A Jaguar and a Lotus race at Bridgehampton in 1994. Photo by Slufty.
[Author Geoff Gehman's recently released book, The Kingdom of the Kid: Growing Up in the Long-Lost Hamptons, which describes Long Island in the 1960s and 1970s and which we've previously excerpted, also includes a chapter on the famous Bridgehampton Race Circuit, which he thought would be of interest to us, so he gave us permission to excerpt it here. For more on the book, visit SUNYPress.edu.]
I’m standing on the Chevron pedestrian bridge at the Bridgehampton Race Circuit, watching heaven duel hell. It’s the 1967 Chevron Grand Prix Can-Am, and some of the world’s fastest drivers are challenging one of the world’s nastiest tracks. Dan Gurney, Jim Hall and 28 others squeezed into fiberglass spaceships with big wheels and giant fenders are whipping through wicked turns shielded by dunes, jackhammering around a bumpy hairpin, pushing gravity to the metal. Over 110 minutes and 200 miles they turn the course into an obstacle course of sand, stones, smoke, flames, oil and an unhinged door.
I’m unhinged by the thundering noise, zigzagging cars, flashing metallic colors, burning fuel, sizzling heat and blindingly bright light. Even the peaceful horizon, with steeples in Sag Harbor and sailboats on Peconic Bay, is strangely dizzying. The bridge is shaking, but only because I am.
Paul Newman and Mario Andretti. Photo courtesy Guy Frost/Bridgehampton Racing Heritage Group.
Down in the crowd is a famous actor who knows my queasiness. Paul Newman, a champion racing fan, is in the pits because he’s sponsoring Mario Andretti’s electric-violet Honker Ford. Watching the crazy ballet of figure eights and fishtails reminds him of his harrowing ride the day before in a pace car driven by Andretti, his first spin with a professional driver as well as his first spin around the Bridgehampton track. The roller coaster in a Shelby Cobra Mustang jarred Newman’s vital organs and left him believing that Custer’s Last Stand must have been a kiddie ride.
A stock-car driver named David Pearson made a grand declaration about the Bridge before he began practicing there for the 1966 NASCAR grand championship. “This here is the end of the earth,” he said, “and that ain’t no shit.” Well, he was almost right. You see, for a car-crazy kid like me, the Bridge was the end of the earth and the shit.
***
My parents swore my third word was “car,” which, because I couldn’t cough out a “c,” came out as “gar.” No one knows why. Maybe I inherited my paternal grandfather’s lust for roadsters, an acceptable sin for a mighty Mennonite minister. Maybe I was conceived in the sporty Pontiac my father sold before I was born for a more sensible sedan.
Whatever the reason, by age five I was an auto addict. Using pound notes sent by my English grandmother for birthdays and holidays, I bought metal scale models of the coolest cars made by the coolest companies: Corgi, Matchbox, Dinky. Most of my purchases were curvy and quirky. I owned a Ferrari Berlinetta 250 Le Mans because of a boss rear engine, a Lotus Elan S2 because of a funky ad on the trunk: “Put a Tiger in Your Tank.”
Like most kid collectors, I was mesmerized by moving parts. I spent hours opening the rear-facing doors of a black Rolls-Royce Phantom V, flipping the red bucket seats of a gold Camaro SS. I spent days operating the gadgets on the James Bond Aston-Martin D.B. 5, which I snapped up after seeing the real deal in the movie Goldfinger. I felt like a spy-in-training ejecting a fingernail-sized villain from the passenger seat, pressing the exhaust pipes to pop a bullet shield.
My love for toy cars came from nowhere. My love for real cars came from the South Fork. Even as an elementary schooler I realized that sexy automobiles became sexier on those flat roads along those sweeping fields washed by that lush light. I had my first vehicular orgasm when a candy-apple-red 1965 Mustang convertible cruised Lamb Avenue in Quogue, where we were renting a house, blasting Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone.” More thrill rides followed: a Karmann Ghia gunning the back roads between Sagaponack and Bridgehampton; an MGB GT dragging the desert-like strip between Amagansett and Napeague; a hemi-powered Barracuda sailing over the slaloming Old Montauk Highway.
