Check this article I guess you can find it interesting, it is included in the Sports Car International Magazine in the March issue of 1998.
A Works F1 Jockey at age 19, Ricardo Rodriguez’s track exploits were brilliant, brash and all too brief. But what brought about his untimely end is a question
El chamaco
If it hadn’t been for all the liquor, the whole mournful and fraudulent legend of Ricardo Rodriguez might be different. Or, to put it the longer and more complicated way, all that stuff about “El chamaco”, the kid, one of the fastest race drivers in history, being nothing but a little mexican spoiled brat rich with a plankfoot and righteous cojones who was destroyed 35 years ago because he was pushed too hard by his twisted father –all of that sick junk might have been prevented from circulating if only Gus Vignolle, the whiskey journalist, hadn’t gone and gotten smashed of his senses back on 1 November, 1962.
The great and fearless publisher and editor of Motoracing newspaper liked to drink. And the apocalyptic winter of 1962 was one wonderful season for drinking. First there'd been October's Cuban Missile Crisis: Civilization for a week teetering on the edge of nuclear anni- bilation. But then on 1 November, Vignolle got an even stronger excuse for tipping over into the sauce when the news exploded inside Motoracings tiny office in Los Angeles that the preternatural Ricardo, Formula One racing's first baby star, had just killed himself while practicing on the Grand Prix Autodrome in Mexico City.
Getting bombed and staying bombed was Vignolle's best defense against the same rotten sense of grief that everybody else was feeling, but Gus might also have been boozing out of guilt. For during a trip to Mexico back in 1957, he had been the first gringo scribbler to observe and divine the mysterious overtones shrouding Rodriguez, a ninth-grade schoolboy of 15 just up from bicycles and motorbikes. "He can't miss as a world champion!" Vignolle had roared, almost defying anybody to challenge his opinion. And for the following four racing seasons, Vignolle's breathless reports on Ricardo's prodigal skills at the wheelhouse of hurtling Porsches and Ferraris, plus Motoracings exclamation marks, had gone a long way toward making El Chamaco a celebrity around the globe. And also now very dead at 20.
Post-mortem details of Ricardo's wreck were appalling. Death was "attributed officially" to "too much speed in an unfamiliar car," said car being a Lotus-Ford, blue with white trim in Rob Walker Grand Prix livery. "The driver," a report said, "lost control on the treacherously banked last corner not far from the start-finish line, and the machine struck the rail, flipping several times and bursting into flarnes." Ricardo's purported last words: "Please don't let me die."
Bad as all this already was, it was followed by the grisly symbolism of Ricardo's burial occurring on 2 November, "Dia de los Muertos," Mexico's tradicional day of the dead, and marked by the President of the Republic himself walking in Ricardo's funeral and afterward the entire country dissolving into an agony of prolonged mourning.
lt was too much, it was melancholy and so suffocating that not even firewater helped. The Rodriguez obit published in Motoracing was one of the few really awful and sentimental things Gus ever wrote.
But -if you'll bear with me- here's where the story gathers steam. Vignolle apparently intended to remain juiced forever, because by the middle of November he was still on his hard drunk. Instead, something forced him out of his liquid seclusion and brought him back to the outside world.
Of all unlikely things, it was the press introduction of the Austin 850 Mini-Cooper, the famous box-shaped little bullet with transversely-mounted four-banger hot rod mill and tricked-out Cooper competition suspension. November marked the debut of their 850 deluxe models, so the importers BMC/Hambro were in Los Angeles having their flacks promote the bejesus out of them.
Accordingly, Vignolle and several dozen other distinguished elements of LA’s motoring hacks got invitations to "Operation 850-Plus," a monster two-day press party which was to commence with a charter flight north to the Casa Munras resort on the soothing Big Sur coast. An evening of wining and dining and schmoozing was to be followed by a climactic day spent viewing celebrity drivers, everybody from Dan Gumey to the Indy 500 champ Rodger Ward, roughhousing 850s through a series of demo-races.
Vignolle accepted the invitation. Naturally he did. "Press party," after all, was the user-friendly euphemism for "Booze freeload." I suppose I’m making Gus sound horrible, but he was hardly the only two-fisted drinker among LA car scribes of the delirium-tremens 1960s. And not only was he aware that one day he was going to poison himself with alcohol (he finally did the job in 1982, aged 69) but he was so unapologetic and defensive about it that he routinely accorded the Motoracing readership full details of his marathon binges.
Gus’ big Scoop
That's what happened this time. "Operation 850-Plus-The Greatest Freeload of All Time," was a yarn Gus wrote up in the form of a diary; with the exception of one astounding entry about Ricardo, it was a celebration of 48 continuous hours of relentless sousing. Vignolle's excerpts:
2:30 pm-I meet the BMC/Harnbro press and dealer gang in the Sky Room Saloon for the takeoff to Monterey.
3:15 pm-The booze shuts off, and the chartered press plane takes off. . .
