David E. Davis Jr. Recalls the 1961 Shell 4000 Trans-Canada Rally
Mr. Douglas G. Wilson of North Vancouver, British Columbia, writes:
Dear David:
What a pleasant surprise to see you have surfaced again with Car and Driver. If your picture is recent, you have changed very little since our first meeting. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same for myself.
We met in May of 1961. You were team manager for the Corvairs entered in the [British Columbia International Trade Fair] Trans-Canada car rally. I was rally manager. The mechanical inspections were held in the Pepsi-Cola garage in Montreal, Quebec.
Your three cars were being protested for having nonconforming belly pans. The problem was solved by Detroit’s parts manager coming up with a part number (he may have pulled out a dollar bill and used its serial number).
It was probably not the best international rally (Denise McCluggage said it was “Mickey Mouse”), but it did begin a series of first-class rallies for the next seven years. I left after the 1965 Shell 4000 and came back as Nissan team manager in 1967 and ’68.
I have not been involved in motorsports for many years, but I keep informed with Car and Driver and that other car magazine.
Sincerely,
Doug Wilson
November is my birth month, celebrating 79 years of relatively harmless risk taking and debauchery, and Mr. Wilson’s letter is the nicest gift I could imagine.
In these seven decades of decadence, I might have been an automotive assembly-line worker. I might have spent my life doing automotive advertising. I was sort of successful as a car salesman. I learned something about myself while pursuing these false starts, to wit: I became a more effective salesman as the price tags got bigger on whatever merchandise I was selling.
Thus, it was in advertising that I peaked. I could stand in front of the senior management of a major automotive corporation and convince them that it was in their best interest to spend millions of dollars on advertising that said, “New Fire, New Flair, New Freedom From Care,” even though I had often failed miserably trying to sell some frazzled housewife a Countess Mara necktie for her husband. It was this gift that gave me the con man’s satisfaction of a job well done, and it also transported me from the thankless penury of an expediter’s job in the North American Aviation purchasing department to the glory and wonder of car magazines.
In 1960, I managed to convince Chevrolet’s general manager, Mr. Ed Cole, and his minions that he should be the first to break the automakers’ protocol against engaging in any form of motorsport by entering a team of Corvairs in the 1961 Shell 4000 (BCITF) Trans-Canada Rally.
Zora Arkus-Duntov, father of the Corvette, was not amused. If the ban on factory-sponsored racing was going to be broken, he wanted to break it. He hated my poaching on his turf and did all he could to undermine my little hip-pocket rally team. This included hiring the great racing driver John Fitch to spy on us and file daily reports with any new evidence that I was in over my head and my efforts would result in the utter destruction of General Motors. John was out every morning at dawn, measuring the gradual collapse of our front suspensions and looking for other evidence of malfeasance. He took a bazillion photographs. He didn’t talk to us much. We didn’t talk to him much.
Our real problem was this: Denise McCluggage was driving one of our team cars. On the previous weekend, she and her dashing lover, the saxophone player and heroin addict Allen Eager, had won the GT category in the Sebring 12 Hours race driving her Ferrari. They were quickly protested by Chevrolet’s male chauvinist Corvette team—(Glass Ceiling Racing?)—casting a shadow over their legitimate victory, to say nothing of what it did to her attitude as a Chevrolet Corvair driver in the Shell 4000. Her Sebring victory in limbo pending the judges’ decision, she was a woman scorned. She reduced her female co-driver to tears more than once. She made my life miserable, but I’m still crazy about her 48 years later. In a fit of pique, after breakfast in eastern British Columbia, she backed her rear-engined Corvair into a steel basketball stanchion in the schoolyard that served as a parc fermé. Rear-engined cars do not respond well to being backed into steel posts at high speed.
Another of our drivers was my closest friend in those years, Trant Jarman, who would go on to drive for Ford twice in the Monte Carlo Rally. Trant found an angry Denise McCluggage to be utterly irresistible. He would have followed her anywhere and almost did. They shared a platonic but intense friendship until he died of a brain tumor a few years ago. At the peak of her Trans-Canada truculence, we were all huddled in a Corvair Greenbrier van outside our hotel in the pouring rain waiting for Trant. He came skipping merrily down the stairs, opened the passenger door, bounded in, and cheerfully announced, “Hey, Coach! I’m menstruating!” This was not helpful.
Trant worked for me on this magazine as an ad rep in the mid-Sixties. A racing driver who needs metaphysical reassurance and seeks it in the selling of advertising is entitled to be occasionally unstable. He may have been confused because the magazine industry calls such people “space salesmen.” When Trant died, Tommy Kendall ran a televised Trans-Am race in Kansas with “R.I.P. T.J.” prominently displayed on the instrument panel of his Beretta. I hope that somewhere Joe Cocker was singing “Space Captain."
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