Skip Barber’s Racing School Is Prospering

Stopping at the pits:

One of the fine training grounds for aspiring drivers is the Skip Barber school of racing in Canaan, Conn. Many pupils and teachers have graduated to fame and fortune.

The 1985 Indianapolis 500 featured 11 Skip Barber alumni and the winner, Danny Sullivan, is a former instructor at the school of racing education.

“All our instructors are or were successful racers,” says Barber. “Many students have no intention of going into racing, but simply enroll for the experience and knowledge provided by the school. Suprisingly, though, 40% do some actual racing and we want to be certain they have the best skills with which to enter the sport.”

Among a recent crop of former students are Ken Johnson and Mike Groff, Super Vee series leaders, and top NASCAR rookie Ken Schrader . . .

Famed British racing driver Sterling Moss made his first area appearance in 24 years when he handled a Porsche 944 Turbo in a four-hour endurance race at Lime Rock, Conn., Saturday. His last turn of the wheel in the northeast was at Watkins Glen, N.Y., in the U.S. Grand Prix on Oct. 8, 1961.

Moss won 23 of 48 races that year. Records for some other leading drivers of the era that year include Jack Brabham’s seven wins in 16 starts, Jimmy Clark winning only once in 16 races, Graham Hill, once in 11, Phil Hill 4 of 9 and John Surtees 2 of 10.

On April 23, 1962, while racing at Goodwood near London, Moss was mangled in a near-fatal accident. His face was slashed to the bone, his left cheekbone crushed and his eyesocket displaced; the left arm was broken, and the left leg fractured at the knee and ankle. In addition, Moss suffered a broken nose and the left side of his body paralyzed because of a brain injury.

Moss recalls receiving a spiritual lift while hospitalized by a phone call from Frank Sinatra, who was in London for a singing engagement.

“This is Frank Sinatra,” Moss said the caller proclaimed. “I don’t know whether you know who I am. I was reading about you in the newspaper and I decided that just about now you are probably feeling pretty low. I just want you to know that I’m pulling for you and there are a lot of people out there pulling for you.”

Moss says, in a way, the entertainer saved his life . . .

Johnny Rutherford, a three-time Indianpolis 500 winner, had his share of accidents in a racing career that spans two decades.

“You don’t talk much about accidents, you don’t dwell on them,” says Rutherford. “It’s just something you know is there, and I’ve been fortunate to walk away from a bunch of them. I’d rather be lucky than good any day.” . . .

Charlotte Motor Speedway president Humpy Wheeler terms “ridiculous” a recent article in the New York State Journal of Medicine by Dr. Allan Blum asking that auto racing be banned.

Blum likened driver death rate “to that of the Marine Corps in the Vietnam War during the height of battle.”