4:24 pm-They turn on the faucet. "What will you haye?" "Scotch, please." The question thoughtfully will he asked for
two days...
5:30 pm-Arrive at Monterey airport.
5:45 pm-Buses leave for the Casa Munras in Monterey.
6:00 pm-Arrive at Casa Munras.
6:15 pm-A mammoth drinking party starts.
10:00 pm-The drivers leave. They are smart. The rest get smashed to the gills.
And on and on like that, although at least Gus was finally getting some rest from gloomily finalling on El Chanuco. But the following day one of the most unexpected celebrities to tum up for the demo races was none other than Ricardo's elder brother, Pedro. And Pedro, pale and still grief-strickened, hadn't made the long trip up from Mexico City just to Mickey- Mouse around in a shoebox 850. He was there to work the press-to lay on Vignolle and all the other scribes a version of Ricardo's demise which utterly contradicted the "official" one.
Ruinously hung over-"with trip hammers flogging the skull"-from all the drunkenness of the evening before, Vignolle was in sad shape when Pedro collared him, yet somehow managed to enter this into his drinking diary:
11:26 am-Pedro Rodriguez tells me about the accident that killed his brother, Ricardo. He said that it was no driver error and that the boy did not go in too hot. He said the right rear suspension of the Lotus broke and the car went sideways into the
top right guardrail on the banked turn. The car did not flip and it did not catch on fire, as reported. Back section of the car was practically intact. Ricardo was going about 100 mph at the time. He flew out of die car and hit a post supporting the guardrail, dying instantly.
And there they were, 100 words that were like 100 sticks of dynamite. Gus' big scoop, if only he'd been sober enough to realize it. Ricardo hadn't been the instigator of his own doom! He'd been more like a victim.
Look at it this way: Suppose that Pedro was juggling the facts and speaking with a forked tongue on behalf of his baby brother, and that the suspension of Ricardo's Lotus hadn't really snapped at all and that Ricardo had truly made a driving mistake. He still had deserved the opportunity to survive a measly 100 mph crash.
Alarm bells, not trip hammers, should have begun flailing Vignolle's skull about the screwed up and criminally unsafe racing conditions of the 1960s. His memory might even have clicked in and reminded him that Ricardo wasn't the first martyr of this kind of stupid crash, and that some months earlier at Goodwood, England, Stirling Moss -regarded as Grand Prix racing's uncrowned world champion, and a special buddy of Vignolle's -had had a Lotus identical to Ricardo's possibiy flake off its suspension and sail not into a steel rail but an earthen embankment. Moss, too, had suffered head injuries, not fatal ones, but he decided never to race again.
And just that October at Riverside Raceway in southem California, Pat Pigott's Lotus, not a formula racer but a sports car, had also possibly blown its flyweight suspension and wedged against a deadly steel wall. (Pigott, one of the world's fastest Formula Junior chauffeurs, had for a stepfather John McCone, chief spook of the Central Intelligence Agency, and attending his stepson's funeral had almost made McCone late to the start of the Cuban Missile Crisis).
Racing's code of silence ordinarily prevented anybody from writing up accidents, but Gus was always a rebel. So Motoracing was going to make itself a forum for an exposé of Ricardo's pathetic and inexcusable demise. In fact, with all of the paper's tradicional red ink and exclamation rnarks, such a screaming exposé might shake up racing enough to make it develop a conscience about better protecting the lives of its heroes.
So Gus returned home from the Operation-850 freeload motivated and dried out again. Motoracing published photographs of Ricardo's Lotus, and it looked only modestly damaged with its tail section intact and the steering wheel bent from where Ricardo had been holding on, just like Pedro had said.
But that was the end of it. Afterward, Motoracing dropped the hot and controversial topic of race car and race track safety and dummied up just like everybody else. I'm still not sure why Gus didn't go through with it, my only speculation being that booze and misanthropy were really beginning to gain on him, and after what had happened to Ricardo he was thoroughly fed up with racing. Plus, he was beginning to have intimations about suffering a second heart attack unless he sold Motoracing and got out, which he soon did.
Today, almost four decades later, racing at last has safety coming out its ears -last September at the new California Speedway the CART boys were slamming walls not at 100 mph but 230, as well as scoring G-Ioadings in the double digits, yet still managing to waik away with headaches not as severe as Vignolle's hangover. But of course it's all way too late to save Ricardo.
Or to prevent the myth of his having heen some kind of pampered juvenile psycho who was far more muy macho than talented (poor, quiet Pedro, killed racing in Germany in 1971, is regularly-and erroneously-remembered in the same way). Actually, Gus had it right; had he been able to live through an era when safety hadn't been invented, Ricardo Rodriguez truly couldn't have missed becoming world champion. He was a Troy Ruttman or Mario Andretti--one of those phenoms who come along once in a generation.
