This past week, I’d finally found his email address and sent him a letter. I wrote him as if we’d seen each other last week, as I tend to do, though this fall will mark 50 years since I last had.
Three hours later, I Googled Harry to show my wife a photo I’d found online about a year ago, of Harry on the Super Vee podium at Watkins Glen, with a life-loving smirk on his face that was Pure Harry.
I meant to buy that print and now wish I had, it’s gone now and instead I found this:
https://rrdc.org/202...ngle-1943-2024/
Harry was a bit of a Legend in the early days of Formulae Vee and Super Vee in the States. He won the Formula Vee Runoffs in 1970, when the event first graced Road Atlanta. It had to feel like a home race to Harry in being close to his Charlotte, North Carolina home.
But the first I knew of Harry was in Super Vee, when I was 12, and asked him for the first of probably a half-dozen times to autograph my programs at Road America and Road Atlanta. I think it was at the former in 1974, Harry just smiled and said something like “You again?”
I ran into him near Turn 4 during a Runoffs Prod car race, I think also in ‘74, when we hung on the fence together and watched much of the race. I probably asked mostly inane questions, but he genuinely made me feel like part of the game — and I never forgot that.
Harry had a real chance at the Big Time. He clearly had all the talent, and made a brief attempt at Formula 5000 in 1973, in perhaps the toughest year that series ever enjoyed. I believe he had close to a Top 10 qualifying effort in a very-early race, in the McLaren M22 that really wasn’t a very good car — and presumably well underfunded.
That shortened attempt in F5000 was run by Ed Zink, which was appropriate in most of Harry’s success coming in Zink cars. He owned or at least co-owned the company for a time — and I believe was Ed’s nephew but I never confirmed that, before the company was sold to Steve Lathrop.
He would have been a sponsor’s dream in every way a driver needs to be, but had a very bad crash at Road America — and that was the end of it, in most senses. I recall little of what he said about it later, but think he ended up in the woods.
Harry won his second National Championship that Fall, and I got another autograph. He was second in the Super Vee pro series three times from 1972 through 1974, to Bill Scott, Bertil Roos, and Elliot Forbes-Robinson respectively, and I’ve long wondered how things might have worked out for him if he had won any of those titles.
This image matches my childhood memories of Harry in a wonderful way. I cannot recall him ever not smiling:
https://www.gettyima...photo/144063977
Thank You for being so gracious to this kid, Harry. Race in Perpetuity.
Note: If anyone knows of any errors I’ve made, please let me know. The web has so little about Harry I want to make sure this is all accurate.
Edited by E1pix, 16 March 2024 - 17:24.
