Mosport’s a natural for Indy car race, Unser suggests

Bobby Unser, seen at Mosport in the late '60s.

Photo courtesy Ed Moody

Bobby Unser, seen at Mosport in 1967.

Norris McDonald

MOTORSPORT WRITER

Bobby Unser, the three-time Indianapolis 500 winner, was in the middle of telling me how he and his first wife, Barbara, had less than a dollar in change between them when he won his first Pikes Peak Hill Climb in his own car, which changed the family’s financial fortunes on the spot, when he suddenly switched subjects.

Looking out at Mosport International Raceway, where he was Grand Marshal of last weekend’s American Le Mans Series Grand Prix, Unser said: “You know; they should have an Indy car race here again.”

Unser won the first Indy car race held in Canada, the Telegram Trophy Race, at Mosport on July 1, 1967. Although the series returned the following two years and then again once in the late 1970s, the Indy cars — which now race in downtown Toronto each summer — haven’t been back to the circuit north of Bowmanville since.

Unser said improvements made to the Mosport circuit over the years would make it a natural venue for the Indy cars.

“I’d forgotten how pretty it is here,” he said. “The track is wider now, it’s a whole lot nicer, it’s safer and the pit is plenty wide. They need to start talking.”

But wouldn’t there be a problem trying to promote two races in the Toronto area?

“They’ve done it in California, with Long Beach and Fontana, so why not here?”

Unser, who won 35 Indy car races and two national racing championships before retiring, went on to enjoy a wonderful second career as an auto racing colour commentator and analyst (including working with Brian Williams on CBC-TV broadcasts of Molson Indy races in Toronto and Vancouver).

Although he went on to become a millionaire, he chuckled when he recalled how close to being dead broke he was when he won that Pikes Peak race in 1959 — one of his 13 victories there.

“After it was over, Barbara and I counted all the money we had in my pockets and in her purse and it was less than a dollar,” he said. “I’d just won $8,700, so I could pay off all our bills. But I also took $3,300 of it and made one of the best investments of my life — I bought an airplane.”

Unser explained that racing didn’t pay much in those days (he had a car parts and service business in his hometown of Albuquerque, N.M. “to feed my family”) and it took forever to drive from one race to another. For instance, with no freeways, it would take him 36 hours to drive round-trip from Albuquerque to Ascot Park Speedway in Los Angeles for one race.

“That airplane let me drive in two or three races a week for different car owners, whereas some of the other fellows could only race once or maybe twice because of the distances. I made a lot more money than they did because of that plane.”

Unser said he often invited other barnstorming drivers to fly with him, to cut down on expenses.

“I’d ask McCluskey (Roger) or Andretti (Mario) or Don Branson to come along and help pay for the gas,” he said. “We all slept on that plane, too. Why pay for a room when you could sleep on the plane?”

Unser relished talking about Branson, a man in his 40s who became legendary in the 1960s for racing against, and frequently beating, drivers in their 20s and 30s.

“He was like a brother to me,” Unser said. “He was going to retire (in 1966) and he lined me up to take his place at Leader Cards Racing. Then, at the end of the season, he went out to California and got himself killed in a sprint car race.

“The only way I could honestly beat him in a race was to get him tired. He didn’t have as much stamina; he was older and his health wasn’t as good as mine. I learned so much from him, though. He was the best qualifier I ever saw. I’d watch him qualify and I’d say, ‘Holy Moses, how am I ever going to do that?’ You know what I did, though? I then became the best qualifier of that era. I said, ‘I’m gonna do it like Branson did it.’ ”

Unser led pretty much a charmed life in an era when many top race drivers were killed. Although he survived the huge crash at Indianapolis in 1964 that killed Eddie Sachs and Dave MacDonald, he had two other extremely close calls — both times in Phoenix.

“I walked away from an Indy car crash at the big track there — I still sometimes wonder how I managed to do that — and once I was really hurt in a sprint car crash at the Manzanita Speedway.

“They took me to a hospital but they left me on a stretcher. I made my friend get me an ambulance and they took me to another hospital where they told me if I’d been 30 minutes later, I would have been dead.”

Unser said that although everybody made a big deal out of his winning a road race — Mosport was only the second time the Indy cars of the day had competed on a road course — he’d had plenty of previous experience shifting gears and turning right, as had many of the other drivers of that era, such as Lloyd Ruby.

“I’d won Pikes Peak a bunch of times by then,” he said. “And I did some sports car racing at Riverside in California. But I was from a poor family and couldn’t afford to do much sports car racing.”

Unser was curious about one big change at Mosport. “Where’s the hump at the end of the backstretch?” he asked (which was removed in the late 1990s). “As soon as I saw the track, I said, ‘Where’s the hump?’ ”

In 1969, Unser had gone flying off the track there, his car becoming airborne and nearly flipping before landing on its wheels. I told him I saw the crash and that the girl I was with had screamed when it happened.

“That was probably me you heard,” Unser said, laughing.

“I wrecked a pretty good race car. I pretty near wrecked myself. Yeah, that would have been me screaming.”

Norris McDonald writes an auto racing blog at Wheels.ca. nmcdonald@thestar.ca

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