Posterity, at least, remembers Ricardo far more kindly than it does his late father, Don Pedro. At the peak of his sons' careers, when he was routinely spending 80-grand a year bankrolling them in the great day and night marathons of Le Mans and Sebring, Don Pedro was considered a loving father and grand sportsman. Yet fate is cruel. Now in the late 1990s, in light of what happened to Ricardo and Pedro, popular opinion consigns the old man up there on the all-time horror role with those macabre parents who turned their daughter into a seven-year-old aviatrix fatally trying to set a bizarre crosscontinet flying record. Don Pedro Rodriguez: The parent from Hell.
History is humbug
So what’s the big deal, you ask? History is humbug. A racer driver isn’t the only public figure to take a royal screwing once he’s dead and gone –look what happened to JFK.
Ordinarily I tend to agree. In fact I’m with that big French literary gasbag who a couple of centuries ago said, “History is joke the living play on the dead”. Negative retro article about Ricardo continue to be published and no longer bug me, even when they contain doomsday and malarkey lines like “The Rodriguez brothers, Ricardo and Pedro, were young, dashing, and reckless on and off the track... no need to wait for the end of the story: Ricardo dead at 20, Pedro at 31.” But where this 1991 story succeeded in ringing my tolerance buzzer was with its glib assurance that “The two brothers were popularly considered matadors in race cars,” followed by this howler: “The press were quick to catch the simile and played it for all it was worth in column inches...”
Excuse me, time out, that was not the way it was.
Full disclosure, a la Gus 1) I was a cub member of the Rodriguez paparazzi pack, and nobody I hung with held the morbid view that Ricardo was some doomed little geek in a suit of lights programmed to take a goring; and 2)outside of Gus, none of us had a vocabulary potent enough to understand what “simile” meant, or what you did with one (and he should have used “metaphor” anyway).
You want the unvarnished truth? I was certain that Ricardo Rodriguez was immortal, would go on racing forever. Ascari, Castelloti, Musso, Fangio and all those other red-blood Latin race drivers were history, all the light-skinned lads of the UK were coming on, and he was the fiery antidote for all their stiff-upper-lip, showing-any-emotions-is-bad-form jive.
And the even deeper truth? I envied the hell out of El Chamaco! Only somebody out of their mind wouldn’t have.
Here was this 5-5, 135-pound... child, actually eight months younger than I was, who at 19 was already a works Ferrari Formula One jockey, and who in addition to wheeling and dealing F1 torpedoes-on-wheels was a teenager master whaling away on the Nurburgring, Le Mans, the Targa Florio –the devil circuits- with classic Ferrari sports racers.
No slingshot top-fuel dragster, no Offenhauser roadster, and no two-ton fast-back rooster of a NASCAR Grand National stocker ever carried more mystique than one of those front-engine V12 Ferrari long-distance rigs of the late 1950s and early 1960s. They were beautiful but by today’s standards gargantuan-so humongous that Ricardo looked like he could barely see out. Yet at the12 Hours of Sebring, 1961 version, I had the fantastic good fortune of watching him go on a tour de force with one.
An extremely suspicious and prolonged pit stop to fix a dead generator –a similarly lengthy and maybe bogus stop was forced on Ricardo and Pedro later that same season while they were leading Le Mans –had pitchforked the brothers’ North American Racing Team No.17 out of a safe lead of one or two laps and deposited the vehicle back to third, miles and miles aft of two squads of older Ferrari drivers.
Barely three hours remained and night was falling, Ricardo replaced Pedro in the saddle and, banshee V12 revs riffing across all five miles of Sebring, set out in darkness to grab back as many miles as he could. Pure fire and brimstone. Slower traffic fled from the heat of No.17’s blazing headlights exploding up from behind, and each one of Ricardo’s reverberating up-and-downshifts through the esses or over at Webster corner provoked fiery bolts of crackling orange exhaust flame, plus shrill cries of objection from all the pseudo-experts –“You can’t no-clutch shift a V12 like that! He’s going to blow that freaking thing up!”
Well, our star never did, and No. 17 came in a dangerously close third with all the old-timers in the first and second place factory cars bugging out and glancing back over their shoulders in horrified apprehension.
And there were all those other perks and goodies that went with being Ricardo. Girls, naturally: He scored with great-looking ladies by the numbers, most of them much older than he was. He was a Fon Portago throwback, and with Pedro, sexxed up the scene from Sebring to Nassau to Monza. And when Ricardo did marry in 1961, his stunning trophy bride, an elegant and hot Mexican lady named Sarita, was so voluptous that one evening in LA she had the clientele of the Grand Prix restaurant choking on their libations from the sight of her.
Finally, El Chamaco wasn’t busy living the life of the world’s best boy race driver, he was either taking the waters at Acapulco or else home in one of Mexico City’s most upscale quarters where he was a clothes horse with 100 differents suits and 60 pairs of shoes. Sure looked like fun to me.
And yet...
November 1, 1962, is a date fixed in my conscious as darkly as 30 May 1955, the afternoon Billy Vukovich stepped off at Indianapolis. I can recall everything I was doing, including what I still can’t believe I said when somebody telephoned with word of what had just gone down with Ricardo in Mexico City. “Well”, I said, “I’m not surprised”.
