The Garner Files: A Memoir (16 page)

The white “BRM” I drove was actually a Formula Three car, a disguised Lotus-Ford with a one-liter, four-cylinder engine. It was rigged with fake exhausts and carburetor stacks to make it look exactly like a three-liter V-8. It could hit 130 mph, while the real Formula One cars could do 160. Frankenheimer was so thorough, when he realized my car didn’t have enough torque to spin its wheels on the starting grid, he coated the tires with oil to make it smoke like the real thing.

I
did all my own driving in
Grand Prix
. The other actors weren’t so gung ho. Yves Montand scared himself to death when he spun out in front of the Hôtel de Paris and almost put the car in the police station. Antonio Sabato seemed to think he was Fangio, until he spun it in the pits, and from then on he looked terrified of the car. Brian Bedford didn’t know how to drive at all before he got the part—he’d had a driver’s license for only a few months when we began shooting. Before long he said, “Look, I can’t do this. Either double me or replace me.” Frankenheimer got a stand-in who did all his driving. Brian later said, “Asking an actor to drive Formula One is like asking Phil Hill to play Hamlet.”

During practice for the Belgian Grand Prix at Spa Francorchamps in June, Lloyd’s of London found out I was running 120 miles an hour in the rain. The district manager from Lloyd’s came down to the pits and said, “We can’t have that, Mr. Garner.” We managed to calm him down. Birds were another hazard at Spa. They kept bouncing off the windshield. I half expected one to bounce off my face.

There was a sudden downpour at the start of the actual race, and the drivers ran into a curtain of rain. Half of them crashed on the first lap, including Jackie Stewart, whose BRM hit a stone wall and went upside down in a ditch. There he was, trapped in the cockpit with a broken collarbone and high-octane racing fuel leaking all over him, terrified that the car’s hot exhaust pipes would turn him into a human torch at any second. There were no marshals or emergency personnel handy, so it was fellow drivers Graham Hill and Bob Bondurant who rescued Jackie—after they pried the steering wheel off with a wrench borrowed from a spectator. By the time they pulled Jackie from the car, he was soaked with gasoline. He had to wait twenty minutes for an ambulance, his skin blistered by the additives in the fuel.

The experience turned Jackie into a crusader for driver safety, which made him unpopular with the Formula One establishment,
including some of the drivers. Jackie maintained that he was being paid to drive, not to risk his life week after week.

Jackie was talented as he was tenacious. Between 1965 and 1973, he won twenty-seven races and three World Drivers’ Championships. In his spare time, he formed a drivers’ union that demanded changes and eventually got them. Because of his efforts, barriers were erected, medical support was improved, and some venues were closed, including Spa.

I
t was a simpler time when we made
Grand Prix
. Formula One racing was a lot more seat-of-the-pants. The teams were run by individuals, not giant corporations. The drivers were a swashbuckling band of brothers, and they had personalities: you could actually recognize them in their open helmets as the cars streaked by. Now the drivers look like faceless robots when they’re in the car and walking billboards when they’re not.

Though today’s Formula One cars go much faster than their 1966 counterparts—220 mph now versus 160 then—modern cars are a lot safer. In those days, safety measures were crude at best. The Ferraris, BRMs, Maseratis, and Lotuses didn’t have seat belts, because in a crash the cars would either disintegrate or catch fire or both, so drivers had a better chance if they were thrown free. Driving a Formula One car then was more physically demanding than it is now. They were hard to steer and the insides of your fingers would blister and bleed from constantly changing gears. Today drivers shift with a flick of a paddle on the steering wheel.

The old cars were slender and beautiful, but they were death traps: between 1960 and 1969, on average, two Grand Prix drivers were killed every year. In 1996, I went back to Monza with Formula One World Champion Jacques Villeneuve. He took out a restored 1963 Brabham that was older than he was. Though Jacques was used to driving a much faster car, he said the Brabham scared the hell out
of him. I had the chance to drive a couple of laps myself, and as I brought the car back to the pits, I caught myself giggling.

