Langhorne - a spooky place

The words are from a race programme, so already you probably have some clue that this week I'm keeping off modern Formula 1. Off modern motor racing altogether, in fact.

It is 20 years since the 'old' Spa-Francorchamps circuit hosted the Belgian Grand Prix for the last time. After that, militant drivers refused to go back, claiming the place had become unacceptably perilous. On the other side of the water they were saying the same about Langhorne.

Last week I bought some Langhorne programmes, and it is from one of them that my opening paragraph comes. "You may have the opportunity to meet your favourite drivers," runs the last sentence, "and look over the race cars at close range". The word "may" was well chosen, consciously or not, since there was a fair chance, in this place, that your favourite race driver and his car might not be in one piece by the end of the day. Langhorne, indeed, would make an ideal twin town for Francorchamps.

You will find it about 15 miles north of Philadelphia, in Pennsylvania's Bucks County, but no trace of a race track remains. On the site now is a faceless shopping mall, much like any other, save that the foundations of this one are bloodied. After 1970, Foyt, Andretti, Rutherford and the rest said they would race there no more.

Langhorne was a 1-mile dirt track, like DuQuoin or Syracuse or Sacramento. But where these others were conventional ovals, with two straights and four turns, Langhorne was rounded off, almost circular. It was known, in fact, as 'The Big Left Turn', and that meant there was nowhere for the driver to relax even momentarily. The whole of his lap was effectively one long, opposite-lock slide. Even on the narrow tyres of 30 years ago, a great driver could lap at close to 115mph.

Not far up the road is Nazareth, where Poppa Andretti settled his family in 1955. "Even now," Mario says, "when I think about Langhorne, I get goosebumps.

"There was something special about that place, no question about it. When we were in our teens, Aldo and I went out there lots of times to watch, and it seemed like every time they ran a race there somebody would buy the farm...

"People don't realise these days," he goes on, "that until the end of the sixties the USAC Championship was a mix of paved race tracks like Indianapolis, and dirt tracks like Langhorne. I kinda liked that, because they were totally different disciplines, and you had to excel at both to win the title.

"Langhorne's big deal each year was a 100-mile championship race, which was always run in June when the heat was tremendous. The track would get dry and dusty, and the ruts deeper and deeper - man, you'd see cars pitched clean in the air by those ruts!"

Part of Langhorne's viciousness stemmed from its location. The track, originally built in 1926, was on marshland, with an abundance of underground springs. Parts of it, therefore, tended most of the time to be moist and soft; wheels dug ruts, which then hardened in the summer sun. Most notorious of all was the section soon after the start, downhill, very quick. The drivers christened it "Puke Hollow'.

In 1964 Mario Andretti was a feisty young sprint car driver aiming for Indianapolis. Early in the season he had a one-off drive in an Indy roadster at Trenton, and soon afterwards was approached by legendary crew chief Clint Brawner, then running the Dean Van Lines team. It was a plum drive, and the contract should have come into effect at Langhorne in June. But Brawner said no, Andretti wasn't ready for Langhorne.

"He was smart to say that, no question." Mario thinks, "but I was just getting started in the big time, full of vinegar. OK, if Clint wouldn't let me run there, I'd find a ride someplace else. What I found was the Windmill Truckers Special..."

In my programme, opposite the entry of car number 74, the space for the driver's name is left vacant. 'Mario Antratti', the original owner has scribbled in.

The Windmill Truckers Special was not a car in the first flush of youth. Its engine was tired, for one thing, but more crucially it lacked power steering, by then a standard item on the front-running championship dirt cars. In short, it was everything a small, slight man didn't need on a torpid afternoon.

"That deal had two things going for it," says Andretti. "It was quite a forgiving car, first of all. But more important was that its chief mechanic was Tommy Hinnershitz, who had been one of the greatest drivers on dirt. I'd often seen him run, and he was incredible. Anything he said to me, man, I was gonna listen."

Hinnershitz warned Mario particularly of a phenomenon peculiar to Langhorne. The almost circular shape of the track, he said, sometimes caused a driver to lose his bearings.

"People called it 'mad momentum'. You were turning left the whole time, steering on the throttle, and you could literally forget whereabouts on the race track you were! Tommy warned me about Turn 3: that was where you ran out of road, he said, where you could so easily catch the fence.