***
I had no idea that some of these roads were racetracks before I was born. From 1949 to 1953 a host of speed demons—many ex-soldiers, some retired fighter pilots—pushed Jaguars, Porsches and other new European roadsters over 130 mph over four-plus miles of pavement in Bridgehampton and Sagaponack. Bold-faced drivers ranged from Dave Garroway, the first host of the “Today” show, to Briggs Cunningham, a legend for his high finishes at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in hybrid cars (i.e., “LeMonstre,” a Cadillac coupe with an aerodynamic aluminum body developed by aircraft engineers) and skippering the winning yacht in the 1958 America’s Cup. Races were supervised by a consortium of East End speed moguls. Financial pole sitters included Henry Austin “Austie” Clark Jr., whose Long Island Automotive Museum featured such early hot rods as a 1907 Thomas Flyer, and Bruce Stevenson, an energy investment manager and Royal Air Force alumnus who jump-started street racing on the South Fork after a three-decade hibernation.
The Bridgehampton Road Race was scenic and magnetic, annually attracting upwards of 180 drivers and 40,000 spectators. It was also dangerous, with snow fences and hay bales masquerading as safety barriers. In 1953 local governors canceled the popular street competition after three spectators were hit by a car dodging a pedestrian chasing a runaway hat. The same year Clark, Stevenson and service-station owner B.J. “Mummy” Corrigan decided to fill the racing void by building a safer, bolder, out-of-town track. They spent the next three years buying nearly 600 acres of Bridgehampton land chartered in 1685 by King James II. The byzantine operation involved the purchase of hundreds of lots—most used for fishing, hunting and foraging, many with long-lost owners.
The leaders of the fledgling Bridgehampton Road Races Corporation had earthy, lofty plans. They sold stocks for $5 apiece from a card table by the Candy Kitchen, a Bridgehampton luncheonette, ice-cream parlor and social center. They commissioned two Grumman Aircraft engineers to design the track. It ended up being largely developed by the man who bulldozed its roads, contours and hazards: Ercole Colasante, an Italian racecar driver and team manager. He was inspired by a jigsaw puzzle of glacial debris and three daring European courses, particularly a Dutch track snaking through trees and dunes.
The Bridge opened in 1957 with races for cars, motorcycles, bicycles and even runners. Shaped like an abstract whale, the course had the bite of a Great White shark. The 2.85 miles of asphalt pavement featured bumpy and sandy patches, four elevation changes totaling 130 feet and eight turns. The first turn, the Millstone, was famously hair- and hell-raising—a true millstone. After hitting up to 170 mph on a 3,100-foot straightaway, drivers had to prepare for three right-hand bends–all quick, all downhill, all blind, all scary. Only a yellow light and a flagman warned racers of breakdowns, crashes and other looming catastrophes.
“You didn’t dare miss that first bend,” says Mario Andretti. “You had to be very precise. If you didn’t know where you were going, you could get lost. You’d end up in Long Island Sound—or Coney Island.”
Bridgehampton track map, circa 1965. Image courtesy RacingSportsCars.com.
Indeed, the Bridge was a Hamptons version of Coney Island. Drivers registered in a Water Mill restaurant owned by Dick Ridgely, who drummed in a band led by Paul Whiteman, the renowned jazz impresario. Beautiful bun-haired women in sleeveless sheet dresses listened to jazz and sipped cocktails under a tent by the Circuit Club, an exclusive paddock with a picket fence, picnic tables and an antique bar salvaged by Austie Clark, who loved to tend his bar. They hobnobbed with celebrities attracted by first-rate drivers attacking a track with a top-notch reputation as a bitch goddess. Among the A-listers were Vincent Sardi, restaurateur and amateur racer; James Garner, amateur racer, racecar owner and star of the television series “Maverick” and the racing film Grand Prix, and Walter Cronkite, the nation’s anchorman.