I still have the open-face helmet I wore in the picture. At the time, I thought it was really something, but compared to what they have now, it was awful. Made of fiberglass, the only thing it protected you from was the wind. Today’s full-face helmets are much stronger and give a lot more protection. The Lexan visor protects the driver’s face from pebbles and bits of debris thrown up from the track that can travel at 300 mph, and it has multiple layers of clear film that can be peeled off as they get dirty. There’s a tube connected to a supply of drinking water—the temperature in the cockpit can reach 120 degrees Fahrenheit, so drivers have to fight dehydration, which can lead to muscle cramps and loss of concentration. Today’s helmets also allow two-way radio communication with the pits. In the old days crews had to write on message boards on the side of the pit wall and the driver tried to read it while speeding by.

A
t one point, the shopkeepers along the race route in Monte Carlo revolted because we’d blocked off the streets and their customers couldn’t get to them. We’d already paid them, but I guess it wasn’t enough, because one day they came down and disrupted filming. I was on a boat in the harbor, soaking wet from the previous shot and eager to get on with it. When I realized that a shakedown was in progress, I went ashore and pretended to blow my stack. Well, half-pretended. We were soon filming again.

Toward the end of the shoot, I did a fire stunt with butane bottles that I ignited with a switch in the cockpit on the final turn. When I crossed the finish line going about 120, I slammed on the brakes and threw another switch to put out the flames. But something went wrong and the car erupted in a giant fireball. I scrambled out of the cockpit as the crew blasted me in the face with fire extinguisher and smothered me in an asbestos blanket. I wasn’t hurt, but it shook me
up. The producer wasn’t happy that I’d done the stunt and neither was Lloyd’s of London. They canceled my policy, and for the rest of the picture I drove without insurance.

O
ne of the top-grossing films of 1966,
Grand Prix
won Oscars for editing, sound, and sound effects. The movie captured the beauty and spectacle of Formula One racing in its golden age, before it became commercialized and high-tech. It looked real, sounded real, and felt real. At the end of three hours, you felt you’d been
in
the races, not
at
the races. I think it’s still the greatest auto racing picture ever made.

Grand Prix
was a high point in my film career, and I owe the whole experience to Steve McQueen for dropping out of the picture in the first place. Steve’s son Chad finally dragged him to see it. I ran into them on our street as they were coming home. Steve stopped and said his first words to me in two years:

“Well, we went to your movie.”

“Yeah? What’d you think?”

“Pretty good picture. Pretty good.”

Coming from Steve, it was high praise.

W
hen you get behind the wheel of a race car, it’s just you and the car. It takes complete concentration. You can’t fake it. I wasn’t a thrill seeker, and I didn’t have a
need for speed,
but I liked the challenge of controlling your machine and outmaneuvering your opponents.

Making
Grand Prix
gave me the racing bug. After soaking up the atmosphere on the Formula One circuit and driving fast cars on race tracks all over Europe, I
had
to be involved in the sport.

So I formed American International Racers.

The first thing we did was buy three brand-new L-88 Corvettes. Big mistake. They were so unreliable, we raced them only once, at
Daytona in 1968. We sold them and moved up to Formula A with three Lola T-70s.

In Formula A, which is just a cut below Formula One, the cars can reach speeds of 180 mph. Formula A cars aren’t easy to handle. They’re too light overall, and the weight is in the back, so the rear end swings all over the place. But the Lolas were sweet.
Great
race cars. What I wouldn’t give to have one now. I drove one on the street for quite a while, but the lights were too low. Totally against the law.

We entered long-distance endurance events—LeMans, Daytona, Sebring. We raced two cars and kept a third as a backup. At our first Daytona, our Lolas finished second and seventh.

In those days auto racing was friendly competition. You thought nothing of helping a competitor fix his car during a race. I remember doing that for Roger Penske at Sebring. To me that’s what racing is all about.

It was fun and exciting owning AIR while it lasted, but I disbanded the team at the end of 1969 after discovering that racing is a big commitment of time and money. I didn’t have enough of either to continue.

We chronicled AIR’s 1969 season in
The Racing Scene,
a ninety-minute documentary directed by former ABC Sports director Andy Sidaris and written by William Edgar. The film follows us as we race at Daytona, Sebring, and on the Formula A circuit at Lime Rock and St. Jovite. The title sequence shows Scooter Patrick and me driving in the Baja 1000.

