Mickey Thompson’s World: Speed, Ideas

Biographies of Mickey Thompson say that his attraction to motor racing stemmed from watching Sir Donald Campbell attempt to break the land-speed record on Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats in 1937.

But Donald Campbell didn’t drive at Bonneville before 1960.

“Maybe it was Sir Malcolm Campbell, not Donald,” Thompson said when questioned about the disparity.

But Sir Malcolm made his last land-speed record attempt in 1935.

“I never forgot it, I know that, and that’s what got me started,” Thompson said, neglecting to put the pieces in proper perspective.

Thompson’s flamboyant career, which ended early Wednesday morning in a hail of assassins’ gunshots in front of his exclusive hillside home in Bradbury, was often as confusing, complex and mysterious as the tale of the day the seed for speed was sown at Bonneville.

Whatever the beginning, Thompson was driven to succeed.

From the time he was 12 and pieced together a ’27 Chevy in the backyard of his Alhambra home to Wednesday morning, when he was preparing to leave for his Mickey Thompson Entertainment Group offices in Anaheim Stadium to work on his Mickey Thompson Off-Road Championship Gran Prix season, Thompson was promoting, inventing or selling.

Everything he did he felt was the greatest, the biggest, the most important thing in the world. And he directed so much energy to each project that it often became contagious.

In a life full of spectacular achievements, Thompson’s most memorable may have been the wedding party he put on when he married Trudy Feller, who was killed with him Wednesday morning.

Thompson was 41, Trudy 24 when they were wed in 1971 in the Imperium Room at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.

For the occasion, Thompson chartered three jet airliners to carry 250 friends and associates from Long Beach to Las Vegas for the wedding and reception. It was like a Hollywood celebrity party as photographers snapped pictures of Mickey and his bride from every conceivable angle during the flight and the ceremony.

Trudy, who wore shocking pink hotpants, was the center of attention when she walked into the Las Vegas casino.

“I’ve always disliked weddings and funerals,” Thompson said at the time. “So we decided to do something different.”

Trudy, a racing publication secretary, said: “We wanted to have the wedding in Hawaii, but we couldn’t work out the logistics.”

Seven hours after the champagne flight had arrived in Las Vegas, the party returned to Long Beach, but only after every guest had been handed a $1 bill to pay for the cab ride to the Las Vegas airport.

In what friends called a typical Thompson scenario, Thompson said he won enough money at the gaming tables that night to cover the cost of the wedding party, which was estimated at $35,000.

Perhaps no one in racing touched as many bases as Thompson in his 59 years as a competitor, innovator, promoter and businessman.

In drag racing, he originated the “slingshot” construction of top-fuel dragsters, was the first to break 150 m.p.h. in competition, won several National Hot Rod Assn. events, built cars that Danny Ongais drove to many more wins, and ran the Lions Drag Strip in Wilmington when it was the hottest hot-rod strip in the country.

The California Legislature passed a resolution in 1969, honoring his efforts in helping take hot rodders off the street. It was one of the few times in his life that Thompson had one pulled on him.

Mickey’s sister, Colleen, was informed of the honor and told her brother that she wanted him to have lunch with two handicapped children at a Long Beach restaurant. When Mickey arrived, with a stuffed toy under each arm for the children, he was greeted by State Sen. Joseph Kennick, about 40 friends and fellow racers.

“That was as close to being speechless as ever happened to me,” he said.

In a land-speed record attempt in 1960, he was officially clocked at 406.6 m.p.h. for a measured mile in his Challenger I at Bonneville. It was the fastest a car had ever been driven, but he failed to get the official record because a broken crankshaft prevented him from making a return run in the required one hour. To set a land-speed record, a car must be driven over the measured mile in both directions.

The Challenger, which was blueprinted in chalk on the garage floor of his home in El Monte, was powered by four Pontiac engines and had four LaSalle transmissions.

“Getting the Challenger ready was like an obsession to Mickey,” said Harold Hogan of La Mirada, who worked on the crew. “He was myopic. When he went after something, nobody was more tenacious than he was.”

In 1968, he took three specially modified Ford Mustangs to Bonneville and, with Danny Ongais, set 295 speed and endurance records while driving over a 10-mile circular track. They averaged 157 m.p.h. for 24 hours. Thompson said that he went without sleep for 70 hours in preparing the cars for the record attempts and then driving them.

For the last 10 hours, Thompson refused to get out of the car. Later, he said that he had thought the ground was breaking up and he didn’t want Ongais to get in the car because he wouldn’t know where the rough spots were.

“Besides, the longer I drove the better I felt,” Thompson said.

It was typical of his feats of endurance. Once, with a couple of friends, he went snowmobiling at Mammoth Mountain in the morning, then flew his airplane to the Colorado River to water ski the same afternoon.

“Mickey asked me to come along for a relaxing day,” one of the friends said. “I was so exhausted that I had to take a week to rest up.”

When the first Times Grand Prix for Sports Cars was scheduled in 1958, Thompson was working as a pressman and decided to drive in the race in a Kurtis Kraft. During practice, however, he suffered a broken leg when his car lost its engine and was slammed from the rear by a car driven by Ak Miller, a longtime hot rod friend.