Some races were prefaced by laps from vintage sports cars. Clark showcased his 1914 Duesenberg-Mason, which was identical to an Indy 500 vehicle driven by Capt. Eddie Rickenbacker, the World War I flying hero. Sometimes Clark was joined by his friend Charles Addams, the gloriously ghoulish cartoonist, Westhampton Beach resident and owner of a 1926 Bugatti T 35 C Grand Prix, manganese blue and very, very sweet. In 1959 Addams raced at the Bridge in a rare 1923 Mercedes built for the Indy 500, the same machine he raced in 1952 on streets in Bridgehampton and Sagaponack.
Spectators at the Bridge read programs with an Addams cover illustration. They sat in stands imported from the Polo Grounds, the demolished home of the New York Giants and New York Mets; camped in infield tents, and moved from site to site in tractor-drawn hay carts. One of the best spots for these “mountain goats” was Arents Corner, which had a lovely view of Peconic Bay and was nearly, thrillingly over the track. Its namesake was George Arents III, who in 1957 tested the unopened course by demolishing a new Ferrari—which he could afford to buy, repair and replace as an American Tobacco Company heir.
***
I liked cars more for their looks than their guts; lyrical lines meant more to me than horses under the hood. Likewise, I liked drivers at the Bridge less for their success than their story. I really didn’t care that Peter Revson failed to finish three races in 1967-1969, that he was victimized by suspension and gearbox problems. What appealed to me was his snappy combination of intelligence and recklessness, Ivy League hipness and movie-star charisma. His sideburns were the best in the business; I wanted to grow a pair like them like I wanted to wear a Nehru jacket. If I had his handsomeness, I figured, I could date the gorgeous girls who flocked and flirted around him. Of course I ignored the fact that Revson, to quote Sports Illustrated writer Robert F. Jones, looked “like a $10,000 bill must feel.”
To me, Revson seemed exotic because he won grand prixes in Europe. He polished his pedigree by finishing second in the 1970 12 Hours of Sebring with teammate Steve McQueen, who was more of a speed junkie than fellow actors Garner or Newman. Revson grew up privileged, the child of a co-founder of Revlon, the cosmetics giant. Yet he paid his bills and his dues. He kept racing even after his brother Doug, a driving colleague, died in a 1967 crash. His zest for life was inscribed on a pillbox he received from a female fan: “Everything Is Sweetened By Risk.”
I liked Mario Andretti because he lived in Nazareth, Pa., near my father’s hometown. He was also a bona fide underdog, a species my dad taught me to appreciate. His car career was pure bootstrap. At age five he and his twin brother, Aldo, raced hand-made wooden cars over the hills of their Italian village. In Nazareth, where the brothers Andretti settled at 15, he competed on oval dirt tracks in a rebuilt 1948 Hudson Hornet Sportsman. By 1964 he had conquered every racing class from midget to sprint.
There was something endearing about Andretti’s checkered career at the Bridge. It was here, in 1965, that he drove his first sports car, a Ferrari 275P, for the North American Racing Team run by Luigi Chinetti, a fabled ex-driver, mechanic and early Ferrari advocate in the U.S. Andretti was at a disadvantage even before he turned on the ignition. “I had never seen the course, so the blind hairpins were doubly blind,” he says from his office in Nazareth, a half hour from my home. “Before the first practice, I didn’t even know if the first turn was right or left.”
That weekend Andretti wrestled the Bridge to a draw. He was in third place when his Ferrari was retired prematurely by a bad clutch. While the Chinetti team was satisfied with him, he wasn’t satisfied with himself. “That day I was not quick enough,” he says, “to rub wheels with the big boys.” The breakdown was especially disappointing during a breakthrough year when he was named the Indy 500’s top rookie and became the youngest United States Auto Club series champion.
