The two-time GP winner who never raced an F1 car

One of the most talented drivers ever to win a world championship round never drove a Formula 1 car and only ever appeared at one circuit on the calendar. Among the many anomalies thrown up by the Indianapolis 500's presence on the first 11 F1 calendars is that Bill Vukovich sits alongside the likes of Elio de Angelis, Patrick Tambay, Jean-Pierre Jabouille, Pedro Rodriguez and Wolfgang von Trips in the statistics as a two-time 'F1' race winner.

A desire to give the newly-established F1 world championship a more global flavour was behind the Indy 500's inclusion on the schedule from 1950-1960, as was a hope that it would encourage more crossover between the European and American racing scenes. Ultimately little of that occurred, and as F1's own races became established in Argentina and the United States itself later in the decade the Indy 500's purpose on the calendar was superseded.

That leaves those 1950-1961 Indys as a statistic-skewing curiosity in F1 history - but one worth celebrating as the world championship reaches its milestone this week.

Motorsport's worst year? 1955. On May 26, the fastest grand prix driver of the era, two-time Formula 1 world champion Alberto Ascari, suffered a fatal accident while testing a Ferrari sportscar at Monza. On June 11, almost 90 people died in the Le Mans disaster. And in between, on Memorial Day (May 30), a man who had dominated the Indianapolis Motor Speedway since 1952, in a manner similar to Ascari's 1952-1953 scorched-earth campaigns in GP racing, also paid the ultimate price.

Unlike Ascari's demise, however, there was no mystery to Bill Vukovich's death. He was blameless. 'Vuky' just didn't make mistakes at Indy.

"I think Bill Vukovich was probably the greatest driver we've ever known," said fellow two-time Indy 500 winner Rodger Ward, speaking on ESPN Classic's SportsCentury in 2001. "In terms of his skill and his ability and his determination.

"He wasn't really a big guy but I tell you what, I wouldn't have wanted to tangle with him if I was nine feet tall with six-feet arms! The guy was tougher than anybody I knew."

Forget the 'Mad Russian' nickname hung on Vuky: it shows profound ignorance of what he was all about. For one thing, he was an American born to immigrants from Yugoslavia. Yvoan and Milka Vucurovic, landed on Ellis Island in 1909, lived in South Dakota for four years, then headed west to Alameda, California. On December 13, 1918, Milka gave birth to Vaso, who they named Bill when he first went to school - just like they changed their own names to John and Mildred and simplified their surname to Vukovich.

One of eventually eight children, Bill was only two when John's dream of becoming a land owner led to the Vukovich clan moving 150 miles south to Kerman, a little farm town in Fresno County. But from barely treading water financially, the Vukoviches sank when another move to a less fertile ranch a few miles east proved disastrous at the height of the Great Depression. At rock bottom, just two weeks before his land and house were to be repossessed, John shot himself on Bill's 14th birthday.

Bill quit high school aged 15 to support the family by working in an auto parts store and stoked his interest in racing by helping elder brother Eli and eldest brother Mike convert a 1920s Chevrolet into a racecar for Mike to campaign. At local dirt tracks, Bill befriended Fred Gerhardt and convinced the future Indycar constructor to let him race his heavily modified '26 Chevy. The combo won their fourth event, spurring Gerhardt into buying and running a midget for this tough teenager.

"Guys were saying you can't win two in a row. I didn't say anything. I just let them talk" Bill Vukovich

In this booming category, Vuky became a sensation up and down the west coast. Yes, he had a couple of bone crunching accidents - bad enough to keep him out of the Army in World War II - because finding the limit by exceeding it was perilous methodology when racecars and track facilities meant it was hard to have a non-injurious shunt. But in between times, he and the midget he'd dub 'Old Ironsides' became virtually unstoppable.

When America entered the war and halted motorsport, Bill, now married to Esther and soon to have two children - Marlene and William (Bill Jr) - earned his money maintaining army vehicles in Riverside. When the conflict ended and racing resumed, he picked up where he left off, winning the United Racing Association 'Red Circuit' championship for non-Offenhauser-engined midgets in both 1945 and '46. As midget racing's popularity and purses dwindled, Vuky expanded his campaign to include the URA's 'Blue Circuit' for Offy midgets and in 1948 scored an astonishing 29 Feature wins.

After dominating the Turkey Night Grand Prix, Bill was approached by two-time American Automobile Association (AAA) champion Rex Mays. Eldest brother Mike, speaking to author Bob Gates in the definitive biography Vukovich, recalled: "Rex told Billy he needed to go back east to run, and then go to Indianapolis. He told him, 'Vuky, if you can make that little Offy talk like you did tonight, you should be able to make one of those big ones sing'."

Vuky hated to leave California so delayed the move for a year, but the oversaturation of midget tracks there was exacerbating the reduced prize-money issue, and he headed to Indiana in 1950. After winning at Kokomo Speedway, Vukovich spoke to his first hero, 1925 Indy 500 winner Pete DePaolo, and three-time Indy winner Wilbur Shaw, president of Indianapolis Motor Speedway, both of whom suggested he was ready to tackle the world's greatest race.

