On its 100th running, no one knows the race like Donald Davidson.
by Ben Smith
He seems such a slender reed to carry the weight of so many years. That's what strikes you first about the polite Englishman sitting here in this quiet office on the second floor of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway's Hall of Fame Museum.
Downstairs, in the museum itself, a blaring, tumultuous century comes at you in endless eye-watering chunks. Here is the Day-Glo orange of Joe Leonard's wedge-shaped STP turbine from 1968, one of the most iconic machines in Indianapolis 500 history. Here's the deep maroon of Cliff Bergere's 1932 Studebaker, as primitive to today's eye as a Roman chariot. Here's the cream-colored Novi from the 1950s, whose supercharged scream and penchant for killing those who tried to tame it still haunts this place of ghosts, and the red, blue and pearl of Parnelli Jones' fabled No. 98 Offenhauser roadster.
It is impossible to get your arms around it all, now that the 500 readies for its 100th running. And so the slight, polite Englishman does not even try.
His name is Donald Davidson, and he knows more about these crowded 100 years than any man living. The only full-time track historian in the world, he came here as a young man in 1964, saving up for several years to make the pilgrimage. And if his knowledge of the place and the race is encyclopedic, it is not so much the broad sweep which absorbs him, but the small details that illuminate it.
His favorite part of race day, for instance?
It comes at mid-morning or thereabouts, when the pace cars roll out carrying the former winners. Their names are not on the cars, but they don't have to be. Everyone knows who A.J. Foyt is, or Mario Andetti, or Al and Bobby Unser.
“When those fellows roll out onto the track and you hear the reaction … that's the greatest part to me,” says Davidson, who helped establish this tradition in 2011.
He's been hearing those reactions for a long time. His passion for Formula One racing in the 1950s introduced him to the 500, and when he finally made it to the track in '64, climbing off a Greyhound bus at the corner of 16th Street and Georgetown Road, his impression, he says, was “euphoria.”
“As much as I knew about it, I just assumed you get off and you walk a distance and you eventually see the track looming blocks away,” Davidson recalls. “And you go under the overpass, and here's the grandstands right next to the road.”
He quickly impressed Sid Collins, the longtime voice of the 500, with the fact he had memorized the final standings of every 500. And then came the race, memorable mostly for the fiery crash that killed Eddie Sachs and Dave MacDonald and stained everything that came after.
Davidson remembers every detail of that: The tower of black smoke, the “ashen” looks on the faces, the surf-sound of thousands of horrified voices. And, worst of all, there was the thought this would spell the end of the 500 itself.
“I thought, ‘Wouldn't that be ironic that I have this dream all this time and I realize I'm here and I've lived it, and now is it gonna be ripped away?'” Davidson says.
It was not. Jimmy Clark won the next year in a Lotus-Ford to usher in the era of rear-engine cars, and then came Parnelli and Leonard and the STP turbines, and on and on. Davidson began hosting the radio call-in program “Talk of Gasoline Alley” in 1971, and he hosts it to this day, having become almost as distinctive a voice to fans of the 500 as Collins was.
Sixty years on, he's still in love with his job and the race.
“I just love the fact so many people care about it,” he says. “It's so neat not only that I have all these stories I'm so passionate about, but that thousands of people want to share them.”