In 1967 Andretti returned to the Bridge for the Chevron Grand Prix Can-Am. His car, a Holman-Moody Honker-II Ford 427, was famously unreliable, or “slippery.” Despite a respectable eighth-place finish, he insists it’s the worst vehicle he ever raced. The race wasn’t a total loss; after all, he met Paul Newman for the first time. In fact, he learned the actor was on his team when he saw “Paul Newman” on the Honker’s nose. “I think I’ll paint my name on it,” joked Andretti over the public-address system after a practice, “and let Paul drive it.”
That weekend Newman wanted no part of driving the Bridge. He learned his lesson while riding with Andretti in a pace car from hell. When the reconnaissance run was over, Newman ejected himself from “the infernal machine,” belly flopped in the pit, “kissed the ground, thanked my Maker, and vowed never to kick my dog.”
Despite the unfriendly introduction, Newman quickly befriended the Bridge. Andretti believes the demanding course compelled Newman to become a more devoted racing actor, owner and driver. In 1969 he starred in the film Winning, playing an obsessed driver who fights a rival for the affections of his long-suffering wife, played by Newman’s real-life spouse, Joanne Woodward, who entertained herself at the Bridge by chatting with spectators, some of whom petted her dogs. In 1983 Newman and Carl Haas, an Andretti rival on the Can-Am circuit, formed an Indy team with Andretti as driver. In the ’80s Newman regularly raced at the Bridge, becoming a respected competitor. In the ’80s and ’90s he endorsed a campaign to prevent the course from becoming a condominium complex and golf course.
***
My main man at the Bridge was Mark Donohue, a main competitor of Andretti and Revson and a driver with Newman-like creativity and intensity. I began following him during that 1967 Can-Am, which he won in a blue, bodacious Lola T70 Mk.3B Chevy. The next year he won the Trans-Am in a Camaro Z/28, a souped-up version of one of my favorite sports cars. My admiration grew as I listened to gear heads in the stands celebrate him as that rare driver who could engineer and customize his cars. I was particularly fascinated by the story of Donohue and Roger Penske, his team owner, lightening and quickening the Camaro by dipping its frame in paint-stripping acid. What sounded like vehicular voodoo was what Donohue called “the unfair advantage.”
Donohue and the Bridge were true comrades. In 1964 he won his first significant race there, a 500-mile marathon. He drove an MGB owned by his mentor, Walter Hansgen, one of the track’s best and best-loved drivers. In 1967-1970 Donohue was the course’s most successful competitor, winning four races, two more than the runner-up. During the 1968 Vanderbilt Cup he broke the Bridge speed record, finishing a lap in 91.33 seconds in a McLaren M6A Camaro. By then he had mastered the course’s demands of agility and aggression, especially under rainy conditions. He had also conquered a turn named for Hansgen, who died from injuries suffered during a 1966 practice for Le Mans.
SCCA Trans-Am racing at Bridgehampton, 1970. Photo by Jack Brady, courtesy Racing In America.
A scientist of speed, Donohue made the Bridge his personal laboratory. It was there he tested the Camaro Z/28 on ice at sunset; it was there, after winning the 1967 Can-Am by default, that he decided to shape up. One of the first drivers to embrace situps and healthy foods, he radically improved his alertness, endurance and success. In 1967 he won six of the eight races he entered for the U.S. Road Racing Championship. In 1968 he won a stunning 10 of 13 Trans-Ams and finished seventh in his first Indy 500, receiving rookie of the year honors. In 1972 he won his first Indy in style, setting a speed record of 162 mph.
The 1969 Trans-Am gilded Donohue’s mythic status at the Bridge. He won the pole position in a Camaro Z/28 with holes poked in doors to cool rear tires and brakes. After killing the motor during a warm-up, he borrowed a Camaro from Penske teammate Ronnie Bucknum and was demoted from the front of the pack to the back for driving an unqualified car. Pissed off by the chief steward’s verdict, even though he knew it was right, Donohue started the race a whopping 500 yards behind the pack—“just to make sure there was no confusion.”
