Chasin’ A Dream – On a Shoestring

By Fred Voorhees

   Let me present to you the story that I came across while doing some research and it caught my fancy.  The story, like so many others in the sport, is a tale of dreams…..bound not by gumption and determination and grit, but by the need that every racer faces….the financial wherewithal. 

   Introducing Phillip Monnat of Endicott, NY……firmly planted in what was and is commonly known as the “Southern Tier” of New York state.  A mechanic at an Oldsmobile dealership, Phillip had a competent ability to work on any vehicle and that, combined with his fascination and love for local stock car racing, decided to take the plunge and try his hand at going in circles.  In early 1964, Phillip purchased a 1934 Ford coupe from Bryant Ingalls.  Ingalls, a United Racing Club sprint car driver had used the car to propel himself to Rookie of the Year honors at the Five Mile Point Speedway in 1962 before moving to the open cockpit ranks of URC and handing the car over to his Brother Lynn, who duplicated Bryant’s Rookie of the Year effort in 1963 at Five Mile.  Fate however stepped in and Lynn was fatally injured in a highway car crash and the car was back in Bryant’s hands and that is where Phillip Monnat came in.

   With high hopes of joining his heroes at the dirt tracks, but minimal financial holdings, Phillip purchased the car and another that had been in the process of being built and the dream was underway.  Before putting his new acquisition on the track, Phillip had made deals with not one, but two different guys – Jack Kerschner and Dick Hiliker - to share driving duties, a situation that usually winds up being….well, complicated.

    Back in those days, Five Mile Point was in its heyday of activity and enjoying a burgeoning pit area with weekly car counts usually numbering around fifty cars vying for the twenty or so feature starting spots.  Not good for an upstart team just learning the ropes.  Needless to say, gaining entry into the nights main event proved a tough task and neither driver was showing more promise than the other.  Five weeks into the frustrating season, Phillip asked former car owner and driver Bryant to take advantage of his night off from URC competition to give the car a try at Five Mile and see if he could figure things out.  Not making the cut in the heat race, he took the green in the nights consi and a grinding crash shelved the car with damages for a handful of weeks.

   Once repairs were made…the decision was made to shake things up and new driver, veteran Larry Witter behind the wheel and now competing at the Midstate Speedway in Morris, a 70 mile flat tow drive each week.  One of the bonuses of competing at Midstate was fewer cars to beat out for one of the nights feature starting spots.  However, even with a few heat wins to their credit, the parts needed to better their odds of becoming even more competitive were simply either not attainable or if they were…just more than the mechanic at an Oldsmoble dealership could swing and still raise a family.   Sadly, it was decided that the dream of short track dirt stock car racing of Phillip Monnat, would have to be abandoned.  His racing endeavors didn’t exactly start with his acquisition of the former Ingalls car….no, it actually got its start further back in time……joining ten other racing enthusiasts in a group effort in the early ‘50s in putting a car onto the tracks with Monk Rauch or Jimmy Lott behind the wheel.  The ’37 Hudson sedan….lovingly called “Lucky 11” provided lots of experience and thrills for the group before Phillip Monnat would decide the he wanted to go it alone in car ownership.

   His love for the sport remaining, Phillip and his family continued to attend the local racing off and on in the area for many years.  The 1980 season dawned and the family once again began the weekly ritual of enjoying the stock car shows, but after one night at the Shangri-La Speedway, for some reason, both Phillip and his wife would never attend another racing event.  The dream was, in all reality, snuffed out.

   In the words of one of the Monnat’s children….. “Both of my parents are deceased now, my dad almost thirty years ago in December of 1993 and I'm in the twilight. Every time I see a picture of one of his race cars, all the great memories of how proud I was of what he tried to accomplish as a racing guy come flooding back and I have to stop what I'm doing and that's never been a bad thing. I'll always miss what we once had.