Dear FOTers
I know of one great American driver that loved flying. Masten Gregory, who
I had honor of preparing several cars for (including a Porsche 910 for the
24 hour Daytona race circa 1970) loved flying. Although I never witnessed
any of his take-offs - his acrobatics were well known in Europe. Masten
developed the habit of literally jumping out of racing cars if he thought a
major crash was imminent. He did this on several occasions including once
in a D Type Jag. I was fascinated by this and asked Masten why he did it.
He said that he'd rather risk a short flight and a hard landing by himself
than be jammed in a car that could fire up or roll on top of him after an
impact. If I remember correctly, the worst injury he received after one of
his self propelled exits was a broken ankle (I think this was after an exit
from a 'Camoradi' birdcage Masser).
Self preservation is a remarkable thing. I well remember travelling in a
racing transporter through Sweden. There were three of us in the front seat
'Cedric' (Jim Clark's mechanic) driving, me in the middle and Trev Taylor
(who at the time was driving for the Surtees team in a TS5 F5000 car). We
were all dog tired as we'd driven from a race at Fassburg near Hamburg and
it was Cedric's turn to drive. Trev and I were fast asleep on each other's
shoulder. I was suddenly awoken by what felt like a very rough road. I
looked out and realized that the transporter was half off the road with the
two nearside wheels in a gravel run off heading for a tree. I immediately
lunged across Trev opened the door and tried to jump out. Trev woke and
tried to do the same jamming us both against the door. In what must have
taken a second or two for the whole operation Trev and I then lunged across
at the steering wheel to get the transporter back on the road (Cedric who
had momentarily nodded off also joined in the struggle). We succeeded
although the transporter almost spun (we were doing about 50MPH). We've
often spoken about this incident and we came to the following conclusion.
The way Trev and I first reacted was due to the fact that having been
awoken from a deep sleep and found ourselves in a potentially dangerous
situation - we momentarily panicked.
Paul
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