Actor + Racer = James Dean

Lee Raskin - World's Leading Expert/Historian on James Dean & Porsche 356/550 for Author

Contact: Lee Raskin at N/A

       

• How did you get started down this particular path in motorsports? What drew you to the James Dean story. Was it through Porsches/PCA? Or something else?
• James Dean was an accomplished actor and American heart-throb, his most popular films being East of Eden and Rebel without a Cause. But many might not know that he was also an avid Motorsports enthusiast and amateur race car driver?
• Let’s talk about the Crash.
• Let’s talk about “the Curse” – It is theorized that James Dean’s death was not his own fault, but rather that of the car. Some have also said that this particular Porsche 550 Spyder has it’s own dark and unsettling past. Legends, myths and other tall tales surround the James Dean story, and some go as far as to say that someone building Dean’s 550 died during the construction of the vehicle at the Porsche factory and their soul “haunted” the vehicle after its completion. So let’s get into a bit of fact vs. fiction and unpack this curse.
• In the end, it’s important that we do highlight one important aspect that is missing from the Dean story: SAFETY. A lot of engineering and thought has gone into vehicle design since 1955 to keep drivers and passengers as safe as possible on the roads. And even more research and development has gone into racing cars, to make sure we lose our heroes to old age, rather than faulty or insufficient equipment. 

and much, much more!

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Gran Touring Motorsports podcast, break Fix, where we’re always fixing the break into something motorsports related.

There are so many men and women that we have lost over the years, ton Sena, Dale Earnhardt, Jim Clark, Peter Brock, John Lingenfelter. The list continues. Many other motorsports organizations have written and will continue to write about those heroes every day. But on this episode of Break Fixx, we are choosing to explore the life of someone lesser known for his motorsports accomplishments and more for his acting and the tragic story surrounding his death.

Today we take a moment to remember the race car driver and actor James Dean, and with us to unpack his story is the world’s foremost expert on all things related to James Dean. Mr. Lee Raskin. Welcome to Break Fix Lee. Hi, Eric. It’s a pleasure to see you again, and I’m very excited about talking about my [00:01:00] favorite actor racer, James Dean.

So before we get started on the James Dean story, I think it’s important that we set the stage on you, Lee, the Petrolhead. How did you get started down this particular path in motor sports? What drew you to the James Dean story? Was it through Porsche’s or the Porsche Club of America, or was it something else?

Well, I think it’s a, it’s a combination of a lot of things. First, we’ve gotta do a back flip to Lee Raskin at the age of nine. I grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, July 4th, 1953. I asked my father to take me to the first sports car races at Offit Air Force Base. They were being hosted by none other than General Curtis LeMay.

Oh wow. I don’t know. I just fell in love with foreign cars. I was buying, uh, road and Track and Sports Car Illustrated. This was an opportunity to go to see some of these cars that I had read about. It was the first race that they held and actually [00:02:00] Curtis LeMay was really an advocate of the Sports Car Club of America.

And this was his way of getting grassroots racing throughout the country. He was using all the Air Force Tarmax. It was a natural, so I remember it was about a hundred degrees that day. There were no grand stands. We just sort of sat on the hillside behind snow fences wasn’t a real safe, uh, environment, certainly was up close and you could smell the rubber and the castor oil.

It was really great. After the race, they had brief ceremonies and my father said to me, he said, go up and get some autographs. I had a program bought that for 25 cents. And he said, go over to those two guys standing there. They’re the ones that finished first and second. And he gave me a ballpoint pen and it’s the first time I ever had a ballpoint pen in my hand.

And I went over and I introduced myself and I got two autographs, first and second. First was a guy, a really young guy, uh, he was just 22 years old [00:03:00] from Kansas City and they referred to him as the Kansas City Flash. His name was Maston Gregory. Oh wow. And the person that finished second nose to tail was this big, tall guy wearing bib overalls, and his name was Carol Shelby.

No way. And those are the first two autographs that I collected among thousands, by the way, you know, today. And I still have that. I still have the program. So that was my introduction to sports car racing. And I went back the next year. They held it again on July 4th. It was just as exciting. And by that time I had done a little studying, so I knew Porsche’s and Morgan’s and Austin Healy’s and Ferrari, and I could identify them.

And back then you almost could identify them by the sounds. Of course, the Porsches were rear engine and the Austin Heal were a little bit, uh, louder. And uh, they were six cylinder cars in the Ferraris. They just roared around the track as well as Maseratis. In the third [00:04:00] year, 1955, my sister. Was watching James Dean on black and white television.

And of course we only had one television in the household, as did everybody else. And James Dean was starring on live TV and General Electric Theater. Phil, coach Lititz, both my sister and all her girlfriends were enamored over this great young star, James Dean. And of course I was 10 years old the time and I was watching him as well.

And then in September, the headline said, actor James Dean killed in car crash. My sister was absolutely devastated and she created a shrine in her bedroom floor ceiling photos of James Dean. And there were two or three photos that I particularly liked. Those were the photos of James Dean and his Porsche speedster that he was racing.