Nolo contendere –I plead guilty, but with an explanation. That wasn’t me saying what I thought, it was me parroting racing’s old establishment drivers saying what they thought.
Ricardo was something they feared because they’d never seen anything like him before. He was a phenomenally fast teen who made them race harder than they wanted to. I well recall flying back to LA from the aforementioned 1961 Sebring with one of the sport’s most prominent names and listening to him tell me in exasperation that the Rodriguez brothers turned a race track into a billiard table: They behaved as if they were cueballs and everybody else was a number ball. Still other famous senior drivers delivered the definitive Ricardo-bashing quote (afterward denied) that has endured through decades:”If he lives, I’ll be surprised”.
Ricardo’s legacy reads that he was a maniac risk-taker. And not until I got through researching this could I verify what I always suspected to be true, which is that contrary to the crash-and-burn image, Ricardo seldom ran over people –not even at Sebring ‘61”- and almost never got into an accident. He couldn’t afford to. Exactly like all the codgers he was worrying so much, he was competing on epic road circuits of five miles, eight miles, 14 miles, even 45 miles (the Targa Florio) where almost no runoffs or rooms for error existed. And far from being a mad-dog sprinter, he had to discipline and strategy to preserve himself to go the distance and day-and-night marathons like Sebring and Le Mans, as well as the 1000 kms of Paris, which he and Pedro regulary won. Ricardo once “wore” an RSK Porsche at Meadowdale, Illinois, but about the only other significant mistake he ever made was the one that bit him in Mexico City. If, that is, he truly made an error there at all, and if the Lotus suspension didn’t first snap, exactly as Pedro claimed.
Ricardo wasn’t just a threat to established drivers, but to prevailing racing attitudes. Racing 35 years ago possessed even more solemn all-knowing, pundit/historian phonies than it does in the 1990s, if you can imagine, and the cognoscenti’s big deal, basically, was to portray sports and Grand Prix racing as activities as difficult to perfom as, say, brain surgery. You had to spend a lifetime developing the sensitivity and intelligence required. What made Ricardo Rodriguez so subversive was that through his actions he was suggesting that racing wasn’t difficult to do at all, as long as you had youth, balls, and a rich papa keeping you in fast cars.
Bad deal
Gertrude Stein, one of the Gus Vignolle’s literary heroines, wrote “Dead is dead but that is why memory is all and all the immortality there is”. I was going to chop this thing off with the memory of Ricardo forever bombing around Sebring in the dark in his Ferrari. And then unfortunately I stumbled onto the rumor of a family skeleton scandal about Don Pedro and the snakebitten Rodriguez clan that I don’t have time to confirm but don’t feel I can omit either.
In his day Don Pedro was a mistery man who wore sunglasses indoors and out while functioning as a highly secretive financial tycoon in one of the world’s poorest countries. Nobody ouside of Mexico ever got a satisfactory handle about where all Don Pedro’s pesos came from, but there were a pair of conflicting versions plus a third whispered one.
One version had it that in his youth he’d been a motorcycle stunt rider who somehow became strong man of Mexico City’s crotch-rocker police squad and had begun amassing his fortune there. The second version had it that he’d been engineer of the goverment train of el jefe Cardenas, Mexico’s reform president of the thirties, and later used his well-placed connections within the administration to make hyper-profitable real estate buys in Mexico City and Acapulco.
The whispered third version, which was only juicy innuendo 35 years ago, was reported as unattributed fact not long ago in Enzo Ferrari, a grim book which does a battleship gray number on Enzo and all his works and associates including Don Pedro: The actual working occupation of the elder Rodriguez was that of bordello-master with a fancy string of Mexico City upper-class houses of ill repute.
Well, as for the family skeleton, it seems that back in November of 1962, at approximately the same time that Ricardo’s brother Pedro was up on the Monterey peninsula trying to rescue the dead El Chamaco’s image with Gus Vignolle and the gringo press, Don Pedro was himself getting into the act.
He went public in Paris-Match, one of the biggest magazines in Europe, with a tell-all account of his son’s end being caused by the rear suspension failure of the Rob Walker Lotus. I haven’t been able to raise a copy of this Paris-Match exposé, but it never caused the stink that Don Pedro was hoping for –nobody in racing apparently read Paris-Match- yet it incensed Rob Walker. Taking it as libel and enmity directed not at Lotus workmanship per se, but at his own team, Walker afterward broke off all contact with Don Pedro. He wouldn’t even pay him the life insurance premium he’d carried on Ricardo (Walker routinely insured the lives of all his drivers, which speaks loudly about the sixties racing)- and instead paid it directly to the widow, Sarita.
Who, as it turned out, desperately needed it. Per Rob Walker (in a racing book about himself), following Ricardo’s funeral Sarita’s father-in-law played the arch-villain. The old man banished Sarita from the household bag and baggage and pitched her out onto the bricks on her beautiful bottom. For some years she apparently had to sub-exist in bitter conditions bordering on poverty.
