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Quinn Epperly did what the breakfast cereal commercials talk about--he built strong bodies. However, he built them for race cars, and they were not only strong--they were beautifully done. Now I had money and he was a natural choice to build the body for the Spirit of America.
Quinn came over to the garage and just stood there in disbelief when he saw this 40-foot-long frame sitting amidst the debris from six months of hectic efforts. He was accustomed to building bodies for Indianapolis cars, which were about one-third the size of the Spirit, and the whole thing was a little overwhelming. He just stood there, shaking his head and saying, "It's the biggest thing I've ever seen."
He stepped back about ten feet, took another long look and said, "Bring it over to the shop."
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| Crew members marvel at one of the Spirit of America 48 inch tires and wheels |
The next day Goodyear sent over four truck wheels and tires, so that we could shift the car around while they were designing and building the rear wheels and tires. Now we could move it--move it, that is, if it weren't for a few minor problems. The car was eleven and one-half feet wide, and I had to get it out of the garage and down the driveway. It was like building a boat in the basement. There were some obstacles, namely, the fence, the side porch, and Mr. Tuchen's hedge. They all had to go.
I didn't want to take a chance on Mr. Tuchen's saying no when it came to cutting down the hedge; so I thought we had better get to it early in the morning before he got up. I had always known my early hedge-trimming days would come in handy. This, however, was to be my swan song.
Mr. Tuchen would probably be so relieved to see the car go that the loss of his hedge would be insignificant, I reasoned. At least I felt that I could convince him of it because I had had a lot of experience in calming Mr. Tuchen down after every crisis. But he did have a for sale sign in the front of his apartment building. We had just about driven him out; so the car's leaving might be his most glorious moment.
We got up early, and the first thing we did was to cut down the hedge. Then we tore out the fence, broke up the steps, and started to move the Spirit down the driveway. Officials from Shell and Goodyear were there and all of the neighbors and hundreds of passers-by. It was a real traffic jam. And right in the middle of it stood Mr. Tuchen, with a smile on his face like the Mona Lisa. He hadn't even noticed that his hedge was gone. I walked over to him and said, "It's about the hedge, Mr. Tuchen. We'll plant a new one tommorow. We'll plant a whole new hedge." He looked at me with this funny smile and far off look in his eyes--the look of a man completely at peace with the world.
"A new hedge. A new hedge. Okay, okay," he said.
The house was all but demolished by the time we moved the car and all of the people over to Quinn's shop. It's a good thing that we moved, for the car was no longer the project of a bunch of buddies--they had now been replaced by a lot of employees. I realized that I had to learn a lot, with half a dozen guys on the payroll and an honest to goodness deadline to meet. Before, it had been pretty much my own schedule, and I could go at any pace I pleased. I couldn't set the schedule anymore. It was May and the car had to be completed by August. August was when conditions at the Salt Flats were best, and Shell and Goodyear had planned a press conference for August 9. We had to be ready by August.
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| Craig revs up the jet engine for a test firing at Los Angeles International Airport |
It took a lot of organizing because Quinn also had six guys working on the project. This meant that we had to keep 12 people busy at all times and the work rolling in the proper direction.
Goodyear was also working against a deadline because they had just started to design the tires and wheels, and they had to be built and tested extensively. I talked with them a lot, and they had people coming around all the time to look at my wind tunnel data and talk with me about the salt and other factors. I felt pretty flattered that a company the size of Goodyear would place that much confidence in my judgment. It made me work even harder.
It had taken two years to get the car to that point; it had to be completely finished in three months. The tremendous strain changed my personality somewhat. I was no longer the jovial kid down the street with a hot rod and trophies and a lot of fantastic dreams. I was a businessman and a foreman on a big project sponsored by two giant companies, and I became all business--not to the point of being unfair and hateful to the guys, it's true, but I was firm. Before, I had been easygoing and trusting with everybody. With the business I was now running, I didn't have time for any of that. The car couldn't have been further from a hobby.
Fortunately, the fellows understood the deadline problems, and we worked 18 or 20 hours a day on the car. We didn't stop, and some of the guys would work until they dropped. Then they would sleep on the floor. It was a complete, out-and-out crash program. It also wasn't long until the payroll became a crash program, too.
I had told Shell that I thought it would take $30,000 to complete the car, but we went through most of that in the first month. So, for the second time in 30 days, I was back in Bill Lawler's office with my hands out. I told him that the whole thing was costing much more than I had ever anticipated, and he listened attentively.