I couldn’t drive in Formula A because I was busy working. Even if I’d had the time, the insurance companies wouldn’t have covered me. But for some reason they did allow me to drive in the Baja 1000. I’m not sure why they made that exception. Maybe they thought it was a rally because there were checkpoints. Whatever the reason, I’m glad I fell through that crack.

F
irst run in 1967, the Baja 1000 is the granddaddy of off-road races and the longest nonstop, point-to-point race in the world, running over a thousand kilometers through the beautiful desolation of Mexico’s Baja Peninsula from Ensenada, 100 miles south of San Diego, to La Paz, near the peninsula’s southern tip.

The Baja had already been a popular playground for dune buggy and dirt bike enthusiasts, so it was a natural for a big off-road race. The course starts on the Pacific Ocean side of Baja California in Ensenada and zigzags from east to west.

It’s an eerie, majestic, untamed landscape where the terrain changes suddenly and drastically, going from seaside to desert, mountains to cactus forest, salt marsh to lava field. There’s every road hazard you can imagine: auto parts, fenders, and tires litter the course; there are steep grades, sharp switchbacks, rocks, washouts, sand pits, sagebrush, scorpions, poisonous snakes, and blinding, smothering silt beds. The most feared hazard of all, silt is like talcum powder. It can be several feet deep with sharp ruts at the bottom. The silt cloud gets so thick, you just point the car, put your foot down, and hope.

If all that weren’t enough, the course is open to local traffic during the race! Livestock wanders onto the course. Spectators build hidden ramps to send vehicles airborne to enhance their viewing pleasure. Nobody sells tickets; people just walk onto the course and stand there, a few feet from the action. There can be tree trunks across the road and other fun-loving sabotage, like when spectators switch course markers to lead drivers astray. One year there was even a speed trap: a pair of enterprising local cops pulled competitors over
during the race
to sell them tickets to the policeman’s ball.

Baja 1000 drivers are celebrities in Mexico, where they’re admired for their proficiency and daring. The greats from all forms of auto racing have driven there: Indy Car racers Johnny Unser, Jimmy Vasser, Roberto Guerrero, Danny Sullivan, and Mario Andretti (“You
don’t fall asleep at the Baja,” Mario said); desert racers Rod Hall, Larry Roeseler, and Ron Bishop; and NASCAR champions Jimmie Johnson and Robby Gordon. Robby was one of the best I ever saw down there. He was so good, I swear he hardly ever touched the ground. And there were sports car drivers like Paul Newman who, in 2004 at the age of seventy-nine, was the oldest person ever to compete in the Baja 1000. Paul was
good
. Very precise. In the 1970s and ’80s, “P. J. Newman” won a bunch of SCCA (Sports Car Club of America) national titles. In ’78, he won his class at LeMans and finished second overall.

T
he first official Baja 1000, in 1967, had sixty-five entries. Now the vehicles are all high-tech, with factory support teams and corporate sponsors. But back in the old days, it was friendly and relaxed. There were hardly any rules and very little prize money. Everyone was there for the fun of taking part in a crazy carnival.

I drove the Baja five or six times, beginning in 1968. That year there were 250 entries, half of which didn’t finish. (In 2010, there were more than 1,200 entries.) I finished the race every year, whether in a truck or car, which is a testament to the people who built the vehicles, not the driver.

In ’68, Larry Bergquist and Gary Preston finished first overall on a motorcycle. Larry Minor and Jack Bayer finished first in their class in the Number 3 Bronco, but not before hitting a cow on the way in. I drove the Number 59 Bronco with Scooter Patrick and we came in fourth in our class.

Scooter and I split the driving, but you couldn’t get any rest while your partner was behind the wheel because it was such a rough ride. You had to vise-grip the handles on the side of the car just to stay in it.

Another year I started from Ensenada while my codriver (and future
Rockford
assistant director) Cliff Coleman flew to El Larco, five hundred miles farther south. Cliff, a good night driver, took over there and finished the race.

A word about Cliff: He’s crazy as hell, but he’s a good man to have around. In addition to his talents on a sound stage, Cliff is a terrific cook. Whenever we were stuck in a little Mexican village, he’d go to the local grocery and pick up canned meats and whip up a stew or some eggs and hash. He’s also a mechanic and a carpenter. I used to tell everybody, “Don’t go anywhere without Cliff.”