He was - but the car that DePaolo's IRC Racing team prepared for him was not: it was the Maserati 8CTF in which Shaw had twice won the 500 a whole decade earlier! Therefore in 1950, Vuky was an Indy DNQ. Still, the fact that both polesitter Walt Faulkner and winner Johnnie Parsons were California midget aces boosted Vukovich's credibility by implication. The exclamation point was his 1950 AAA National Midget Championship win.

Vuky's 1951 Indy ride came from Pete Salemi, a former racer whose Central Excavating Special was a Trevis-Offy that was neither very fast nor reliable. A failed oil line on the 29th of 200 laps eliminated Vuky, but his rise from 20th to ninth in the first 70 miles caught the eyes of many onlookers, including team owner Howard Kech and his 'Whiz Kids' - crew chief Jim Travers and chief mechanic Frank Coon. When their driver Mauri Rose, a three-time 500 winner, announced his retirement following a crash that day, Vukovich got 'The Call'.

He didn't need much convincing, but the clincher was that Kech had green-lighted Travers' and Coon's all-new car design to be built by Kurtis Kraft. This was the first of the 'roadsters', its engine canted 36 degrees to the left, its driver situated low and to the right, presenting a far smaller frontal area than traditional Indycars, where the driver sat high, straddling the driveshaft. The Fuel Injection Special - honouring their regular partner Stu Hillborn's company - was beautiful and fast.

And late. Vuky didn't get to qualify until the second weekend, but with rain preventing all but a handful of cars from setting times a week earlier, he could still shine. With the roadster weight-jacked like a midget, inside front wheel pawing the air through the turns, Vuky earned new IMS one-lap and four-lap records. Chet Miller's Novi would beat his four-lap run the next day, but Vuky and the radical Fuel Injection Special had qualified eighth.

On race day, they hit the front on lap seven, remained there for almost the whole race and, despite one very slow pitstop, were leading by half a minute when a steering pin failed. The car pushed up the track on the exit of Turn 3, ground along the wall and to a halt, and the win was Troy Ruttman's. A devastated Vukovich seethed but there were no histrionics.

"We were all in shock," Travers told Gates. "Naturally we were all disappointed as hell. But we talked about it, and it just made all of us, even Howard, more determined than ever to go back and win the next year."

And they did. Despite completing his four-lap qualifying run in the rain, Vuky took pole. On race day, one of the hottest Indy 500s of all time, one driver died of heat stroke and only five finishers made the distance without the aid of a relief driver.

One of those was the winner, Vukovich (pictured above in the garage afterwards), who led 195 laps - years of push-ups, pull-ups and bike rides had boosted his stamina. Another 'soloist' was the runner-up, Art Cross, who finished 3m30s adrift...

Over the following winter, Travers and Coon added trumpets - inspired by Chrysler, built by Douglas Aircraft Co - on top of their Offy to ram more air to the combustion chamber, producing an extra 40bhp on the dynamometer. But failed piston rings and a cracked block forced seven engine rebuilds over the course of the Month of May in 1954, and Vukovich qualified only 19th.

Without the power improvement promised by the dyno figures, it took until lap 92 of the 200 for him to catch and pass the leader, his friend Jack McGrath, but pitstops aside, the grey #14 car was never headed again. Vuky won by a lap.

"Guys were saying you can't win two in a row," Vukovich told the Indianapolis News. "I didn't say anything. I just let them talk. But I knew Rose and Shaw won two in a row, and they weren't supermen.

"I plan on driving a couple more years here anyway. And a guy can keep on winning here. He's got to have luck, sure, and the right combination. But it's not impossible. Nothing is impossible."

Even with their extraordinary driver, Travers and Coon weren't going to wring a third win out of a 1951 design, so the Whiz Kids devised a closed-wheel streamliner, akin to what Mercedes-Benz had done in F1 with the W196.

Yet when the lateness of both car and engine pushed its likely debut back to 1956, Kech shuttered his team, and rival car owner Lindsey Hopkins swiftly swooped to sign Vuky, Travers and Coon to campaign his one-year-old Kurtis-Offy for '55.

Unlike many rivals, Travers and Coon refused to run nitromethane in their engines, given its propensity for offering extra power at the expense of reliability, so Vukovich did well to qualify the Lindsey Hopkins Special fifth.

The early stages of that 1955 race distilled to a battle between polesitter McGrath and Vuky, who hit the front for the final time on lap 26. Thirty laps later, Travers signalled to his driver from the pitwall that their major rival was out and Vuky gave him a wave of acknowledgement. Jim would never see his friend again.

Exiting Turn 2, Rodger Ward's 'upright' sprint-type car was caught by a gust of wind, spun to the outside wall and rolled twice. The lapped cars of Al Keller and Johnny Boyd and leader Vukovich were next on the scene; rookie Keller appeared to overreact, jamming on his hand-brake, which slewed his car to the infield, then back across the track where it struck Boyd's car, pushing him into Vukovich.