There was no confusion during the race. After the first lap, Donohue advanced from 30th place to 12th. Despite breaking a pushrod and losing a cylinder, he finished second, 109 seconds behind a Mustang Boss 302 driven by George Follmer, a former and future teammate who that season was Donohue’s rough rival, banging fenders and nearly banging heads.
Three years later Donohue accused Follmer of a weird kind of infidelity when the latter tested a Donohue-modified Porsche 917 10K “Turbo Panzer” for the Penske team while Donohue recuperated from an accident. “It just doesn’t feel right,” wrote Donohue in The Unfair Advantage, his memoir-manual. “Seeing another man drive your car, a car you know so well. I imagine it must feel like watching another man in bed with your wife.”
It was this gutsy honesty that made me a Donohue fan. He was funny enough to invent a menu featuring bulls’ balls, philosophical enough to toast a near-fatal accident by hosting a “Crash & Burn” party, colorful enough to turn fans into fanatics. In fact, Al Holbert, a driver who fixed cars for Sam Posey, another Donohue rival, actually learned to imitate Donohue’s handwriting, a rather extreme form of idolatry.
***
It was Donohue who made the Bridge my bridge to nowhere, the only place where I was seduced by speed, strategy and danger. The track inspired me to run my Hot Wheels off their plastic orange track, play pit crew with my Corgi Ferrari Berlinetta and gorge on racing films at the Hamptons Drive-In in Bridgehampton. That’s where I saw Garner in Grand Prix , McQueen in Le Mans and Newman in Winning .
Newman stars in one of my favorite tales of the Bridge. One day the actor was approached during a practice by Carl Jensen, the track’s superintendent and a weekend projectionist at the drive-in. “You know,” Jensen told Newman, “you and I are in the same business.”
“You mean racing?” asked Newman.
“No,” said Jensen, “the movies.”
***
My racing hero, Mark Donohue, became a legend beyond the Bridgehampton Race Circuit. In 1972 he set a speed record while winning the Indianapolis 500. In 1974 he won the first International Race of Champions, a World Series for first-rate drivers, and released The Unfair Advantage , a unique memoir-manual. His advantage ended unfairly during a fatal crash while practicing for the 1975 Austrian Grand Prix. He was preceded to the grave by another Bridgehampton favorite son, Peter Revson, who died while practicing for the 1974 South African Grand Prix.
By then the Bridge was running on fumes. The track was slowly strangled by anti-noise ordinances, poor access roads and lack of money to replace antiquated equipment—including wires hit by lightning after being exposed by eroding sand. In time it became a public course for club, motorcycle and Soap Box Derby racers, and a private course for co-founder Henry Austin Clark Jr. and other vintage-car gear heads. Cartoonist Charles Addams’ third wife, Tee, knew her husband was coming home when she heard the roar of his 1926 Bugatti—a racket caused by a missing tailpipe or exhaust manifold–on the backroads between the Bridge and their house in Water Mill. “When she heard that raw engine screaming through the woods,” says H. Kevin Miserocchi, executive director of the Tee and Charles Addams Foundation, “she would fill up the ice bucket and get out the cocktail glasses as though the commuter train were pulling into the station.”
In 1983 a consortium of Bridge devotees saved it from becoming a condo complex. The Friends of Bridgehampton (now the Bridgehampton Racing Heritage Group) then helped new owner Robert Rubin, a Wall Street commodities trader and an owner-racer of classic cars, continue running it as a track until 1997. Rubin, the child of an appliance repairman, eventually transformed the property into an ultra-expensive Scottish-style golf course with a glass-cathedral clubhouse filled with contemporary art and racing memorabilia. The dunes that were hazards for drivers are now hazards for duffers. The Chevron pedestrian bridge remains as a strangely comforting relic, a reminder of the day I fell for fiberglass spaceships flying around blind hairpins.
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