And of course, I had seen the Porsches, not the speedster, but the coop. Back then in 53 and [00:05:00] 54, the Speedster was a brand new model that came out in 1955. If I was on my best behavior, she would let me into her shrine and let me read the articles and look at the photos. And I think that’s really when it started.

And of course, I was 10 years old, and by that time I was collecting plastic model cars, Revelle and Monogram, and Aurora. I would spend my 50 cent allowance a week to buy those cars, and I bought every sports car that came out, and I only wish that I kept them, but unfortunately, somewhere along the way, I maybe blew them up as a 4th of July celebration.

Later on, I got into my bicycle and of course I put cards on the folks and made noises, and I made noises. Somewhere around the late fifties there were records that were produced by Riverside Records and they were sounds of seabring and Cuban corners, and there were all these great sounds of sports cars racing.

It. [00:06:00] Sebring and you could identify, you could listen to ’em and my friend and I would play games with each other like, which car is this and which car is that? Of course my favorite was the Porsche at that time stayed in touch with what was going on with sports car racing and there wasn’t, there wasn’t anymore racing at Omaha.

It was just there for two years. But I was still buying my road and track and sports Car illustrated magazines and then there was sports car graphic and I learned about the races, the Mill, Amelia, the Targa, Florio Lama, and Seabring. And I liked the endurance races because they weren’t over in 25 laps.

They went on for hours and hours and you had factory teams and it’s something that is like chewing gum. It stuck with you, you loved it, and you couldn’t wait year after year for those races to take place. And I couldn’t wait to get the morning paper after a race at Sebring and Lamar the find out who was winning.

When I was 13, I begged my father to let me buy a [00:07:00] third hand. I would call it as a mini cycle, but it was called a doodlebug. It was made in Iowa. Had a Clinton two and a half horsepower. I. In Omaha, you could drive those on the streets. In 1958, my father, my sister and I moved back from Omaha back to where he grew up in Baltimore.

And I took my motor scooter with me. And of course the police were always chasing me because it was illegal to drive that on the street. You had to have a license and you had to be 16. At 16, I bought a Yamaha motor scooter, drove it 15 miles each way to school. Went to college and took my motorcycle with me.

And then after my first year of college, I begged my father to let me buy a used Porsche. Really? And that was a pretty big step. It was $1,500. It was a 1960 Porsche. Coop, 1964, I bought it, took it to college. I had the very first Porsche on the campus of the University of Alabama. Everybody else was driving Fords and Chevys [00:08:00] and, and trucks too.

I had a Porsche. This would’ve been a 3 56 Charlie, right? A C at that point? Yeah. This would’ve been a B, right? On the borderline, yeah. Yeah. And I, and that was the beginning. That was my first Porsche at age 19. The rest is history. I was always trading up, sometimes I had two Porsches, sometimes I had three.

I’ve had a lot of models. Not every model, but I’ve had a lot of models and Porsche became my favorite. Mark. Although a lot of people know me as racing a Morgan and racing in Arnold Bristol and racing an Elva Formula Junior. So I guess I’m a multi mark person. Somewhere around 1977 I uh, was reading stories about James Dean in some of the Porsche magazines, the Porsche Club of America, Panorama 3 56 Registry.

And I said, you know, that’s not what I remember. That’s not what I saw. And I saw where a lot of individuals were writing articles about James Dean and they really didn’t know what the hell was going on. [00:09:00] They had the cars wrong, they had the events wrong, they had his crash wrong. I wrote letters to the editor, you know, and I tried to straighten things out.

And then a lot of my friends said, you know, Lee, you should be writing these articles and that’s. When things started to happen for me, not only did I write articles, I decided to write books. That’s been my life since 2004. I haven’t stopped. I always thought James Dean would be like, you know, a fleeting moment in my life, but it isn’t.

I realized that I emulated him. I grew up in a very similar fashion of James Dean. I lost my mother when I was 10. He lost his mother when he was nine. I had a little motor scooter that I drove to school. So did he. I had a Porsche when I was 19. He waited a little longer until he was. 24 and then I got involved in racing.

I never thought that I was James Dean behind the wheel, but I always had a lot of respect for what he did. And it wasn’t until recently that I [00:10:00] realized that James Dean really perpetuated the Porsche in California sports car racing. In his first two races, he was on the podium, so he was really the first.

Actor racer in Hollywood to be serious about his newfound sport. And that was automobile racing. And of course, he traded his 3 56 speedster in after a year and bought a five 50 and he was on his way to his four race. When unfortunately he had an accident, it was a moment in time that was unguarded for both James Dean and the person that he ran into at his death on September 30th, 1955.

This is when James Dean’s legend actually began. And we’re gonna unpack that as we go through the episode, getting people familiar with the entire story. As I’ve said many times on this show before, oftentimes for many of us as Petrolheads, it starts with a poster on the wall. And for you, it was photographs of James Dean and his Porsche [00:11:00] and things like that that inspired you to become the petrolhead that you are today.

So for those of you that are listening, you know, as we’re diving deeper into this, understand that James Dean was an accomplished actor in American heartthrob, his most popular films being East of Eden and Rebel without a Cause. But many of you that are listening to this might not know that he was an avid motorsport enthusiast and amateur race car driver.