Boyd launched over Keller's machine and the underside of his car struck the backstraight bridge; Vukovich flew too, but hit the bridge cockpit-first, dying instantly before his Lindsey Hopkins Special landed in the adjacent parking lot, rolled over several vehicles and came to rest upside down and on fire.

The fire services within the oval took a while to reach the car park, but it mattered little; a legend was gone and Indy's brief era of one-man dominance was over.

Of the 676 race laps Vuky turned at the Brickyard, he led 485 of them - an astonishing 71.75%. Post-war, Jimmy Clark and Parnelli Jones are next best on 43%.

That wasn't the last time motorsport tragedy struck the Vukovich family. Vuky's son, Bill Jr, had a fine career, winning 23 midget races and making 158 Indycar starts in which he took the 1968 Indy 500 rookie of the year title and won a Michigan 125 in 1973.

His son, Billy Vukovich III, would emulate his dad by gaining Indy 500 rookie of the year honours in 1988, but died two years later in a sprint car crash in Bakersfield, California, when his throttle jammed open.

Bill Jr, now 75, still visits Indy each May for practice, qualifying and the 500. He sits quietly in the media centre, observing what's happening on track and chatting with Bobby Unser and legendary journo Robin Miller.

Back in 2001, Bill told ESPN, "I think about Billy every day, I think about my dad every day. I haven't come to terms with the death of either of them, and I probably never will.

"There's not going to be more Vukoviches in a racecar, and that suits me just fine. I still like racing a lot, but as far as dwelling on the three Vukoviches, I don't do that much any more because they're bad memories."

Understandable - as is the bias expressed in another comment about his father.

"Some say he was Indy's greatest driver. I say that he was... and I'm very proud of that fact."

Yet even the unbiased would struggle to come up with more than four names from the 770-plus participants of 102 Indianapolis 500s that are worthy of being ranked with Bill Vukovich.

The Indy 500 winner who did try F1

Of the 10 men who appear on the F1 world championship winners list by virtue of Indy 500 triumphs, only two appeared in other rounds. Troy Ruttman truncated a planned series of European F1 races after the 1958 'Race of Two Worlds' at Monza following just one appearance, in the French GP in a private Maserati, but Rodger Ward's non-Indy F1 exploits ended up having a bigger impact on motorsport history:

Beloit, Kansas-born and Los Angeles, California-bred Rodger Ward is the kind of guy on which Boy's Own magazine would have based a hero. Before he became a racer, he flew Lockheed P-38 Lightnings, Boeing B-17 Fortress bombers and was a pilot instructor.

Now, more than half a century after he retired from racing, Ward remains in Indycar racing's top 15 winners of all time, with 26 victories to his credit. Two of those are Indy 500 wins (1959 and '62), which also helped him to the USAC Indycar title in those years.

Perhaps a little carried away with his success, Ward agreed to run a midget in F1's inaugural US GP

But he also scored one of the most honourable runner-up finishes at the Speedway: Ward's duel with eventual winner Jim Rathmann at Indy in 1960 is rightly regarded as one of the 500's greatest battles of all time, and Ward was only slowed by a worn tyre with four laps to go.

But a couple of the unlikeliest contests in Ward's career came the previous year. In late July, USAC wanted its most recent Indy 500 winner to participate in a Formula Libre - 'run what ya brung' - race at Lime Rock Park, Connecticut.

The Cooper Monaco that Ward expected to race was whipped from under his nose when journeyman road racer John Fitch became available, but Kenny Brenn had a Kurtis Kraft midget available. Against Maserati 250F F1 cars and 300S sportscars, Aston Martin DBR2s and Lister Bristols, Ward shouldn't have stood a chance in his little one-speed 1.8-liter Offenhauser-powered midget. And yet he won.

Perhaps a little carried away with his success, Ward agreed to run a midget owned Bob Wilke - his Indycar entrant - at the inaugural Formula 1 Grand Prix in the United States at Sebring, held in mid-December. The team fitted a two-speed differential and two-speed gearbox but running on pump fuel rather than methanol, the car was in no way a match for its European rivals - different strokes, different folks, different circuits, different demands.

Ward qualified last and retired after 21 laps but he would form a friendship with the man who became champion that day, Jack Brabham, and persuade him to come to Indy.

Ward tested a Cooper around the Speedway and admired the car's handling while at the same time urging team owner John Cooper to bring a stronger engine should he ever return for the race. Cooper acknowledged Ward's point and when Brabham finished ninth in the '61 Indy 500, he set in motion the rear-engined revolution at IMS, on which Lotus capitalised.

Four years later, Ward made another one-off appearance in F1, driving a Reg Parnell-entered Lotus-BRM in the 1963 US Grand Prix. He qualified 17th of the 21 entrants, outpacing team-mate Hap Sharp, as well as Carel Godin de Beaufort's Ecurie Maarsbergen Porsche 718 and Giancarlo Baghetti's ATS, but Ward's gearbox gave out just before half-distance.