savage, driver of another Patrick Racing, STP-sponsored car, and Armando Teran, mechanic on a third Patrick/STP car, also died.
It was a May to forget. Rain hampered practice the first two weeks, delayed the race for 2½ days and graciously ended it, on Wednesday, May 30, after 133 laps and 332½ miles.
“After the second day, you started thinking: ‘Who’s next?’” pole-sitter Johnny Rutherford said. “They could have just as well red-flagged the thing, and we would have been happy to have gone on to Milwaukee.”
High speeds, high anxiety
Turbochargers and bolt-on wings introduced in 1972 resulted in an unprecedented spike in speeds that year. Bobby Unser took the pole at 195.940 mph, 17 mph faster than the year before. Then Johncock recorded an unofficial lap of 199.4 mph during tire testing in March 1973.
It was the Golden Era of IndyCar racing. Raw speed ruled.
Current IndyCars generate 670 horsepower. In 1973, that figure was in excess of 1,000.
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Steve Krisiloff, who started the 1973 race seventh and finished sixth, recalled coming around to take the green flag on his pole-day qualifying attempt. His tires were warmed, his four-speed gear box in high.
“I jumped on the throttle coming out of 2 and spun my wheels halfway down the back straight – in high gear,” Krisiloff said.
Cars were on the edge. They carried a full fuel load of 75 gallons. Methanol, at 70 degrees, weighs about 6.6 pounds a gallon. That’s 500 pounds of high explosive. All three major accidents resulted in fireballs.
Robin Miller, the longtime Indianapolis Star racing writer who now works as an IndyCar reporter for NBC Sports Network and the Speed network, recalled sitting with Pollard on the pit wall early pole-day morning. Miller was surprised when Pollard said he would take the car out during prequalifying practice.
“You’re good,” Miller told Pollard.
“I think we can trim it out and get a little more out of it,” Pollard said.
Minutes later, Pollard’s car smacked the outside wall in Turn 1, spun, flipped and slid to a stop in Turn 2, engulfed in flames. Pollard, 46, was pronounced dead an hour later from pulmonary damage because of flame inhalation.
Rutherford was among the first on the scene of the crash. He and Pollard were close friends. They recently had returned from a New Orleans vacation with their wives and two other couples.
No matter. Time trials began on time, at 11 a.m. Rutherford qualified at 198.413 to set a track record and take the pole.
“It was my job,” he said. “That’s all you can say.”
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On race day, Monday, May 28, the massive crowd included 23 U.S. prisoners of war recently released by Hanoi. Jim Nabors, an emergency fill-in the year before, sang “Back Home in Indiana” again. Rene Thomas, the 1914 race winner, was driven around the track. He waved his checkered cap from the riding mechanic’s seat of his winning Delage.
The race started four hours late under threatening skies. It erupted in flames with the green flag still waving.
Walther touched wheels with Jerry Grant’s car in the sixth row and was launched into the catch fence near the starting line. The front of Walther’s car was torn off. The grandstand was showered in debris and burning fuel. Twelve cars were caught up in the wreckage as Walther’s car pinwheeled down the track upside down, gushing flaming methanol.
“This is what everybody feared,” ABC’s Jim McKay told the worldwide television audience. “This is why there has been such a terrible atmosphere of fear here, all weekend long.”
People in the pits recall the searing intensity of the heat.
“He came off the wall and almost landed on the front of my car,” said Lee Kunzman, whose first Indy start carried him only a few hundred yards. “I couldn’t see where I was going or what I was doing.
“I thought I was blind until I flipped up my visor. The flames melted it and crinkled it all up.”
The rain came while workers still were cleaning the track. The race was postponed until Tuesday, when on the second parade lap, the sky opened again and another washout was declared.
By Wednesday, tension and exhaustion infected the track. Drivers and crews were taut.
“People don’t realize how the driver gets himself geared up for battle,” said Bobby Unser, who would lead 39 laps before retiring with a blown engine. “It really tries on a driver hard. It gets to your stomach, to your head.”
It got to Krisiloff’s nose.
“By Wednesday, when we showed up at the race track, the place stunk,” he said.
Mud and sodden trash was everywhere. Clouds threatened again, but sun broke through, and the track dried. The grid was reset without Walther. Thirty-two cars returned to their original positions.
A little after 2 p.m., for the second time in three days, gentlemen started their engines.