So, Lee, without dragging this out further, let’s begin right there with his racing career and expand on his Motorsports pass. So where did that begin? For James Dean. James Dean really got his motor sport start on uh, two wheels. And when he was just barely a teenager, he had a little wizard motorbike. He took a Schwinn bike and they took a wizard, which was a small three or four horsepower engine, and they put it on the bicycle and he drove the hell out of that.

I mean, he just drove it as fast as he could, [00:12:00] everywhere he could. Everybody heard him because it was loud, it was un muffled. He graduated to a little. 1 25 cz a Czechoslovakian motorcycle, which incidentally has been preserved and it’s in the Fairmont Museum in Fairmont, Indiana. And he drove that to school and he got the reputation and, uh, the nickname, they called him one Speed Dean.

And that was he, he drove that white out. As a matter of fact, he was a bit of a daredevil. In order to be a little more aerodynamic on his motorcycle, he would lay prone, he’d be holding the handlebars with his feet out the back. He would try and get it past 40, 45 miles an hour, which was the top speed.

James Dean graduated into, uh, some larger motorcycles when he left Fairmont, Indiana. After graduating high school, he went to California to, uh, live with his father in Santa Monica. Then he moved on to New York. He had a royal [00:13:00] infield 500 cc, and then he bought an Indian tt, which was a, a really neat, uh, motorcycle.

I guess it was probably in 1952 or 53 that he had in New York. And it’s interesting as he needed some service on the motorcycle in New York, he went to a motorcycle shop in the village. He became good friends with the mechanic. He also was a starving actor, and his name was Steve McQueen. So James Dean met Steve McQueen and vice versa.

And they shared their love for bikes. It’s interesting that Steve McQueen had an M G T C in New York City, and James Dean admired that, but didn’t have any money. So he was still on a, you know, his two-wheel Indian as he was to discovered by ILI Kazan in 1954 to start a CoStar in east of Eden, playing the role of Cal Trask.

He left his Indian bike in New York, came to California [00:14:00] immediately, had some money in his pocket and bought a used M G T D. Okay. His best friend said to Jimmy, you know, I don’t see what you you like about this car. It’s awfully loud and it doesn’t go very fast. And uh, Jimmy must have listened to him because he traded up, he traded the MG for a brand new 1955 Porsche Super.

3 56 speedster. Is there any backstory to how he went from English Roadster to Porsche? Because had they established their foothold yet, especially in America, were they still considered a boutique manufacturer at that point? What drew him into the brand? I mean, he had so many other things to choose from in those early 1950s.

That’s an excellent question. The MG was very popular, as well as Austin Healy’s Triumphs. They were cheap cars. They sold new for around 22, 20 [00:15:00] $300 some less 1800. The Porsche Speedster was the brainchild of Max Hoffman, who became the largest. Porsche importer and dealer in this country, and Hoffman was the one that said to Dr.

Porsche, we need to create a car under $3,000 to compete against the British cars, not only on the street, but on the racetrack because amateur racing through the S E C A was becoming very popular on the East coast and the California Sports Car Club on the west coast. So the speedster was created in 1954 and it sold for 29 95 under $3,000 if, and it, and it sold without a, a side view mirror.

So if you wanted a mirror, it was an extra five or $6 and it that took it over 3000. So that was their marketing program. Brand new, stripped down, Porsche speedster. Fast, light, fun, perfect [00:16:00] car for California on the road on the racetrack. And James Dean being in California. Had befriended John Von Newman, who owned Competition Motors, and he had taken a test drive of a Porsche speedster and Von Newman said, look, there’s a new car coming out.

It’ll be a super, it’ll have a larger engine and it’ll have a three piece crankshaft. Wait a few months, we’ll order this car for you. You’ll be able to race it. And the car came in in February of 1955. Jimmy traded in his M G T D and bought the car for 29 95 and immediately within that month, took it racing.

Competed in the novice race at Palm Springs, won the novice race and qualified for the main event in under 1500. Ccs came in third to Ken Miles and Sayta, and miles of all things was disqualified in his MG flying sh [00:17:00] shingles special because he was using aviation fuel. Oh, so Ser who had, uh, raced Ken Miles’ first MG special became first, and James Dean was bumped up to second and, uh, within two months for May day, he raced at Bakersfield in May of 1955 and finished third in the first group, and then ninth in the main event on Sunday.

Immediately with that speed stir, he was not only driving on the street. But he was racing it. And of course in those days and days following, you could have a race car, you could drive it on the street, you could take it racing and you could drive it home if everything went okay. James Dean was busy filming.

He had just started Rebel Without a Clause after the Palm Springs race. In March of 1955 and after Rebel was completed, he got a break and he was able to race at Bakersfield. Warner Brothers was [00:18:00] not very keen on his racing. They thought something could happen to him and he was lined up for five or six movies.

And they didn’t want anything to happen. He, they didn’t want him to get injured while he was racing. James Dean had to pick and choose. Soon as a movie was over, he had a few weeks and if there was a race, he was in it. So his third race would’ve been Memorial Day weekend, the end of May, and it was a Santa Barbara.