Another Rodriguez victim.
El chamaco
If it hadn’t been for all the liquor, the whole mournful and fraudulent legend of Ricardo Rodriguez might be different. Or, to put it the longer and more complicated way, all that stuff about “El chamaco”, the kid, one of the fastest race drivers in history, being nothing but a little mexican spoiled brat rich with a plankfoot and righteous cojones who was destroyed 35 years ago because he was pushed too hard by his twisted father –all of that sick junk might have been prevented from circulating if only Gus Vignolle, the whiskey journalist, hadn’t gone and gotten smashed of his senses back on 1 November, 1962.
The great and fearless publisher and editor of Motoracing newspaper liked to drink. And the apocalyptic winter of 1962 was one wonderful season for drinking. First there'd been October's Cuban Missile Crisis: Civilization for a week teetering on the edge of nuclear anni- bilation. But then on 1 November, Vignolle got an even stronger excuse for tipping over into the sauce when the news exploded inside Motoracings tiny office in Los Angeles that the preternatural Ricardo, Formula One racing's first baby star, had just killed himself while practicing on the Grand Prix Autodrome in Mexico City.
Getting bombed and staying bombed was Vignolle's best defense against the same rotten sense of grief that everybody else was feeling, but Gus might also have been boozing out of guilt. For during a trip to Mexico back in 1957, he had been the first gringo scribbler to observe and divine the mysterious overtones shrouding Rodriguez, a ninth-grade schoolboy of 15 just up from bicycles and motorbikes. "He can't miss as a world champion!" Vignolle had roared, almost defying anybody to challenge his opinion. And for the following four racing seasons, Vignolle's breathless reports on Ricardo's prodigal skills at the wheelhouse of hurtling Porsches and Ferraris, plus Motoracings exclamation marks, had gone a long way toward making El Chamaco a celebrity around the globe. And also now very dead at 20.
Post-mortem details of Ricardo's wreck were appalling. Death was "attributed officially" to "too much speed in an unfamiliar car," said car being a Lotus-Ford, blue with white trim in Rob Walker Grand Prix livery. "The driver," a report said, "lost control on the treacherously banked last corner not far from the start-finish line, and the machine struck the rail, flipping several times and bursting into flarnes." Ricardo's purported last words: "Please don't let me die."
Bad as all this already was, it was followed by the grisly symbolism of Ricardo's burial occurring on 2 November, "Dia de los Muertos," Mexico's tradicional day of the dead, and marked by the President of the Republic himself walking in Ricardo's funeral and afterward the entire country dissolving into an agony of prolonged mourning.
lt was too much, it was melancholy and so suffocating that not even firewater helped. The Rodriguez obit published in Motoracing was one of the few really awful and sentimental things Gus ever wrote.
But -if you'll bear with me- here's where the story gathers steam. Vignolle apparently intended to remain juiced forever, because by the middle of November he was still on his hard drunk. Instead, something forced him out of his liquid seclusion and brought him back to the outside world.
Of all unlikely things, it was the press introduction of the Austin 850 Mini-Cooper, the famous box-shaped little bullet with transversely-mounted four-banger hot rod mill and tricked-out Cooper competition suspension. November marked the debut of their 850 deluxe models, so the importers BMC/Hambro were in Los Angeles having their flacks promote the bejesus out of them.
Accordingly, Vignolle and several dozen other distinguished elements of LA’s motoring hacks got invitations to "Operation 850-Plus," a monster two-day press party which was to commence with a charter flight north to the Casa Munras resort on the soothing Big Sur coast. An evening of wining and dining and schmoozing was to be followed by a climactic day spent viewing celebrity drivers, everybody from Dan Gumey to the Indy 500 champ Rodger Ward, roughhousing 850s through a series of demo-races.
Vignolle accepted the invitation. Naturally he did. "Press party," after all, was the user-friendly euphemism for "Booze freeload." I suppose I’m making Gus sound horrible, but he was hardly the only two-fisted drinker among LA car scribes of the delirium-tremens 1960s. And not only was he aware that one day he was going to poison himself with alcohol (he finally did the job in 1982, aged 69) but he was so unapologetic and defensive about it that he routinely accorded the Motoracing readership full details of his marathon binges.
Gus’ big Scoop
That's what happened this time. "Operation 850-Plus-The Greatest Freeload of All Time," was a yarn Gus wrote up in the form of a diary; with the exception of one astounding entry about Ricardo, it was a celebration of 48 continuous hours of relentless sousing. Vignolle's excerpts:
2:30 pm-I meet the BMC/Harnbro press and dealer gang in the Sky Room Saloon for the takeoff to Monterey.
3:15 pm-The booze shuts off, and the chartered press plane takes off. . .
4:24 pm-They turn on the faucet. "What will you haye?" "Scotch, please." The question thoughtfully will he asked for
two days...
5:30 pm-Arrive at Monterey airport.
5:45 pm-Buses leave for the Casa Munras in Monterey.