"The body's costing three times as much as I expected, and the guys are working around the clock," I said. "Before everybody was working for nothing, and the thirty thousand sounded like all the money in the world. Now it's a business, and we're paying everybody a salary. Nobody's giving us anything anymore, and we're just spending money like it's going out of style."
He let me finish and then he said, "I've got some good news for you. We knew you couldn't do it for $30,000; so we appropriated $75,000." Shell must have marked it up to "education"--my education. I just hadn't realized that it was going to cost so much, what with buying everything and paying everybody.
The next problem that we faced was the design of the car's steering. Because of the car's triangular shape, it was difficult to design front wheel steering, and Rod Schapel, who had agreed to help me with the final design, had wrestled with the problem for a month. Finally he decided that we should steer the car by using differential braking on the back. In other words, we would steer it the way you steer some old tail-dragger airplane. You step on the right brake and it makes a retarding movement on that side of the car, causing it to veer in that direction.
The plan was that I was going to steer the car with the brakes until I got up to 150 miles an hour. At that point I would have sufficient air speed to be able to guide the car with the fin that would be placed on the bottom of the nose. It would be just like taxiing it up to air speed and then steering with the fin, as if we were going to fly an airplane.
The idea didn't appeal to me at first because I couldn't imagine a car that didn't steer entirely with a steering wheel, but the more Rod talked to me about it, the more convinced I was that it would work. That's the way the car was built.
Spirit of America was completed on schedule--August 9, 1961, exactly on the day of the press conference. If I'd had any idea of just what Shell and Goodyear had in mind, I'm not sure that I would have made it. I would have had stage fright. The unveiling was held at the Beverly Hills Country Club, and we looked like the original Beverly Hillbillies by the time we arrived. We worked on the car--polishing and buffing and touching it up, right up to the gate of the country club--and it was fantastically beautiful, even if we weren't. As soon as the car was positioned near the eighteenth green in this spectacular sylvan setting, we ducked out the back and got cleaned up in the locker room.
When the press (and it seemed as if there were a thousand reporters) arrived, there was a magnificent blue and silver three-wheeled car with about the sleekest lines of anything in the world. The workmanship was superb, and it glistened like $100,000--because that's what it had cost.
All the Shell and Goodyear VIP's were there, and even people like General Jimmy Dolittle. The unveiling was a tremendous success. I talked to all of the wire-services and television networks and racing writers, and for the first time I really knew that there was something more to this whole thing than just a hot-rodding kid's dream. This really was the "spirit of America."
After the press conference we all took a couple of days off and just rested. We were totally exhausted, and most of us hadn't had a decent night's sleep in three months--just an hour or two here and there, whenever we could find time. Most of the fellows just went somewhere and collapsed.
My retreat was Redondo Beach, and Lee and I lay in the sun and played in the surf, We were like a couple of kids again. It was the first time in three years that I had taken off one day to do something for myself, and I was determined to enjoy every second of it. I hadn't gone to a restaurant--except for business purposes--or a movie or a dance in so long I couldn't remember. That first night Lee and I had dinner at a neat little seafood place at the beach and went to a movie afterward. I wore my new blue blazer with the Spirit of America emblem on the pocket.
When we got back to earth--which, in this case, was Quinn's shop--Rod and I sat down and started to finalize the program, so that everybody would know his job when we got to the Flats. This had to be done immediately because we had learned that conditions were perfect at the Salt Flats. We all knew that the situation could change with the first storm; so we had better get there,soon.
It was apparent that my time was going to be taken up with learning to drive the new car, and with the questions and interviews of the army of newsmen who were planning to be there. I wouldn't have much time to run the crew; so I asked Rod to take over that duty. He would be the project manager. I would tell him how I thought the car was handling and what I thought needed adjusting and he would then work with Nye Frank, the chief mechanic, and between them, the work would get done.
We were ready to go, and fortunately for us, our competition had problems. Dr. Ostich had run his jet car but hadn't done too well because the inlet ducts again collapsed and the car had a shimmying problem. Mickey Thompson had all but given up temporarily but was talking of putting rockets on the Challenger to try to get it going faster. Donald Campbell had crashed the Bluebird, which was being rebuilt in England. Athol Graham crashed his City of Salt Lake and had been killed. Glenn Leasher was ready to come to the Flats in a jet-powered car built by Romeo Palamedes. The latter was an after-burning J-47 powered car that was essentially a four-wheeler with a Ford front axle under it. It was pretty much a hot rod with a jet engine.
That was what we were up against, and we were confident. We were ready and well organized, and our spirits were high.
