USA TODAY International Edition
EARLY ASTRONAUTS DRAWN IN
Race’s intrigue had U. S. heroes eager to get involved
INDIANAPOLIS America’s pioneering astronauts were speedobsessed gear- heads by nature. Then they started running around with a certain Chevrolet dealer.
It was inevitable they’d gravitate to the Indianapolis 500.
Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper was the first, attending the 1963 race. He had made his historic flight aboard Faith 7 — 22 orbits, 34 hours — two weeks earlier, so at the time he was the nation’s latest, hottest “spaceman.” He was a national hero.
Celebrities attend the Greatest Spectacle in Racing for different reasons, but a big one is to take advantage of the huge crowds and the pageantry to promote their careers. Cooper came purely for the sport.
He first visited the track on a quiet, thinly attended practice day. He asked officials if he could take a race car for a spin around the oval. They said no. On race day, Cooper tried to duck the pageantry and get right to the racing.
“The biggest name in the country at the moment … a slim, 36year- old man dressed in a black sport shirt and sport coat, dark glasses and a white cap,” The Indianapolis Star wrote at the time, “tried to slip into the sprawling ( Indianapolis Motor Speedway) grounds unnoticed.”
Once on the grounds, Cooper made a beeline for a “visit to Jim Rathmann shortly before the start of the race.”
Rathmann was the Chevy dealer. He also was a race car driver. He drove in 14 Indy 500s and won the 1960 race.
The astronauts training facility in Cape Canaveral, Fla., was 26 miles from Melbourne, where Rathmann had his dealership. Rathmann had Corvettes, and Chevrolet saw the marketing value of the astronauts driving its cars. The company let Rathmann lease Corvettes to them for $ 1 a year. Cooper, Gus Grissom and Alan Shepard took him up on it. John Glenn was the exception.
The first astronauts were A- list celebrities, but they answered to NASA. Cooper wanted to ride in the pace car as it led the 33 racers to their famously thrilling running start. But NASA officials nixed that. So instead there was Cooper, waving from the back of a convertible, doing a slow, prerace loop like the other celebrities, which that year included Mickey Rooney and Connie Stevens.
That was good for public relations because the slower Cooper was paraded, the longer people could cheer him ( and perhaps the more supportive they’d be of NASA’s substantial budget). The Star pronounced Cooper “THE hit” of the day “as an estimated 250,000 spectators stood and cheered the modest space explorer.”
Cooper was back at the Speedway in 1964 with three astronaut colleagues: Shepard, Wally Schirra and Thomas P. Stafford. Schirra told The Star that Indiana native Grissom wanted to come “but was unable to leave the space center at Houston.”
Cooper also attended qualifications two weeks before the race. He predicted the 160- mph barrier would fall that year, and he was nearly right — Jim Clark went 159.337 mph.
He was becoming an expert. He mentioned again he’d like to “turn a few laps” at the Speedway.
Grissom, with his wife, Betty, attended the Indy 500 in 1965. On race day, Grissom played the celebrity, donning a suit and tie, sitting on the back of the pace car as it circled the Speedway during prerace ceremonies and getting a thundering ovation.
The next year the astronauts got down to business. Cooper, Grissom and Rathmann, at Rathmann’s suggestion, bought a rearengine supercharged Offenhauser called the Pure Firebird Special. They entered the car in the 1966 Indy 500.
Cooper and Grissom at first were silent partners but soon acknowledged they were the G and C in G. C. R. Inc., the car’s registered owner. They hadn’t notified NASA of their venture, and NASA was not happy. “We were called on the carpet for it,” Cooper said a month later.
“That bothered me, because I figure this is part of our private life, and ( it) didn’t seem right for them to be regulating it. I figured it was part of our recreation and hobby interest. But when we got to the right people, there was no problem at all. Gus and I and some of the other astronauts are real interested in racing. Gus has a competition Corvette, and I have a single- overhead cam 427 Ford that can go 180.
“There are some private roads near Houston that are owned by the oil companies. We have our own private little races sometimes when we get the roads closed off. And we have some dandies.”
Greg Weld was hired to drive the Pure Firebird Special. Weld crashed the car on his final quali- fication attempt. The car was repaired, and Art Pollard drove it the rest of the year and had his best finishes, fourth and seventh, in races at the Milwaukee Mile. Cooper and Grissom, when they had a weekend off from NASA, worked on Pollard’s pit crew.
In June 1966, while helping prep the car for a race at Indianapolis Raceway Park, Cooper expressed more firmly his desire to drive a race car. “Sometime, before the summer’s out, I intend to get our car on a racetrack and check out in it,” he said. “And then I’d like to run it in a race. I’m serious about this.”
Grissom was feeling the desire for speed, too. Months later he ordered from Rathmann a new Corvette, a 1967 convertible specially geared and modified in the rear to accommodate extra- wide racing tires. It was his last Corvette. Grissom died at Cape Canaveral on Jan. 27, 1967, along with astronauts Ed White and Roger Chaffee, when fire swept through their spacecraft during a pre- launch test for the Apollo 1 mission.
Cooper and Rathmann returned to the Indy 500 that May with another race car. Grissom was gone, but they continued to call their team G. C. R. They tried something new: They got corporate sponsorship from Smirnoff, the vodka maker, and agreed to name their race car the Smirnoff Skyball, the name of a cocktail Smirnoff was promoting.
The drink was basically a vodka tonic, but it was the focus of an expansive advertising campaign built around the concept of space travel. Full- page ads in magazines showed a man and a woman wearing party clothes, holding hands and floating weightless above the Earth. In their hands were drinks, presumably Smirnoff Skyballs, and behind the couple floated a fully decked- out spaceman giving a thumbs- up. The ad copy claimed that: 1) The Smirnoff Skyball “leaves all other tonic drinks back on the pad”; 2) “There’s not too much mixer to dampen the fuel”; and 3) “Whoosh!”
Speedway officials nixed the deal because it didn’t allow sponsorships from hard liquor companies, said Donald Davidson, the Speedway’s official historian.
Smirnoff’s snub didn’t matter because Cooper’s and Rathmann’s car, driven by Bobby Johns, failed to qualify.
Finally, in July 1967, Cooper at last got what he’d long wanted, sort of. Speedway officials allowed him to climb into a race car and take a few laps. They prohibited him, however, from standing on the gas and running all out.