Rolla Vollstedt 1918-2017

An unconventional star of racing, says Richard Heseltine

FROM STREET RACING in the ’30s to upsetting the Indy establishment by installing a woman to drive his car at The Brickyard, Rolla Vollstedt did things his own way. He took on the US motor racing elite from his basement, gave a leg-up to a legion of future stars and even ran the sainted Jim Clark in his last-ever Champ Car outing.

As he told Octane when interviewed for issue 55 in 2007, Vollstedt was a racer to the core. Of German descent, he arrived in Portland, Oregon, aged two. As a teenager he terrorised the neighbourhood in a ’37 Buick while working at Frank Costanzo’s speed shop. Called up for WW2 and having landed at Omaha Beach on D-Day, he was awarded a Purple Heart after stopping a bullet.

In peacetime, he picked up from where he left off, racing a Lincoln-engined roadster on dirt ovals. Realising his talents lay elsewhere, he installed local man Len Sutton in his car in 1947 and the partnership led to countless honours on the Pacific Northwest before a first run in the Indy 500 in 1964 with a Vollstedt-made, mid-engined single-seater.

Sutton qualified eighth and was running fourth at the halfway mark when the fuel pump broke. Vollstedt would never win in 21 attempts, but gave early rides to Mario Andretti, George Follmer and the pioneering Janet Guthrie (above, on left, with Vollstedt). After entering a car for Emerson Fittipaldi for the 1984 Indy 500, Vollstedt turned his hand to restoring vintage oval racers.