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Tony Bettenhausen and his sons

Tony Bettenhausen was one of America’s greatest racers who twice won the IndyCar championship under the AAA in 1951 and USAC in 1958. Bettenhausen won 22 AAA/USAC races between 1946-’59 and spawned a renowned racing family.

Tony was a legendary midget racer through the 1940s, winning hundreds of midget races as well as many stock car races. He was killed during practice at Indianapolis in 1961 but his sons Gary, Merle and Tony Jr kept the Bettenhausen name in the forefront of American racing through the ’90s.

The Bettenhausen family were German immigrants who worked a small farm in Tinley Park, Illinois, and Tony started his racing career in 1938 when he was 21, driving a midget at the Chicago Armory. He soon became one of the Midwest’s top midget drivers, winning Chicago’s Raceway Park track championship in 1941, ‘42 and ‘47 and the Milwaukee’s Mile’s title in 1942, ‘46 and ‘47. Immediately before and after WWII Bettenhausen formed the “Chicago Gang” with fellow Illinois racers Emil Andres, Cowboy O’Rourke, Paul Russo, Jimmy Snyder and Wally Zale to barnstorm midget races throughout the Midwest and East coast.

Bettenhausen made his rookie start at Indy in 1946, the first post-WWII running of the 500, and scored his first AAA Championship win at the end of the year at the Goshen, Indiana one-mile dirt track. Driving Murrell Belanger’s Kurtis-Offy dirt car, Bettenhausen dominated the 1951 AAA Championship winning a record eight races. Seven years later, aged 42, Bettenhausen again won what was then America’s unrivalled National Driving Championship, now sanctioned by USAC.

In 1957 Bettenhausen made his mark in European racing circles when he set a world closed course record on the high-banked Monza oval. That year saw the first of two ‘Race of Two Worlds’ run there. Tony was among ten USAC drivers invited to compete in 1957 against the fastest cars the European F1 and sports car teams could scrape together.

He drove one of the spectacular supercharged Novis at Monza and qualified on the pole at a startling 177.046 mph, establishing a new world closed course record. Tony led the opening laps of the race but Monza’s notoriously rough banking resulted in his car breaking first its throttle linkage, then its suspension and chassis. After the race Bettenhausen was invited to test a Maserati F1 car at the nearby Modena test track.

Tony continued to race Indycars into his mid-40s and at Indianapolis in 1961 he was entered in Lindsey Hopkins’ new Epperly-Offy ‘laydown’ roadster. He set the pace through the opening week of practice, consistently turning laps at 149 mph, and there was talk of him becoming the first man to lap the Speedway at 150 mph. But the day before Pole Day, Bettenhausen stepped into his old friend Paul Russo’s car. Russo was struggling with his Watson-Offy, the car Rodger Ward had driven to win the ‘59 500, and Russo asked Bettenhausen if he would help him find more speed from the car.

After a few warm-up laps Tony shot down the front stretch at full speed when a bolt fell out of the car’s suspension. The car snapped to the right and was launched into a series of barrel rolls along the wall, tearing out fence poles as it went. When the car finally came to a stop it was wrapped in fencing and burning furiously. Tony was dead, killed instantly from a basal skull fracture.

But the Bettenhausen legacy carried on at Indianapolis. Tony’s wife Valerie bore him three sons, Gary, Merle and Tony Jr, and all three of them raced cars with some distinction. Gary started 21 Indy 500s between 1968-’93 and enjoyed his best race in 1972 leading 136 laps in one of Roger Penske’s McLarens and looking a likely winner until a late race electrical failure. Gary won six USAC Championship races over the years and also took USAC’s Sprint Car title in 1969 and ‘71 and Silver Crown championship in 1983.

Merle was also successful in midget and sprint cars but lost his right arm in 1972 in a violent crash during his USAC Championship debut at the Michigan Speedway. Merle came back with a prosthetic arm to race midgets while younger brother Tony also raced Indycars. Tony Jr started eleven Indy 500s between 1981-’93 and formed his own CART team in 1986. Tony scored his best result as an IndyCar driver when he finished second in the 1981 Michigan 500. Tragically, he and his wife Shirley were killed with two of his business partners when his light plane crashed in Kentucky amid bad weather in February of 2000.

So the Bettenhausen family spanned six decades of racing from WWII through the turn of the century. Tony Sr would have been proud of his legacy.

Motor Sport Magazine – The original motor racing magazine

Source: Motor Sport Mag

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Crutchlow on top as MotoGP testing ends

When someone once congratulated Eddie Lawson for being fastest in practice, the four-time 500 World Champion shrugged his shoulders and said “you don’t get points for practice”. He was right, of course, and it’s the same with testing: no points, no prize money, no nothing, save for a faint feeling of satisfaction.

Certainly, Cal Crutchlow must have left Jerez on Monday evening wearing a faint glimmer of a smile on his face after topping the final pre-season tests.