In 1962 Thompson decided to take on the Indianapolis 500 with a rookie driver named Dan Gurney. Gurney qualified the car in the third row and was running 10th when its engine quit. The next year he went back with another rookie, Miller, who finished ninth.

Thompson’s last car in the 500 was driven by yet another rookie, Dave MacDonald, and it was involved in a fiery first-lap accident with Eddie Sachs’ car in 1984 that killed both drivers and caused the race to be halted for nearly two hours.

After the accident, Thompson vowed to return in 1965 and do the driving himself, but Indy officials would not let him drive because he had collapsed during an endurance run at Bonneville and they said he was not fit. Thompson put Bob Mathorisey in the car but he failed to qualify it.

Speedboating was another of Thompson’s passions, although it was probably his most fruitless racing venture. He drove 27 straight races without winning and was in four high-speed accidents. One broke his back and paralyzed his legs. Doctors said he would never race again but seven months later he was walking, planning his next adventure.

“I’ve had more broken bones than (motorcycle daredevil) Evel Knievel,” he once said.

He was flying over Baja California in 1967 while an off-road race was in progress and the sight hooked him.

“I knew I had to go down there and try it myself,” Thompson said. “I had never done anything like that and when I tried it for the first time, it was the greatest thrill I’d ever had.”

Thompson often had the fastest car in the race, but his hell-bent-for-election style of driving never let him finish. The more horsepower he put into his cars, the faster they went, and the quicker they expired.

Another plane ride, after he had crashed early in a Mint 400 race, changed the sport of off-road racing. Thompson got in his plane and flew over the race to watch Parnelli Jones bounding across desolate desert terrain.

“I said to myself, ‘This is too good not to let the public see it,’ and I started thinking about how I could capsule it into a smaller area,” he said.

The result was the closed-circuit off-road race at Riverside International Raceway in 1973.

“That first year almost broke me,” he said. “It was the first year of the gasoline shortage and it was tough for people to get to Riverside, but we knew we had a good thing going, so we stuck it out.”

From Riverside, which later attracted crowds up to 40,000 to watch desert buggies, pickup trucks and VWs careen over a bumpy course laid out by Thompson in the SCORE closed-course world championships, his next move was to capsule the sport even further and put it inside the confines of the Coliseum. Thompson had been impressed with the first Superbowl of Motocross in the Coliseum put on by Mike Goodwin and began work on substituting automobiles for motorcycles.

“That’s the way Mickey was,” said Billy Duel, a supervisor in The Times press room who worked alongside Thompson for 10 years when both were pressmen. “He would take ideas and mull them around in his head and then come up with something new. He was a wheeler-dealer who made things go.”

In 1982, at 54, Thompson finally scored his biggest individual victory. After two decades of trying, he won the Baja 1,000, off-road racing’s most prestigious event, while sharing a ride with Travis Smith in a borrowed car.

Thompson drove the first half of the 983 miles, then turned the car over to Smith. He had a 1-hour lead over the second-place car at the time and was so excited that he hopped in a truck, drove to the highway and raced to La Paz almost in time to see Smith finish the race.

The irony was that Thompson had been shooting a picture of his life--”The Man in the Iron Cage”--and had wanted a checkered flag in an off-road race to serve as the finishing touch. For three years he had a camera crew at every event he entered, hoping for the golden moment. Six months before the Baja race, he won a closed-course event in Fresno and decided to use that as the climax to the autobiographical film. He dismissed the camera crew.

“Wouldn’t you know it, I paid a crew for three years to follow me around, and then I win the biggest race there is, and they’re not around,” he said. “But I don’t care, really, it was so great to win. When you get to be 55 (his 55th birthday was less than a month away) it’s good to show these kids how tough you are. Now I can retire as a racer and concentrate on getting my stadium details worked out.”

Thompson promoted his first stadium race in the Coliseum in 1979 but it wasn’t an instant success. After a few years, during which he designed a set of metal ramps to give stadium races an illusion of bumps and ruts, Thompson returned to stadium racing at the Los Angeles County Fairgrounds at Pomona and later, the Coliseum, Rose Bowl and Anaheim Stadium.

He also created a water-filled barrier that he used to line his courses to protect drivers from smashing into concrete walls.

“This might be the most important thing I’ve ever done for racing,” he said recently. “I started thinking about doing something about safety when I saw Danny Ongais hit the wall at Indy a few years ago. When he was laying unconscious for two days, I thought, ‘This is nuts, having cars going nearly 250 m.p.h. and running into cement walls.’

“I worked for five years to develop something different and finally came up with the idea of using polyethylene barriers filled with water. They absorb the shock and are strong enough not to break.

“It isn’t the speed that kills you. It’s the sudden stop that kills you.”

At the time of his death, Thompson was trying to get his barriers accepted by the California Highway Patrol for use in roadside emergencies. The Secret Service used them around St. Vibiana’s cathedral during Pope John Paul’s visit in September, to protect against anyone trying to crash into the church grounds.