INDIANAPOLIS — Another January has come and gone, and with it the favorite winter pastimes of dirt-track people: competing in or watching the Lucas Oil Chili Bowl Midget Nationals, and then spending hour upon hour bitching about the very same Chili Bowl.
Complaining has become as much a part of the Chili Bowl as the Golden Driller, the 76-foot statue guarding the River Spirit Expo Center in Tulsa, home of America’s most exalted and most maligned indoor race.
This year’s hot topic was a familiar one: the proliferation of multi-car superteams and the rent-a-ride kids that come with them. These discussions get ugly in a hurry and they tend to follow a theme, which is that every pay-to-play driver is a talentless bum stealing that seat from the low-dollar guy next door who believes — as do his family and friends — that he could make the world forget all about A.J. Foyt if he only caught a break.
We enjoy a good class war, don’t we? Just as “West Side Story” had the Sharks vs. the Jets, racing loves pitting its Silver-Spoon Boys against its Spam Sandwich Kids. And we love any story about a down-and-out young driver who becomes a superstar. Just don’t look too far into things; you’ll risk spoiling the narrative and discovering that none of this is anything new.
Let’s go back to the late ’50s, when Parnelli Jones and Jim Hurtubise hopscotched all over the Midwest, hustling from one IMCA sprint car track to the next.
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Soon they would be two of America’s most celebrated race car drivers, but for now they were living close to the bone. Inside Hurtubise’s station wagon was a raised plywood bed; they stowed their gear beneath it. When they were too tired to drive, they’d just pull off the two-lane, preferably alongside some lake. One of them would sleep across the front seat, the other on that makeshift bed. Come morning, they’d bathe in the lake and hit the road again.
At small-town markets, they’d load up on canned goods. Parnelli said, “We’d pop the hood of the car and wire a can to the exhaust manifold. After five minutes, dinner was ready. Chili and crackers, beans and crackers, corn and crackers.”
If they had a good week racing, they might splurge: “Instead of crackers, we’d get a loaf of bread.”
We only know these stories because Jones made it big and this is where things move beyond the simple poor-boy-makes-good plot. Because Parnelli didn’t reach the top by waiting for good fortune to find him; when necessary, he made things happen.
Sprint cars led him to Indianapolis, but what led him to sprint cars was success on California’s rough-and-tumble jalopy circuit, and later in full-sized stock cars. Pivotal in that progression was a 1956 NASCAR Pacific Coast late model event at Gardena Stadium.
A car owner named Larry Bettinger had a decent Ford, and among Bettinger’s pals was one Donnie Harrison, a jalopy driver who’d raced with Parnelli enough to see him as something special.
“Donnie believed in me,” said Jones, “before most people even knew my name.”
Harrison lobbied Bettinger, trying to get Parnelli the ride for Gardena. It worked, sort of. Wary of rookies, Bettinger told Harrison, “If you get me a $300 sponsor, I’ll let Parnelli drive.”
Three-hundred bucks was far more money than Jones could lay his hands on. But at the jalopy races, he’d met the manager of a Ford dealership in San Pedro. According to Parnelli, “He’d always stop in the pits and say hello. He seemed to be a fan of mine.”
Shy by nature, Jones ratcheted up his courage, called the manager and made his pitch: Would the dealership be interested in sponsoring him at Gardena? The manager loved the idea.
Come race night, Parnelli climbed to third place before a wheel broke. His run impressed even the NASCAR officials, who until then had eyed him as “just a jalopy driver, which was a lot to live down.”
Before long, Jones was winning NASCAR races for Oscar Maples and Vel Miletich, sprint car races for Harlan Fike and USAC championship races — including the 1963 Indianapolis 500 — for J.C. Agajanian. Bettinger’s Ford was a stepping-stone.
Now, are you going to call Parnelli Jones a ride-buyer? Three hundred bucks was a pile of dough in ’56. Hell, in 1957 the prize money for his first NASCAR Grand National win, on an airport track in Washington, was only $900.
No, I’d say that $300 was a pretty good down payment on what blossomed into a spectacular career.
You could make a similar argument for Tanner Thorson, who in 2013 joined Keith Kunz Motorsports — the midget superteam some people love to hate — on a rent-a-ride basis. His speed elevated him to hired-driver status and in 2016 Thorson was USAC’s national champion.
Money is going to keep changing hands, in amounts large and small, wherever race cars are unloaded. But suspend your anger for a moment and remember that when this year’s Chili Bowl was over, the two drivers everyone was talking about were Kyle Larson, who drove 54 brilliant laps in the A-main, and winner Christopher Bell, who pounced on the one lap Larson didn’t get it right.
They lit up Tulsa like they have lit up NASCAR and neither of them brought anything to the sport but talent.
All’s well that ends well, isn’t it?
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