Sure, conditions weren’t ideal, with just a couple of hours of dry track time on the last day of the three-day session, but his lap time was good, two tenths inside the lap record, and on last year’s ‘bike, too. It put him a fraction ahead of factory Yamaha riders Valentino Rossi, one hundredths down on Crutchlow, and Jorge Lorenzo, another hundredth down, both of them on their 2013 YZR-M1s.

Crutchlow looked good at Jerez. He still has the burning aggression that makes him such a joy to watch, but he’s learned to smooth things out, which is what you need to make the Yamaha go absolutely as fast as it will go. That’s what Lorenzo does, which is why mantequilla (Spanish for butter, as in buttery smooth) is his MotoGP maxim.

Learning to ride more smoothly sounds easy to do, but it isn’t. All hell is breaking loose when you’re riding a race ‘bike at ten tenths. To see through the chaos of speed, horsepower, g-forces and everything else while staying serene would be entirely impossible for you, me and pretty much everyone else. Crutchlow has been working on finding that ability to smooth out the madness since he came to MotoGP in 2011, and it looks like he’s just about there.

Rossi and Lorenzo looked as smooth and inconspicuously fast as ever at Jerez. It’s weird seeing Rossi back in the Yamaha pit, where nothing seems to have changed since he walked out at the end of 2010. It’s like the garage had been preserved in aspic for his return: the people are the same, the colours are the same and the ‘bikes are the same (from the outside at least). You stand there in pitlane looking at all this, wondering is the last two years were just a dream you had last night.

Rossi led day two at Jerez and Dorna must’ve been hoping that things had stayed that way – Rossi on top would surely add some tens of millions to the TV ratings for the opening race at Qatar on April 7. But if Rossi’s best time was faster than that of his team-mate, his consistency wasn’t up there with Lorenzo. He will have to fight hard to make the podium at Qatar, because he’s got a young rookie called Marc Marquez and his team-mate Dani Pedrosa to deal with.

Marquez was sixth at Jerez, behind Stefan Bradl and six tenths down on Crutchlow, though I’m sure that’s not indicative of his true potential.

If I were a betting man I’d put some money on Marquez winning in Qatar, just for the sheer hell of it. The young man is phenomenally fast. To get an idea of his true potential, please refer to the earlier tests at Austin, a new track for everyone. Marquez bettered Lorenzo, Rossi and Pedrosa at the Texas venue. And consider this: Marquez has zero race miles on a MotoGP ‘bike. Between them the other three have ridden 417 premier-class races, which is around 30,000 racing miles.

Call him what you will – Marquez the Merciless, Marquez the Magical – he looked magnificent at Jerez: elbow on the ground at pretty much every corner, backside out of the seat every now and again. Might he be the first man since Max Biaggi and Jarno Saarinen to win his first race in the class of kings? Might he even be the first man since King Kenny Roberts to win the premier class title in his rookie year?

Remember Ducati’s rookie MotoGP season, a full 10 years ago? The factory’s Desmosedici won its first victory just six races into the year. The embattled factory won’t be doing that again in 2013, having horribly lost their way in recent years. Rather than listen to the usual complaints of Andrea Dovizioso and the other Ducatis at Jerez (“It won’t turn, it won’t turn”), I had a chat with Karel Abraham, who’s riding an Aprilia CRT bike after two mostly painful years on a Desmosedici. So how do the two ‘bikes – one, an immensely expensive handmade one-off prototype, the other, a much cheaper street/race hybrid – compare?

“The Aprilia’s engine is slower, but the chassis is better and it’s nice for me to ride a ‘bike that I can trust,” said Abraham, delighted that he no longer has to sling a leg over the fickle Ducati.

So how is the chassis better? “It’s better in braking, in corner entry, mid-corner and corner exit.” Ah, right. In every corner? “Yes, every corner.”

It’s a mystery how Ducati can spend so many millions and still get it so wrong, when a hotted-up streetbike can be so right.

Of course, there’s another thing you have to bear in mind with testing. Not only are there no points or prizes, but also (and please forgive me for stating the obvious) it’s not racing. Not everyone is trying to do the same thing: go absolutely as fast as possible. Some riders fit new tyres and run low fuel loads in the quest for a qualifying-style, one-off, ego-boosting lap time. Others (not many, though) don’t bother with that kind of thing. Rookie Bradley Smith – 13th overall at the tests – was one such man at Jerez.

His Tech 3 crew wouldn’t allow him the luxury of new tyres and low fuel load at the end of each day, because they wanted him to stay utterly focused on learning to ride has M1 fast, lap after lap, smoothing out his riding and working on a base setting that will work throughout a race, not just for one hot lap. There’s no doubt Tech 3 know best and Smith knows that, though he would have loved to have done an all-out lap at Jerez, “because it’d be good for my ego”.

The good thing for Smith and everyone else is that the racing – the real battle of egos – begins in less than two weeks time.

Motor Sport Magazine – The original motor racing magazine

Source: Motor Sport Mag