Dick Irish in the Ferrari 340/375 coupe, sn 0322 at Chanute AFB in 1954.
By Pete Vack
Photos from the Dick Irish collection unless otherwise noted
While Carl Goodwin did superb job covering race driver Dick Irish for his book, They Started in MGs, this article adds new information about Dick and his all too brief racing career, including never before published photos of the Ferrari 340 PF coupe, sn 0322 after being ditched in Wisconsin.
VeloceToday first contacted Dick Irish in April of 2007 to get his comments about the Ferrari 340 PF coupe, as it was going to an RM Auction. How could he forget the experience? He answered, “The only claim to fame was that I spun 9 times in practice at Chanute in 1954. I was in the Army and hadn’t driven ANYTHING in six weeks, and more comfortable with my Kieft F3, then stepped into THIS. We found the front anti roll bar was disconnected. Reconnecting it stopped the gyrations.”
But Dick was being modest…he ran the beastie often and with good results. We continued to email each other and as we did, his fascinating story came to light:
“I had been exposed to auto racing through midgets at the end of WW II while I was still in high school. I was the youngest of three sons and my middle brother and I built a Ford stock car and we graduated to midgets. When I got out of high school I bought an M.G. TC from a used car lot in Cleveland. The TC led me to a life of sin and degradation and we started the Cleveland Sport Car Club. I started a “foreign car repair shop” out of my Dad’s garage. The main business was replacing those British carbon throw out bearings with ball bearings as the Americans liked to ride the clutch and the carbon didn’t last under that treatment.
Irish in the pits as brother Chuck tries to fix an oil leak. Note the oil on the floor of the Siata. They won their class anyway.
“I bought a Jag XK120 and went to work for Vincent Penote, who started Jaguar-Cleveland Motors selling Jags and VW (we had to take THREE VWs to get a Jag, even the new Mk VII). While this was a neat place, it was sort of the blind leading the blind as the manager was a great guy, he knew nothing about the car business. So I left there and went to work for Dave Blauschield, a Cleveland Chrysler dealer who had been bootlegging Jags and started a dealership called Sports Cars Ltd. Anyway, as I had known Tony Pompeo for a year or two now, I talked Dave into taking on Siata and we got the 1400 Grand Sport which we set up for Vero Beach on March 8, 1952. Head gasket problems there so we went on to Sebring where we took 1st in Class, 2nd on Handicap and 3rd Overall Distance.
Irish told Cliff Reuter, “At our last pit stop, we lost time when the engine wouldn’t fire for some reason. When it did fire, we’d dropped to third place behind an XK-120 Jag. We ended up 45 seconds behind it while gaining 19 seconds a lap. The kicker was the next morning the car threw the rod on the way back into town and we had to fit a tow bar and tow the car back to Cleveland. We had driven it down to break it in, as I had also driven it from New York to Cleveland. The dealer I worked for, who owned the car, hadn’t a clue and repainted the car a different color before putting it on the showroom floor with the trophies!
Bob Fergus comes in for his last pit stop with the Siata. Note the driving lights. The car had headgasket problems until they made a new up of aluminum.
“Getting greedy and wanting a real race car, I ordered a Formula III Kieft-Norton from Cyril Kieft in England. When Blauschield found out about it he was pissed. He wanted me to ONLY race the Siata and only in races near Cleveland, not realizing that race wins sold cars worldwide and that there were NO races near Cleveland. The result, I got fired. Therefore, I ran the Kieft that summer starting at Bridgehampton with brother Chuck, aka Bud, crewing until he went onto active duty. We had both joined the U.S. Army Reserves a couple of years earlier. (I was to go active in May of ’53.) My first time at Elkhart Lake as a competitor was ’52 when the course still came through the town. I took my F-III Kieft-Norton there and practiced only to burn a piston, which was a bummer as there turned out to be no other 500cc cars there so there wasn’t going to be a class anyway. I had been there in ’51 as a spectator with my XK-120 Jag and fell in love with the place.
With the Kieft at Elkhart Lake in 1952.
At Bridgehampton on May 24, 1952 Dick ran in an unrestricted race and even though it was his first drive in the FIII he registered a surprising 12th overall. Apparently, he sent in an entry to the FIII event at Torrey Pines in California but didn’t make the grid and was listed as Did Not Arrive.
Dick with his Kieft at Janesville in 1952. Photo by Glen Glendenning.
According to historian Carl Goodwin, Dick ran the Kieft at Giant’s Despair hillclimb with a 6th in class, but racingsportscars.com lists him as 12th on July 25. “He became notorious as a record setter at venues such as Janesville, Wisconsin,” wrote Carl. “The Norton twin cam engine was tuned by a Canadian wizard and its megaphone exhaust created an ear-splitting shriek while the fumes from the alcohol fuel made your eyes water.” At Watkins Glen on September 20, Irish got a lot of attention as did Claudia Hall, but the Kieft retired early.
Claudia Hall, brother Bud and Irish get ready for the start at Watkins Glen, 1952.
Watkins Glen, September 20, 1952 Charles, Jr., (or “Bud” to his family friends). Notice the snow fence “barrier” and the “bench” “pit working surface” that was supplied for the entrants. See, those days really WERE simpler! Anyway, Bud was getting the warmer “start up” plug out prior to starting the engine. Irish Collection
Bud and Gordon C. “Gordie” Wills of Youngstown, Ohio, who was our “pit crew”. . Irish Collection
The final event for Dick and the Kieft was on October 11, 1952 at Thompson, and he took a win in the unrestricted class. The US Army dominated his life in 1953, but he was able to catch a ride with Hal Ulrich at Sebring in March, driving the Brook Stevens Excalibur. The team placed 33th overall, but Dick failed to mention that he won the Shell Sportsmanship Trophy, presented by the Shell Atlanta Marketing Division, “…for pushing his Excalibur car 3.5 miles back to the pits, making it a first recognition of Sebring by an oil company,” wrote Alec Ulmann in his book, The Sebring Story, 1969. There were also two photos of Dick with the Excalibur, one showing him getting the car across the finish line on the starter motor, something Dan Gurney did much later at Daytona. We would have missed this anecdote had it not been for Siata expert Clark Smith; thanks, Clark!
Dick Irish was developing as a driver and rides were coming his way. And what a ride awaited him.
Richard Harry Irish
July 24, 1930 – March 19, 2015
What a coincidence – a feature on Dick Irish. Toly Arutunoff and I were just trading email recollections about Dick earlier this evening. It started with my interest in getting Irish in the NEOhio SCCA Hall of Fame. I kind of remembered a story about Dick driving off the course at Elkhart Lake to pull a driver out of a burning Maserati, and I wanted to get some details on it. Thanks for your coverage of an interesting figure in the sport. – Carl Goodwin
In 2009 Dick Irish told me the funny story about how Oklahoma fruit-and-vegetable king A.D. Logan acquired the 4.9-liter Ferrari 410S [chassis 0596] that the new owner entered at Mansfield, Louisiana, in August 1958. Irish must have been a wrencher for Logan at the time, since both men travelled to New York City to visit Luigi Chinetti. Logan fell in love with the former works 410S. Chinetti had offered it to Logan for $10,000, plus the promise that NART could use it a Nassau at the end of 1958. Logan agreed to buy it, but Chinetti refused to accept his out-of-state banker’s check. So Irish was instructed to exchange the check for cash at the nearest bank. Carrying so much money around the streets of NYC made Irish very uncomfortable. He remembered the 410S as ‘beastly fast’, its rear end frequently breaking because of the tremendous torque.