He drove his speedster up there. He missed practice because he had to do, uh, a stage call or costume call for Giant. And of course, he didn’t tell them that he was racing and he wasn’t able to get up there until Sunday, so he hadn’t raced in the preliminary on Saturday. I suspect if you and I were in that situation, they would say, tough luck.

You weren’t here. Can’t race. But James Dean was James Dean and he was a rising star and it was good promotion. So they let him race on Sunday and he was racing against some of the competition that he had raced against earlier, [00:19:00] but also some new names. I think that he just got ahead of himself. And he qualified further back.

What’s interesting in those days, you didn’t qualify by lap time, fastest lap time. You sort of put your hand in the hat and you picked a number out. So he came up with a, with a bad number. He was 18th in the grid, so he had never started back that far. And I think that he, as I said, got ahead of himself on lap four, lap five, he went wide, hit a, a bale of hay, overwrapped his engine, and burned a piston.

And he was a D N F. It did not finish. And so here’s James Dean driving his car up. He didn’t have a ride home. So there are some very famous photographs taken of James Dean and others pushing the car up on a transporter. So he had a long ride home with his mechanic friend, bill Tunstall in the cab of a truck with the [00:20:00] damaged car on the, on the back.

And they took that to competition motors. Within a, a week or so, he was on his way to Martha, Texas to begin filming Giant. So he did not race in June, July, or August because he was busy filming and he lost the edge and he kept saying, you know, I need a faster car. His car’s not fast enough. So he actually had made a deal with a racer by the name of Jay Chamberlain who had a Lotus dealership.

Okay. Right outside of Warner Brothers in Burbank. And he agreed to purchase a Lotus Mark nine. Actually, it might have been an eight or a nine, I’m not sure. It was in transition. He put down a deposit. As you know, Lotus was, uh, like Morgan, they made racing car bodies, but they used other engines. So Morgan used a Triumph and the Ford and the Lotus used Covent climax and also a crystal engine.

Yep. But James [00:21:00] Dean decided he wanted a smaller v8, and having grown up in Indiana, close to the Indianapolis 500, he chose to use an off the engine Offen Hauser, which was made in Los Angeles. He made a deposit for a used Offen Hauser. Coffee and he was gonna put a VA in there. The British car manufacturers, they were never in a hurry.

So he wanted this Lotus to be ready for September cuz he knew it would be finished filming Giant and he wanted to race at Salinas because that was fairly close to Mendocino in terms of having filmed East of Eden in that, in that area, it’s sort of like going home again. He knew that he had a big fan base.

Any case the Lotus was not gonna be ready, so he canceled the order. He had told John Van Newman, I’d like to buy a five 50. Newman said, well, they’re not gonna be coming in till September. And by the way, you’re not really qualified. You [00:22:00] don’t have enough seat time to race a five 50. Why don’t you finish out the season in your super speedster?

Jimmy was, was relentless. He said, no, I, I want this five 50. And as it turns out, he got his way because of five that were delivered through Hoffman to Van Newman. Someone backed out of the deal and a car was available. He traded his super speedster in for $3,000. He had to come up with 3,800. He really had a deep pocket cuz he was making some, you know, some good, uh, money, uh, having just filmed a giant.

And so he asked his agent to take, uh, advance $3,800, came up with $6,800 and the five 50 was his. And he settled on the car on September 21st, 1955, which would be nine days just before the Salinas race. Let’s put 6819 50 [00:23:00] $5 in perspective. What does that come out to in today’s currency with inflation?

Well, it probably comes out close to 150,000. They’ve only made 95 50 spiders. Most of them were raced. About half of ’em survived. And today, like Jerry Seinfeld sold a five 50 for several million dollars. The auctions today at Amelia Island, they’re going to be offering five 50 spiders for four and $5 million.

Wow. Going forward, it’s a lot of money for a a car, but they only made 90, so they’re fairly rare and most of ’em have as fairly significant race history in as much as some very famous drivers raced five 50 s. At Lamar, at Seabring, at Watkins Glen and California as well, more so than the body and the coachwork itself.

The other significant part about the five 50 is it was the four cam Porsche motors. The first time it was [00:24:00] introduced basically in a production car. Exactly what be considered a production car. Yeah. The Furman engine was developed, uh, specifically for the five 50. It was used. During, uh, 1954 through 1956, then they not only put ’em into the five 50 race chassis, but they also stuck them into the Carrera coupes.

And those cars were very significant in racing as well. You know, to find a four cam Porsche 3 56, uh, that car is approaching a million dollars today, uh, in value. They’re fairly rare. The engine is a double overhead. Cam was very, very rare, highly engineered, almost a bulletproof engine, but you needed a good mechanic.

You needed someone that was really trained. And incidentally, James Dean befriended Ralph Wirick, who was sent over from the, uh, factory in Stuttgart to work specifically with Johnny Von Newman in developing their racing program. So he was [00:25:00] the mechanic of choice in Southern California for all the racing cars.

