If you have spent any time at all listening to The Talk of Gasoline Alley, you know there are certain topics that Donald Davidson does not like talking about. Sometimes it’s because he is asked about the same topic several times per year, and it gets old telling the story. The 1969 Jigger Sirois aborted pole run comes to mind. Another one is the story of Jim Hurtubise removing the engine out of his old Mallard and replacing it with ice and several cases of Miller High Life before placing the car at the end of the Bump-Day qualifying line. When the gun went off at 6:00, Hurtubise opened the hood of the front-engine roadster and offered up free beer to all of those around.
Other subjects Donald would rather avoid are those of a controversial nature. He doesn’t like to discuss the finish of the 1981 race, that was decided in a Marion County courtroom in October of that year. You won’t get much comment from him on the 2002 race either.
But it is out of pure decency that Donald prefers to skip the story of the start of the 1971 race – the year the pace car crashed.
Eldon Palmer, an Indianapolis area Dodge dealer was the driver of the Dodge Challenger pace car. It is not unusual for an automotive executive to drive the pace car. Quite honestly, I think that someone coming from the car industry probably brings stronger credentials than a celebrity – and the word celebrity has had a loose interpretation over the years. Elaine Irwin Mellencamp, Jim Caviezel or Josh Duhamel all had a lack of star-power that was exceeded only by their lack of qualifications to pace the field of the Indianapolis 500. Morgan Freeman, Colin Powell and Lance Armstrong all had undeniable star-power at the time, but I’m still not sure of their qualifications to pace the field.
I’m pretty sure it takes some skill to maneuver the pace car at speeds of well over 120 mph, before diving into the pits. Remember, few pace cars are “stock” as they would come off of the showroom floor. Most of the time, their engines, transmissions, brakes and tires have been beefed up to handle the demands of pacing the field. Not just any bloke off of the street can handle a beast like that at speed.
I always thought former drivers of the race made the best candidates. Benson Ford drove the Mercury Comet Cyclone GT in 1966. Although he returned the pace car intact, some say he brought the field down way too slowly and that may have triggered the massive pile-up on the front straightaway at the start. The next year, they solved that potential problem by putting three-time winner Mauri Rose in the 1967 Chevy Camaro pace car. He wasted no time bringing the field to the green flag.
Even the two years before the ill-fated pace car run, former winners Jim Rathmann and Rodger Ward were tasked with pacing the field. In 1971, the choice was Eldon Palmer – partly because his dealership offered a car to pace the field, when none of the manufacturers came forward that year.
Legend has it that Palmer spent considerable time practicing his duties on the day before the race. He even placed a large cone in the pits as a marker for the proper point to slow down. If you’ve seen the mass of humanity that is in the pits on race morning, it’s not hard to believe that someone might move the cone out of the way or remove it altogether. The loss of his visual reference point is one theory why he was going too fast.
Another story says he was under the belief that the pace car was to cross the yard of bricks before the first car in the field did. If that was true, then that means he was actually racing the field halfway down pit lane.
Maybe he was simply in over his head and lost control.
Whatever the case, the results were disastrous, yet they could have been a lot worse. I’m not sure when Palmer realized he was in trouble, but it was too late to prevent it entirely. The pace car, with occupants Tony Hulman, astronaut John Glenn and ABC’s Chris Schenkel, slid out of control and skidded sideways into a movable stand for photographers, that would usually be moved after the start.
The good news is that no one was killed. There were some broken bones among the 29 that were injured. Two were seriously injured, and Tony Hulman sustained a sprained ankle.
There is some speculation that the car did not have the significant upgrades that are required for the pace car – even to suggest that there were no disc brakes. Some believe that had Palmer simply swerved to the right and re-entered the racing surface, that he could have avoided hitting the photographer’s stand. Of course, what if he were to encounter cars on the track still trying to get up to speed? What kind of confusion and further accidents could that have caused? That may have been a moot point, since a member of the Safety Patrol was blocking the pit exit while trying to get out of the way of the speeding car.
To say it was a chaotic event for those in and near the pits is putting it mildly. But to those of us in the stands, we had no idea anything had happened at first. I was a soon to be 13-year-old sitting in Stand A. Like everyone around me, I was too focused on the start of the race to worry about the pace car. How many follow the pace car into the pits at the start of any race – much less the Indianapolis 500? We could not hear any of the chaos and confusion going on across the track from us, over the roar of the engines.
Here is a short You Tube video of the incident.
As you can tell, it really was frightening – but it could have been far worse. Fifty-five years later, it is now considered nothing more than a comical footnote in the history of the Indianapolis 500; although I doubt that any directly involved thought it was very comical.
Donald Davidson doesn’t think it’s too comical either. As he says, the great thing about the Indianapolis 500 is that it makes anything you do cemented in history. Unfortunately, that also applies to your mistakes. If you make a mistake in front of hundreds of thousands of people in-person, and millions more on television – no one will ever forget your mistake, and everyone will make sure you don’t forget it either.
Donald took pity on Eldon Palmer. He describes him as a very nice man and a gentleman, known for his many civic contributions to the Indianapolis area. But the 1971 pace car incident is just about all he is remembered for. Palmer lived a long and successful life, long after the 1971 Indianapolis 500; but he never could shake everyone else’s memory of those few seconds at the start of the Indianapolis 500. It even followed him into his obituary, when he passed away in 2016 at the age of 87. It almost sounds as if it was reluctantly inserted, just to make sure that the elephant in the room was addressed.
The moral of the story is be careful what you do when you are in the public eye, even for just a few seconds. It could follow you for the rest of your life. In Eldon Palmer’s case, it did.
George Phillips