6:00 pm-Arrive at Casa Munras.
6:15 pm-A mammoth drinking party starts.
10:00 pm-The drivers leave. They are smart. The rest get smashed to the gills.
And on and on like that, although at least Gus was finally getting some rest from gloomily finalling on El Chanuco. But the following day one of the most unexpected celebrities to tum up for the demo races was none other than Ricardo's elder brother, Pedro. And Pedro, pale and still grief-strickened, hadn't made the long trip up from Mexico City just to Mickey- Mouse around in a shoebox 850. He was there to work the press-to lay on Vignolle and all the other scribes a version of Ricardo's demise which utterly contradicted the "official" one.
Ruinously hung over-"with trip hammers flogging the skull"-from all the drunkenness of the evening before, Vignolle was in sad shape when Pedro collared him, yet somehow managed to enter this into his drinking diary:
11:26 am-Pedro Rodriguez tells me about the accident that killed his brother, Ricardo. He said that it was no driver error and that the boy did not go in too hot. He said the right rear suspension of the Lotus broke and the car went sideways into the
top right guardrail on the banked turn. The car did not flip and it did not catch on fire, as reported. Back section of the car was practically intact. Ricardo was going about 100 mph at the time. He flew out of die car and hit a post supporting the guardrail, dying instantly.
And there they were, 100 words that were like 100 sticks of dynamite. Gus' big scoop, if only he'd been sober enough to realize it. Ricardo hadn't been the instigator of his own doom! He'd been more like a victim.
Look at it this way: Suppose that Pedro was juggling the facts and speaking with a forked tongue on behalf of his baby brother, and that the suspension of Ricardo's Lotus hadn't really snapped at all and that Ricardo had truly made a driving mistake. He still had deserved the opportunity to survive a measly 100 mph crash.
Alarm bells, not trip hammers, should have begun flailing Vignolle's skull about the screwed up and criminally unsafe racing conditions of the 1960s. His memory might even have clicked in and reminded him that Ricardo wasn't the first martyr of this kind of stupid crash, and that some months earlier at Goodwood, England, Stirling Moss -regarded as Grand Prix racing's uncrowned world champion, and a special buddy of Vignolle's -had had a Lotus identical to Ricardo's possibiy flake off its suspension and sail not into a steel rail but an earthen embankment. Moss, too, had suffered head injuries, not fatal ones, but he decided never to race again.
And just that October at Riverside Raceway in southem California, Pat Pigott's Lotus, not a formula racer but a sports car, had also possibly blown its flyweight suspension and wedged against a deadly steel wall. (Pigott, one of the world's fastest Formula Junior chauffeurs, had for a stepfather John McCone, chief spook of the Central Intelligence Agency, and attending his stepson's funeral had almost made McCone late to the start of the Cuban Missile Crisis).
Racing's code of silence ordinarily prevented anybody from writing up accidents, but Gus was always a rebel. So Motoracing was going to make itself a forum for an exposé of Ricardo's pathetic and inexcusable demise. In fact, with all of the paper's tradicional red ink and exclamation rnarks, such a screaming exposé might shake up racing enough to make it develop a conscience about better protecting the lives of its heroes.
So Gus returned home from the Operation-850 freeload motivated and dried out again. Motoracing published photographs of Ricardo's Lotus, and it looked only modestly damaged with its tail section intact and the steering wheel bent from where Ricardo had been holding on, just like Pedro had said.
But that was the end of it. Afterward, Motoracing dropped the hot and controversial topic of race car and race track safety and dummied up just like everybody else. I'm still not sure why Gus didn't go through with it, my only speculation being that booze and misanthropy were really beginning to gain on him, and after what had happened to Ricardo he was thoroughly fed up with racing. Plus, he was beginning to have intimations about suffering a second heart attack unless he sold Motoracing and got out, which he soon did.
Today, almost four decades later, racing at last has safety coming out its ears -last September at the new California Speedway the CART boys were slamming walls not at 100 mph but 230, as well as scoring G-Ioadings in the double digits, yet still managing to waik away with headaches not as severe as Vignolle's hangover. But of course it's all way too late to save Ricardo.
Or to prevent the myth of his having heen some kind of pampered juvenile psycho who was far more muy macho than talented (poor, quiet Pedro, killed racing in Germany in 1971, is regularly-and erroneously-remembered in the same way). Actually, Gus had it right; had he been able to live through an era when safety hadn't been invented, Ricardo Rodriguez truly couldn't have missed becoming world champion. He was a Troy Ruttman or Mario Andretti--one of those phenoms who come along once in a generation.
Posterity, at least, remembers Ricardo far more kindly than it does his late father, Don Pedro. At the peak of his sons' careers, when he was routinely spending 80-grand a year bankrolling them in the great day and night marathons of Le Mans and Sebring, Don Pedro was considered a loving father and grand sportsman. Yet fate is cruel. Now in the late 1990s, in light of what happened to Ricardo and Pedro, popular opinion consigns the old man up there on the all-time horror role with those macabre parents who turned their daughter into a seven-year-old aviatrix fatally trying to set a bizarre crosscontinet flying record. Don Pedro Rodriguez: The parent from Hell.