The four cam especially, but also the 15 and 1600 cc flat fours Curiosity question. There’s later four CAM engines, for instance, used like in a 9 0 4. Is that a derivative of the five 50 S engine? Yes. Or is it a different engine? No, it’s a derivative and it’s just an improved engine. And the interesting thing about the 9 0 4 that was in the line, the 5 55 50 A rsk RS 60 and 61 were Type seven 18 Porsches.

That basically were just improved. The engineering was improved, the aerodynamics were improved. The 9 0 4 was the first plastic fiberglass Porsche, and that was a fixed coop. They also made a few open cars. They used the 9 0 4 Carrera engine, which is a very similar engine. They also put a um, I think a an eight cylinder engine in a [00:26:00] few of those that were raced in endurance races like the target of Florio and the Mil.

Amelia, where did the lineage for that four cam? Four cylinder stop? Was it with the 9 0 4? Did it continue on at any point? Yeah, it actually stopped at the 9 0 4 because the 9 0 6 was a six cylinder engine. Right. And then they used an eight cylinder for some of the Berg Meister cars. The 9 0 8 9 0 9 9 10.

The models didn’t hang around very long. It was 3 56 by 50, uh, RS 69 0 4 9 0 6 9 0 8, and then, you know, went all the way through nine 17. The car that really stuck was the successor to the 3 56, which would be the six cylinder nine 11, and then the 9 14 6. You know, the nine 11 was created in 1963, and here we are, 2022.

The nine 11 is still around. It’s, you know, it’s got a long shelf life. That’s very true. Although the original 9 0 1 s as they, as they were dubbed back then versus a 9 [00:27:00] 92 like today, they are right, like years apart. It’s like the original Star Trek versus whatever we come up with now, right? I mean, they were definitely ahead of their time compared to other offerings on the road and other marks and whatnot.

Lotus was very similar. They were changing models constantly and, and those numbers that follow the Lotus was all the revisions, right? The, the, the mark one, the two, the eight, the nine, you know, the se, the super sevens, the sevens, all these, those became s so on down the line. So I, I find that interesting.

But switching back to the five 50, what you have to realize about this James Dean story is it’s very compressed. Everything happens. In just a matter of a couple of years, and especially in that last year, it’s almost super compressed. There’s so much going on between the movies, between the races, between changing cars, and then inevitably the crash, which we’ll talk about here in a little bit.

It’s just, it’s almost mind blowing how much was going on on almost a day by day basis. I do wanna touch on one more like bit of, I guess, trivia that surrounds the five [00:28:00] 50. It’s been a longstanding ideology in the Volkswagen Audi community that we have a tradition of naming our vehicles, and a lot of us know that James Dean called his five 50, the little bastard or little bastard.

So why or how did he come up with this particular name for that car? Well, there’s um, fact, and then there’s fiction. The interesting thing is I’m constantly battling the fiction. It’s just a lot of folklore, you know, it’s, uh, unbelievable that a lot of myths about James Dean, about his racing and then the curse of, uh, James Dean and the car.

The Little bastard is a very unique name. When you think about this and you take a step back, James Dean was probably the first to put some kind of nickname on his race car going through the chronology of racing. There were names, specials that were built, but James Dean may have been the first to [00:29:00] put a name and not only just a name, but a name that was, you know, kind of taboo.

Little bastard. One story has it this way. He had befriended an individual who was a stunt driver at Warner Brothers. His name was Bill Hickman. Okay. And actually, bill Hickman became not only famous because he accompanied James Dean on that fateful day going towards the race at Salinas. But after James Dean’s death, bill Hickman became a very famous stunt driver in the French connection and even more famous as a stunt driver in Bullet.

Oh, okay. Driving. Driving the Dodge. I’m not sure whether it was a charger or challenger as a charger. Charger that crashed into the gasoline station and blew up. That was his claim to fame. Bill Hickman, in any case, bill Hickman kind of, uh, well, I befriended James Dean and he called James Dean a little [00:30:00] bastard, and James Dean called him a big bastard.

Oh. So they had that running commentary back and forth. But I actually think the name Little Bastard came from a situation where James Dean had just finished making the movie East of Eden, and he was living in a trailer on the Warner Brothers set. Okay. It was convenient. There was no rent being charged, and it was very comfortable for him, except Warner Brothers said, you’re done with the movie, it’s time to move on.

Jimmy didn’t leave the trailer, so Stanley Warner said to one of his assistants, I’ve had enough. Get that little bastard off the lot. Anyway, James Dean heard about that, sort of tuck it away. When he bought the spider, he wanted to name it. He said, I’m gonna name this the little bastard, and I’m gonna show Jack Warner, who’s out front.

And in addition to that, all the drivers behind me are gonna [00:31:00] know that the little bastard is winning the race. Oh, nice. So I think that was it. The little bastard, as we know it was in a fancy script on the tail of his five 50. Most people thought that George Barris, the car customizer painted it on because George Barris said, I painted the little bastard on there as well as the one 30 and the pin stripes.