Unser led early, then Savage went to the front. On Lap 57, Savage pitted and took on a full fuel load. Coming out of Turn 4 on the next lap, the rear of his 1,500-pound Eagle, heavy with 500 pounds of methanol, twitched. Savage lost control.
He hit the inside wall almost head-on at full speed. His car exploded in an angry orange flash. Pieces tumbled down the track, and Savage slid to a stop, still strapped in the cockpit amid a pool of burning fuel, but fully conscious, somehow speaking to safety workers and medical officials.
Teran, a mechanic on Graham McRae’s car, sprinted down pit lane to see if he could be of help to his injured teammate. A fire truck traveling at an estimate 60 mph in the wrong direction hit Teran, who suffered crushed ribs and a fractured skull.
Granatelli always had watched the race from the pits but that year for the first time was in a penthouse suite overlooking pit lane from across the track. At last glance, Granatelli had seen Teran standing alongside McRea’s crew chief, Granatelli’s son Vince.
Teran and Vince Granatelli were the same height and build. They wore the same uniform.
“They looked exactly alike,” said Andy Granatelli, who spoke in the hushed tones of grief 40 years later. “I thought it was my son who had been hit.”
Johncock parked his car in the short chute and climbed out, intending to check on Savage, his teammate. A.J. Foyt approached and put a hand on Johncock’s arm.
“He told me, ‘Don’t go up there,’” Johncock said. “He said, ‘You don’t want to see it.’”
George Snider had. He pulled into his pit and climbed out of his car. He turned the car over to its owner, Foyt, who had gone out on Lap 37 with a failed bolt.
The race recommenced an hour later. The yellow came out when light rain began falling on Lap 129. The red flag flew as the rain intensified on Lap 133. Finally, mercifully, the “72 Hours of Indianapolis” were over. It was 5:30 p.m. Only 10 cars still were running.
Johncock, who led 64 laps, was declared the winner while sitting in the pits. He unstrapped and pronounced the day “the happiest of my life.”
Johncock, who would win again when he beat Rick Mears by .16 seconds in 1982, didn’t look or sound happy. No one did.
The traditional victory banquet was canceled. Johncock left the track quickly. He went to the hospital with Patrick to visit Savage. Afterward, Patrick and Johncock held the most muted of victory banquets. They shared hamburgers at the Burger Chef restaurant on West 16th Street, just east of the track.
“Swede wasn’t much older than my son (Steve),” Patrick said. “He was like a family member. Hell, we’d take him on hunting trips, fishing trips, everywhere.
“My whole family was in tears. We just got on the plane and came home.”
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Walther, 25, suffered a crushed kneecap and severe burns over most of his body. The fingertips on his charred left hand were amputated. He had to relearn to walk, but he was back at Indy, back in the field for the 1974 Indianapolis 500.
Walther struggled with addiction to pain medicine after his fiery wreck. He served time in jail. He died Dec. 27, 2012.
Savage, 26, suffered critical burns but survived 33 days. He died of liver failure, attending physician Steve Olvey wrote in his book, Rapid Response, because of a transfusion of contaminated plasma.
Pollard’s was an uncommon touch. “Everyone’s friend,” Unser called him.
Pollard frequently visited Larue Carter Memorial Hospital, a facility for mentally ill youth, and each May arranged for a busload or two of its children to come to the track for a picnic.
Upon his death, Pollard’s family established the Art Pollard Fund with a $25,000 bequest. Forty years later, children cavort on the hospital’s “Art Pollard Playground,” and the picnic survives in his honor, financed by his fund, the original $25,000 still untouched.
Kunzman took over Pollard’s car for the remainder of the 1973 season. Wally Dallenbach stepped into Savage’s.
“Back then, about the only way to get a better ride, move up the ladder, was when somebody got hurt or killed,” Kunzman said. “It was part of the gig.”
Safety was the watchword for the 1974 Indianapolis 500.
Fuel capacity was reduced from 75 to 40 gallons. The large wings of 1972-73 were reduced in size. Pop-off valves cut boost and the horsepower generated by turbochargers. Retaining walls were raised, catch fences improved, and some “trackside seating” was removed.
There wouldn’t be another on-track fatality at IMS until Gordon Smiley in 1982. It was a needed and welcome improvement. It was too late for too many.
Richards writes for The Indianapolis Star, a Gannett property. © USA TODAY. All rights reserved.