History is humbug
So what’s the big deal, you ask? History is humbug. A racer driver isn’t the only public figure to take a royal screwing once he’s dead and gone –look what happened to JFK.
Ordinarily I tend to agree. In fact I’m with that big French literary gasbag who a couple of centuries ago said, “History is joke the living play on the dead”. Negative retro article about Ricardo continue to be published and no longer bug me, even when they contain doomsday and malarkey lines like “The Rodriguez brothers, Ricardo and Pedro, were young, dashing, and reckless on and off the track... no need to wait for the end of the story: Ricardo dead at 20, Pedro at 31.” But where this 1991 story succeeded in ringing my tolerance buzzer was with its glib assurance that “The two brothers were popularly considered matadors in race cars,” followed by this howler: “The press were quick to catch the simile and played it for all it was worth in column inches...”
Excuse me, time out, that was not the way it was.
Full disclosure, a la Gus 1) I was a cub member of the Rodriguez paparazzi pack, and nobody I hung with held the morbid view that Ricardo was some doomed little geek in a suit of lights programmed to take a goring; and 2)outside of Gus, none of us had a vocabulary potent enough to understand what “simile” meant, or what you did with one (and he should have used “metaphor” anyway).
You want the unvarnished truth? I was certain that Ricardo Rodriguez was immortal, would go on racing forever. Ascari, Castelloti, Musso, Fangio and all those other red-blood Latin race drivers were history, all the light-skinned lads of the UK were coming on, and he was the fiery antidote for all their stiff-upper-lip, showing-any-emotions-is-bad-form jive.
And the even deeper truth? I envied the hell out of El Chamaco! Only somebody out of their mind wouldn’t have.
Here was this 5-5, 135-pound... child, actually eight months younger than I was, who at 19 was already a works Ferrari Formula One jockey, and who in addition to wheeling and dealing F1 torpedoes-on-wheels was a teenager master whaling away on the Nurburgring, Le Mans, the Targa Florio –the devil circuits- with classic Ferrari sports racers.
No slingshot top-fuel dragster, no Offenhauser roadster, and no two-ton fast-back rooster of a NASCAR Grand National stocker ever carried more mystique than one of those front-engine V12 Ferrari long-distance rigs of the late 1950s and early 1960s. They were beautiful but by today’s standards gargantuan-so humongous that Ricardo looked like he could barely see out. Yet at the12 Hours of Sebring, 1961 version, I had the fantastic good fortune of watching him go on a tour de force with one.
An extremely suspicious and prolonged pit stop to fix a dead generator –a similarly lengthy and maybe bogus stop was forced on Ricardo and Pedro later that same season while they were leading Le Mans –had pitchforked the brothers’ North American Racing Team No.17 out of a safe lead of one or two laps and deposited the vehicle back to third, miles and miles aft of two squads of older Ferrari drivers.
Barely three hours remained and night was falling, Ricardo replaced Pedro in the saddle and, banshee V12 revs riffing across all five miles of Sebring, set out in darkness to grab back as many miles as he could. Pure fire and brimstone. Slower traffic fled from the heat of No.17’s blazing headlights exploding up from behind, and each one of Ricardo’s reverberating up-and-downshifts through the esses or over at Webster corner provoked fiery bolts of crackling orange exhaust flame, plus shrill cries of objection from all the pseudo-experts –“You can’t no-clutch shift a V12 like that! He’s going to blow that freaking thing up!”
Well, our star never did, and No. 17 came in a dangerously close third with all the old-timers in the first and second place factory cars bugging out and glancing back over their shoulders in horrified apprehension.
And there were all those other perks and goodies that went with being Ricardo. Girls, naturally: He scored with great-looking ladies by the numbers, most of them much older than he was. He was a Fon Portago throwback, and with Pedro, sexxed up the scene from Sebring to Nassau to Monza. And when Ricardo did marry in 1961, his stunning trophy bride, an elegant and hot Mexican lady named Sarita, was so voluptous that one evening in LA she had the clientele of the Grand Prix restaurant choking on their libations from the sight of her.
Finally, El Chamaco wasn’t busy living the life of the world’s best boy race driver, he was either taking the waters at Acapulco or else home in one of Mexico City’s most upscale quarters where he was a clothes horse with 100 differents suits and 60 pairs of shoes. Sure looked like fun to me.
And yet...
November 1, 1962, is a date fixed in my conscious as darkly as 30 May 1955, the afternoon Billy Vukovich stepped off at Indianapolis. I can recall everything I was doing, including what I still can’t believe I said when somebody telephoned with word of what had just gone down with Ricardo in Mexico City. “Well”, I said, “I’m not surprised”.
Nolo contendere –I plead guilty, but with an explanation. That wasn’t me saying what I thought, it was me parroting racing’s old establishment drivers saying what they thought.