It’s not true. The person that painted it on was the other customizer by the name of Dean Jeffries and Dean Jeffries told me personally in 2004. You know, I’m really tired of George Baris taking credit for this. Yes, we had shops next to each other near Compton, but I painted it. James Dean came to me, he was an artist himself, and he had doodled the little bastard on the back of the tail of a five 50 and said, I, I want you to paint this on.

By the way, my provisional numbers for the race are one 30, so he [00:32:00] painted the little bastard in permanent gloss. Black Dean Jeffrey said it was called one shot black, and then the numbers were painted on in a washable black because it was a provisional number. The car was silver with red tail stripes with a two millimeter gold leaf border.

Were not painted by Dean Jeffries or George Baris. They came from the factory that way. Oh, interesting. There’s a whole story about tails, stripes and why Porsche was using those, and we can talk about that was very unique to James Dean’s car number 5 50 0 5 5. I’ve done a lot of research and I believe that this car originally was destined to be part of the factory team of endurance cars, but for some reason it wasn’t completed.

Until July. The racing season started much earlier in the spring in Europe, and I don’t think this car was included. And so it was finished up with Red Tails, stripes, and sent, you know, [00:33:00] as a customer’s car. The tails, stripes were used by the Porsche factory to delineate the cars that usually traveled in a packet, say Lamar 1 23.

They had similar numbers, like 32, 33, 34, and it, and the drivers interchanged some of those cars. So it may have been difficult at night, especially at night when the cars came through to know who was in what order. Oh, okay. So they had tails, stripes, red, blue, green, yellow. They used the, the colors rather than the numbers to keep score.

Oh, that sense makes sense. So, and that’s how the tails stripes were created and Porsche was one of the first to use that. I think Alpha Romeo probably used it as well. So James Dean’s car Silver with red tail stripes was very unique. You would think that maybe a Dean Jeffries, who was a pin striper painted the gold leaf, but no, it came from the factory.

So another question about James Dean before we kind of move on to the tail end of his compressed racing career. He’s [00:34:00] often portrayed as a loner. Right. You see him, you know, infamous pictures, black and white, leaning up against a car, cigarette in his mouth, you know, he’s got that rockstar appeal.

Obviously, plenty of people tried to emulate him later. You know, even so much as to be tongue in cheek, like shows like 9 0 2, 10, right? Where they had characters that were basically modeled after him, et cetera. You know, he went from nobody to somebody almost overnight. Was he really a loner in real life, or is that the way he’s depicted?

But from the way you’ve described, he had this whole racing family that he was a part of. So what was it? Loner or petrolhead, you know, which was he first? I, I think he was a chameleon. I honestly believe, depending on where he was and who he was with, it brought out his persona. Everybody characterized James Dean as being a rebel, wearing a red jacket because of Rebel without a cause.

He played Jim Stark and he was a, you know, tormented [00:35:00] teenager trying to find himself a little boy lost, so to speak. That’s really how he was marketed by Warner Brothers, and I think that teenagers gobbled it up. They loved it, especially the girls. But James Dean was a very compassionate person and he actually was meek at times, although he could be outspoken, but I think he was outspoken on the set because he knew.

How to market himself. One thing that I really noticed was that James Dean at age 24 knew how to get publicity. He always had a photographer with him, and not only that, he took the photographers to the races. He knew it was good marketing. Yeah, I think 90% of his photos had a cigarette. That was part of his persona.

But you never saw James Dean off the set in that red jacket that was merely a prop. I wouldn’t call him fashionable, but he was a pretty cool guy. Wore boots, he wore jeans. He wore a v-neck t-shirt when no one else was wearing a V-neck. I think that he got a big kick outta that. And he had a lot of [00:36:00] friends.

He could have been your friend and my friend, and yet we would’ve known each other. Yeah, and that goes for men as well as women. And he had his own set of racer friends, and the racer friends didn’t know the acting friends. He, uh, he had one friend, Lou Bracker, who he got involved in racing, but Lou lived in that area, west LA, knew a lot of people, was an enamored over Hollywood, but became James Dean’s good friend, and then became a racer.

And actually after James Dean died, Lou Bracker actually got hold of his speedster and raced it for a year and became a really good Porsche driver through 1956 and 57. I’ve heard a lot of stories about Dennis Hopper, for example, said, oh yeah, I. I love James Dean. We are really best of friends, but I’ve never seen a photo of Dennis Hopper and James Dean together other than, you know, on the set of Rebel without a Clause and giant.

Dennis May have thought that, and Dennis May have said, you know, I was invited to go to the races with Jimmy, but. I [00:37:00] don’t think so. I think that if everybody who said they were invited to go to the races that they all got together, they would’ve needed to rent a bus with all those people. Yeah. You were talking about, you know, early on about your sister, you know, kind of fawning over James Dean and he was a heart throb as described.

Right. And so there were a lot of ladies pine for him and then he was object of desire. Did he have a lady on his arm or was that sort of interchangeable? Just like his friends and seems like his cars too in this short amount of time. Yeah, no, I agree. Listen, he died at 24. Whoever thinks they’re gonna die at 24, although everyone says, well, James Dean had a death wish.