"On my first hot lap in practice I was really keen to get at it, you know. The handling felt good, safe, and it would have been very easy to have gotten carried away with myself, tail way out of line, just holding the thing on the throttle. Man, it felt good! But I just remembered what Tommy had said, and came off the gas early for Turn 3. You know what? I only just made it through without tagging the fence. Without him, I guess we'd have finished up in the stands someplace..."

Andretti finished ninth that day, somehow wrestling the old car to the flag. For that he earned a princely $637 - which had to be split with the owners. It seemed like a poor rate for the job, I said, and Mario allowed that, no, he probably wouldn't do it for that now.

"I had no idea where I was at the end of that race. It just seemed like it would never end, with all that heat and dust. I would love to have quit, but in the circumstances there was no way - I had to finish, after what Brawner had said. And my hands... Jesus, my hands! Without power steering, I really had to fight that thing, and the steering wheel had been taped up with that black electrical tape. I just wore those thin leather gloves, and my hands were skinned - I mean, just like raw hamburger meat."

Langhorne, for Andretti, was bitter to endure, sweet to remember. Before that race, he admitted, he had been so scared that it had kept him from sleep: "When a guy like Rodger Ward - who'd won Indy twice and was also real good on dirt - refused to run Langhorne, on safety grounds, it had to be one spooky place. And it was."

Ward took his stand in 1960. He had no fear of the dirt cars, as such, and would happily race at such as Springfield or Sedalia. But Langhorne, no. If his Leader Card team owners wanted to run there, fine, they could get another driver. They did. They got Jimmy Bryan.

Here was one of the greatest of American race drivers. In 1957 he won the inaugural Race of Two Worlds, that curious shortlived event at Monza which sought to match Indianapolis roadsters against European cars. As a contest, it was farcical, for the track selected at Monza comprised the pit straight, the back straight and the high banking at either end. For the roadsters it was a shoe-in, but between themselves the Americans fought hard. And Bryan, who raced with an unlit cigar clamped in his jaw, ultimately ran away with it.

The following season he won at Indianapolis, then went into virtual retirement: in future, he said, he would drive only in the 500, and for a couple of years he kept to that. By 1960, though, his hedonistic way of life had taken toll of his savings.

It was the classic cliché story of the fighter, broke and past his prime, coming back for all the wrong reasons. When Rodger Ward rejected Langhorne, Bryan snapped up the ride.

His friends were appalled. Why, of all places, Langhorne? Well, because he loved it, he said. It was his kind of track; he had won there many times. But that was then... They wanted to say it, but didn't.

In qualifying, however, he was sensational, beaten only by Don Branson, whom Andretti, among others, considers the best on dirt there has ever been. And in the race he had to show the world he could still do it.

The temperature was close on a hundred as they cruised the pace laps, and when the green flag waved Bryan immediately snatched the lead, coming over the line sideways; at Langhorne not even the start/finish area was straight.

Followed by Branson and Jim Hurtubise, Bryan pitched the Leader Card Offenhauser into Turn 1 too fast, too high. And ahead lay the ruts of Puke Hollow. There, as he fought with the car, he tagged Hurtubise, and began endlessly somersaulting.

That same day, at Spa, Chris Bristow and Alan Stacey were killed in the Belgian Grand Prix. Ten years later Chris Amon would lament the passing of the old circuit: "It frightened the hell out of you, but at the same time a quick lap there gave you satisfaction like nowhere else." Roger McCluskey said much the same of Langhorne: "I'm glad they've stopped it, but I'm still going to miss it."

Faced with dwindling entry lists, the Langhorne promoters did the unthinkable in 1965, and paved their infamous mile. It was, in many ways, the worst of both worlds, for it remained lethal, yet now lacked the spectacle which had drawn driver and spectator alike for 40 years, that of a car held sideways, balanced on the throttle.

"Langhorne never changed," Andretti says. "Not really. It was always going to be a widow maker. I guess Foyt is the only guy I ever heard say he really liked the place, but of course, with his size and strength, it suited him.

"I guess it was a little safer after they paved it, but then the speeds went up and up. By the end of the sixties the lap speed was upwards of 130, and it was like driving round in a big circle all afternoon - I don't think I have ever experienced g-forces like that. I won there a couple of times, but it was always the race you didn't look forward to. I can still get spooked thinking about it, in fact."

A bizarre spot for piped music and Mothercare. I wonder if there are ghosts in the mail? There should be.