thedayiignoredpaulnewman

The Day I Ignored Paul Newman

What can I say?

To set the scene:

On a nice, sunny summer Sunday in 1982* I was at the Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course to watch a day’s worth of road racing.

On the slate was a full day of Sports Car Club of America (SCCA) national level amateur, or "club", racing. A wide variety of cars are used in this type of racing so they’re separated by configuration and performance potential into groups known as classes. A number of relatively short races are run during the day but only cars of similar class are in the field of any given race.

This was a special national level club racing weekend because as an added feature the professional-level SCCA Trans-Am series had been included in the slate. For this reason Mid-Ohio management advertised the weekend as a spectator event, where SCCA club races typically are not spectator driven.

Okay, fine. So where does world famous actor Paul Newman fit into this story?

Well, to start, I watched him put on a heck of a show in one of the national level club races. He weren’t doing no actin' neither, he was really racin’.

Mr. Newman was racing his Datsun (now Nissan) 280ZX, I believe, in the B-Production class. He and fellow racer Fred Baker (from the Cleveland, Ohio area) were having a real cat-and-mouse battle for the lead spot. Mr. Baker was driving his highly modified ‘60s vintage Jaguar XKE roadster so it was quite a sight to see Paul Newman in a modern Datsun Z car duke it out with one of the fastest XKEs to grace a race track.

If I remember correctly Fred Baker went on to win the race in his Jag with Paul Newman coming in a close second. They both would have earned top spot in the put-on-a-great-show category, if it had existed.

And now, the whole point of this:

So, anyway, later in the afternoon I was standing at the fence by the entrance of what is known as the key-hole section of the Mid-Ohio track watching the featured Trans-Am race. (The main drive in and out of Mid-Ohio parallels the track from the pit straightaway up past the key-hole section then south to the public highway with about thirty feet of buffer space between the drive and the track fence.)

Here I was, standing there watching the Trans-Am cars roar by when I noticed a small Toyota sedan had pulled off the drive near me, heading in the outbound direction. A man then emerged from the vehicle and walked in my direction. The man ended up walking up to the same fence I was standing against, winding up not more than four or five feet from me. I didn’t think much of the situation, figuring the gent just wanted to catch a couple more minutes of racing before he had to leave the track property.

This whole time I kind of just noticed this man, trying to act cool and not really acknowledging or looking directly at him. As racing fixture and legend Elliott Forbes-Robinson rumbled by on track the gent next to me yelled out "Elliott!" and made a thumbs-up type gesture as if he knew Mr. Forbes-Robinson. Uh, turns out in fact he did.

After standing there just a couple more minutes the man turned around and walked back to his car. People sitting in a small set of old bleachers behind us had started to look toward the gentleman and then call out in his direction. By this point I was starting to figure something was up.

Yes, you guessed it. That gentleman was indeed Mr. Paul Newman and he was just wishing his racing buddy Elliott Forbes-Robinson well before making his exit from the track (in what I assume was a rental or loaner car). I was still trying to act like Mr. Cool and stood there like nothing out of the ordinary took place but I was mentally kicking myself for not at least saying hello.

Mr. Newman waved to the folks in the bleachers and acknowledged their good wishes then got back into his car and motored on up the drive away from the track.

Weak ending to all of that build up, huh? Okay.

Let me try to add some pizazz here.

I believe it was David Letterman who used to go into his audience for a bit called "Brush with Greatness", or something like that. Dave would talk with a preselected member of the audience who would relate their chance encounter with a celebrity. The real story would end with a non-eventful parting. To punch it up Dave’s writers would created a fictional but much more exciting ending that the audience member read after relating their actual tale.

With that in mind here’s my VERY FICTIONAL "Brush with Greatness" type ending to the above story:

After my ignoring him, Paul Newman stormed to his car and got in. He the backed it up in to some gravel at the side of the drive so the rear of his car was perfectly square to me. Mr. Newman then proceeded to floor the accelerator so the wheels would break loose in the gravel, thereby spraying me down with a ton of the stuff. All the time this was happening Mr. Newman had his head sticking out the window looking back at me and screeching at the top of his lungs, "Maybe you’ll know who I am next time, punk!" He then sped up the drive laughing hysterically all the way out of the track property.

Again, that was a FICTIONAL ending! Paul Newman was a perfect gentleman the whole time I could see him.

Paul Leonard Newman, 1925 - 2008. Heck of a race, PL...

* Anyone who may have read this page on previous occasions may notice the year I recall crossing paths with Mr. Newman originally being 1982. Subsequent to the writing of this page I came across a spectator pass stub from 1985 I had saved from an event at Mid Ohio similar in format to the one recalled above, so I assumed that was the event at which the path-crossing took place and declared it as such. However, I came across race results at the UltimateRacingHistory.com Website that makes me confident the event recalled above did indeed take place in 1982 after all. (The Red Roof Inns Trans Am of July 18, 1982, to be exact.) Sorry for any confusion my sketchy memory of dates may have caused.

DFH August, 2006 (Year of occurrence footnote revised February 09, 2009.)

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