No, I disagree. He didn’t. That’s just something that got concocted by a lot of writers. One of the things that I noticed, and I mentioned earlier, I read all these articles and I said, that’s not the way it was. And so. I started interviewing a lot of his friends over the years, and I’m lucky that I did because most of them passed on.

James Dean would be over 90 years old today, born in 1931. [00:38:00] Most of his friends and acting friends have since passed on, but I had the good fortune during this seventies and eighties to have telephone interviews or interviews in person. I had better fortune of recording them. There are a lot of people that say, well, how do you know?

I said, not only do I know I’ve got the recorded voice. Yeah. You know, this has to be, attribution is the best source, you know, in putting together a book or a film. A lot of his racing friends have passed on, but it was great talking to them. They didn’t think James Dean would be a great racer. They thought he was.

It was a publicity stunt, but he had the tenacity and he had the passion for speed, right? He had the right car. Let’s not forget, he, he, fortunately, his craft was acting and he was making a boatload of money that he could have a Porsche. He could afford a, not one Porsche, but two Porsches or Lotus or anything that he wanted.

A lot of people think, well, He was just in it for, you know, the publicity. Now he was serious. I think that he could have been a better driver if he had more seat time. As I mentioned, he [00:39:00] was busy filming. He missed a lot of races, and some of his competitors had raced and they were getting better than he was because they knew the tracks.

The first time you’re learning the second time, you have a little bit more confidence when you race. I’ve learned that over the years. Do any other actors attribute their passion for racing to James Dean? You already mentioned Steve McQueen, but they came up at the same time. I’m thinking of people like maybe Paul Newman or others that have gone down the same path.

Do they ever credit James Dean to that, or did they come to it on their own? Excellent question. I had the good fortune to meet Paul Newman at Seabra in 1977. I was crewing for a very famous baltimorean by the name of Bruce Jennings who had the nickname of King Carrera and we were competing in the EMSA series.

Under, uh, G T U, the smaller ccs. Paul Newman came to Seabra as a co-driver for Bill Freeman in Beverly Hills, Porsche. They [00:40:00] also had a G T U car, and Paul had never driven at night. And so Bruce Jennings. Offered to give him a chalk talk at night. Paul Newman came with the popcorn and we sat down and I got to listen.

And Bruce said, you know, you may think there aren’t any markers at night, but there are, and I’m gonna point ’em out to you and you’re gonna need these markers for breaking and for turning. And it really helped Paul Newman. So I got to meet Paul. And Paul always said, you know, I raced Seing once and I didn’t wanna race it again.

It was a race that I loved to hate cause it was so difficult. And of course, Bruce Jennings had been racing it for umpteen years. Had once finished third overall in 1962 in a rs uh, 61. I got to know Paul Newman over the years and I would see him at Limerock at some of the vintage racing. I actually raced against him in a race.

He was racing a brumos knife. 14 six, I was on the pole. I was probably qualified 15th or 16th to the 3 56 coop. And by lap six. I saw him coming [00:41:00] around the corner in my mirrors. He was gonna lap me and I just pulled over to the right, pointed out to the left and let him pass. And my biggest thrill was that he took his hand off that steering wheel and gave me a huge wave.

Oh, that’s awesome. And I wish that I could have recorded it, but I got to interview Paul Newman in 2004 because he had driven his first Porsche in a movie called Harper. And it was an old clapped out speedster. And he told me that was the first time that he had had Porsche. Since that time he had bought many Porsches, cuz he loved that car so much.

But I asked him, I said, you know, you competed against James Dean for roles and James Dean won, you know, and they both competed for Rebel without a cause and also for, uh, east of Eden. And I said, did you ever talk about cars? He said, Lee, cars were the furthest thing. From my mind, I was never ever concerned about racing cars.

I had never seen a car race, you know, on the East coast or the West coast. And I knew that James Dean, you know, was really a [00:42:00] Motorhead, but I wasn’t. It’s something that he picked up. Coincidentally, he went to Limerock Park and a friend of his said, why don’t you take the 3 56 around? And he got the bug. He loved it.

And he had just such a natural eye hand coordination. He was a tremendous driver. And starting at the age of 50, which is incredible, most people were retiring at the age of 50. Exactly, exactly. Steve McQueen, on the other hand, was also a motor head, mostly on motor bikes, and was really tenacious and fearless.

But he didn’t have the money to get into racing until he became more successful. So let’s get back to the James Dean story. Let’s get back to this late summer, early fall, 1955, and pick up the story from there. And let’s unfortunately get into the, his tragic demise, right? The crash itself. Well, I had mentioned that he missed a lot of racing, a lot of seat time.

And he said to this mechanic, I need a faster car. I need a faster car. Well, the guys he was competing against, and they were the [00:43:00] same people at most races, more people were buying Porsches and they were beating James Dean because they were familiar with the track. I think that James Dean was not a Phil Hill or a Sterling Moss.

I think that he was tenacious, he was passionate about racing, but his goal was to put. The pedal to the metal and he really lacked the nuances of, you know, how to approach the apex of a turn, when to break, when to accelerate, uh, wind to shift. I think that he just tried to race as fast as he could, and there wasn’t a race that he was in where he didn’t have some metal to metal contact with somebody.