Ricardo was something they feared because they’d never seen anything like him before. He was a phenomenally fast teen who made them race harder than they wanted to. I well recall flying back to LA from the aforementioned 1961 Sebring with one of the sport’s most prominent names and listening to him tell me in exasperation that the Rodriguez brothers turned a race track into a billiard table: They behaved as if they were cueballs and everybody else was a number ball. Still other famous senior drivers delivered the definitive Ricardo-bashing quote (afterward denied) that has endured through decades:”If he lives, I’ll be surprised”.
Ricardo’s legacy reads that he was a maniac risk-taker. And not until I got through researching this could I verify what I always suspected to be true, which is that contrary to the crash-and-burn image, Ricardo seldom ran over people –not even at Sebring ‘61”- and almost never got into an accident. He couldn’t afford to. Exactly like all the codgers he was worrying so much, he was competing on epic road circuits of five miles, eight miles, 14 miles, even 45 miles (the Targa Florio) where almost no runoffs or rooms for error existed. And far from being a mad-dog sprinter, he had to discipline and strategy to preserve himself to go the distance and day-and-night marathons like Sebring and Le Mans, as well as the 1000 kms of Paris, which he and Pedro regulary won. Ricardo once “wore” an RSK Porsche at Meadowdale, Illinois, but about the only other significant mistake he ever made was the one that bit him in Mexico City. If, that is, he truly made an error there at all, and if the Lotus suspension didn’t first snap, exactly as Pedro claimed.
Ricardo wasn’t just a threat to established drivers, but to prevailing racing attitudes. Racing 35 years ago possessed even more solemn all-knowing, pundit/historian phonies than it does in the 1990s, if you can imagine, and the cognoscenti’s big deal, basically, was to portray sports and Grand Prix racing as activities as difficult to perfom as, say, brain surgery. You had to spend a lifetime developing the sensitivity and intelligence required. What made Ricardo Rodriguez so subversive was that through his actions he was suggesting that racing wasn’t difficult to do at all, as long as you had youth, balls, and a rich papa keeping you in fast cars.
Bad deal
Gertrude Stein, one of the Gus Vignolle’s literary heroines, wrote “Dead is dead but that is why memory is all and all the immortality there is”. I was going to chop this thing off with the memory of Ricardo forever bombing around Sebring in the dark in his Ferrari. And then unfortunately I stumbled onto the rumor of a family skeleton scandal about Don Pedro and the snakebitten Rodriguez clan that I don’t have time to confirm but don’t feel I can omit either.
In his day Don Pedro was a mistery man who wore sunglasses indoors and out while functioning as a highly secretive financial tycoon in one of the world’s poorest countries. Nobody ouside of Mexico ever got a satisfactory handle about where all Don Pedro’s pesos came from, but there were a pair of conflicting versions plus a third whispered one.
One version had it that in his youth he’d been a motorcycle stunt rider who somehow became strong man of Mexico City’s crotch-rocker police squad and had begun amassing his fortune there. The second version had it that he’d been engineer of the goverment train of el jefe Cardenas, Mexico’s reform president of the thirties, and later used his well-placed connections within the administration to make hyper-profitable real estate buys in Mexico City and Acapulco.
The whispered third version, which was only juicy innuendo 35 years ago, was reported as unattributed fact not long ago in Enzo Ferrari, a grim book which does a battleship gray number on Enzo and all his works and associates including Don Pedro: The actual working occupation of the elder Rodriguez was that of bordello-master with a fancy string of Mexico City upper-class houses of ill repute.
Well, as for the family skeleton, it seems that back in November of 1962, at approximately the same time that Ricardo’s brother Pedro was up on the Monterey peninsula trying to rescue the dead El Chamaco’s image with Gus Vignolle and the gringo press, Don Pedro was himself getting into the act.
He went public in Paris-Match, one of the biggest magazines in Europe, with a tell-all account of his son’s end being caused by the rear suspension failure of the Rob Walker Lotus. I haven’t been able to raise a copy of this Paris-Match exposé, but it never caused the stink that Don Pedro was hoping for –nobody in racing apparently read Paris-Match- yet it incensed Rob Walker. Taking it as libel and enmity directed not at Lotus workmanship per se, but at his own team, Walker afterward broke off all contact with Don Pedro. He wouldn’t even pay him the life insurance premium he’d carried on Ricardo (Walker routinely insured the lives of all his drivers, which speaks loudly about the sixties racing)- and instead paid it directly to the widow, Sarita.
Who, as it turned out, desperately needed it. Per Rob Walker (in a racing book about himself), following Ricardo’s funeral Sarita’s father-in-law played the arch-villain. The old man banished Sarita from the household bag and baggage and pitched her out onto the bricks on her beautiful bottom. For some years she apparently had to sub-exist in bitter conditions bordering on poverty.
Another Rodriguez victim.
, I hope you enjoy this article again. 
There were wide wheels but I don't know on what models.
(hijin ;) 
)