He was seriously myopic. He needed glasses. He couldn’t drive without his glasses. I am too, when I raced, I wore contact lenses for the sole reason that when I wore my glasses, I had no lateral vision, so I couldn’t see a car that was coming up on either side of me. I was really at a disadvantage, as would a lot of [00:44:00] people, so that’s something that I’ve analyzed about James Dean, that his.

Lack of clear vision or being 2020 was a deterrent to his racing. So James Dean wanted a faster car. I mentioned that he tried to buy the Lotus, which would’ve been a sports racer, but he was lucky enough to get the five 50. It’s interesting, someone asked me, well, how did this five 50 qualify on the street?

It was a race car, wasn’t it? I said, yep, it was aluminum and it weighed 1300 pounds, but it had lights, it had a horn, it had turn signals. It did not have windshield wipers cuz it had a plexiglass windshield. But other than that, it was a street car. And of course, The reason it had headlights was because Porsche was using this for night racing as well, for the endurance racing, so it made sense in California.

This car qualified, it was Streetable, so he got a license on it. He had nine days from the time he bought it on September 21st to get this car [00:45:00] prepared for the race at Salinas. The plan was that they would put it on a rented trailer. He didn’t own a trailer, although he is having one made. It wasn’t finished yet.

Ralph Wirick got him a trailer from another cow club racer. They borrowed the trailer to axle trailer. James Dean had bought a Ford Station wagon as his tow vehicle. So it had a hitch on it. They realized that the car, it needed to be run in, it just didn’t have any miles on it. So James Dean was trying to break it in, but he was also finishing up Giant.

He was like running from Pillar to post, from acting to racing. And they were, they would go at it night, bill Hickman, and he, and they would put a couple a hundred miles on. It wasn’t enough. So they put it on the trailer, that’s the thought, and they’ll tow it. Ralph Wirick, strictly by the book said, no, you’ve, you gotta break this car in you and I will drive it to Salinas and the Ford Station wagon with the empty trailer will follow us.

So that was the scenario. On September 30th of [00:46:00] Friday, James Dean had dropped the car off the night before. Rol Wirick, the mechanic, did the valve clearance, changed the plugs, changed the oil set, the timing, and they were running a little bit behind and Rolf said, I wanna put on safety belts for yield. So he installed safety belts on the driver’s side, but not on the passenger side.

They left about an hour and a half late. They left almost at two o’clock. They headed out Ventura Boulevard. A couple famous shots that were taken by Sanford Roth, who was the photographer that took photos earlier during the day at Competition Motors. It shows a car coming up on James Dean on Ventura, and then passing him.

Stanford Roth took those shots in black and white. These are the only photos that we have. Right before they left competition motors on their way, they stopped at a gas station, the most famous photo, and the last photo of James Dean Alive was taken at a mobile station in Sherman Oaks. Where everybody [00:47:00] filled up their tank.

Sanford Roth did not take that photo. It was in color. It was taken by the mechanic with a Leica 35 millimeter using color film. So the photos that show up in color, there’s three of ’em. Sanford Roth, the photographer didn’t take them. He was shooting black and white. It took me years to figure that out because everybody thought that they came from one camera.

They did not. There was no interstate. So they headed up I 99, which is Saville Boulevard. Went through the grapevine, south of Bakersfield on 99 at a Wheeler Ridge, California Highway. Patrolman was traveling south. They were going north. It was a divided area. He did a yo-yo and followed them, pulled them both over for speeding.

James Dean was ticketed for 10 miles over the limit. Bill Hickman, who was driving the station wagon with the trailer, he also got a ticket because California had a law, maximum 45 with a trailer. So he got, he got busted for [00:48:00] 15 miles over the limit. C h p officer. His name is O V v Hunter, who recently died, has been interviewed over and over again.

I had the good fortune to talk to him many times and he told me about how he pulled him over. He heard the car, he saw the car. There was a curiosity cuz it was a sports car. Hunter was about six two. Spider is 39 inches high from, uh, tire to the, uh, plexi. And he was fascinated by the car. But he left with parting words.

He says, you better slow down or you’re not gonna make it to Salinas. And James Dean said, well, you know, it car’s not running right unless it’s going at least 80 miles an hour. They sort of laughed it off. Anyway, he took the ticket and folded it into thirds, put it into his short pocket. This was at three 30 in the afternoon.

You do the chronology. You can figure out when he left. When he got the ticket, they took the racers road. They did not go through Bakersfield because the racers said, it’s too slow. There’s a traffic signal on every street corner. [00:49:00] Take the racer’s road. You can go as fast as you can. So it was a left. On these two lane highways, it’s about 50, 60 miles.

And they would end up at Blackwell’s Corner, which is at Route 4 66. Blackwell’s Corner was a small coffee restaurant, gas stop back then. And, uh, James Dean, when he pulled in, flagged down Bill Hickman because Hickman didn’t know that he had stopped there. He had actually seen a Mercedes 300 s sl cou, and it belonged to Lance Revent Low and his co-driver was Kessler.

So he knew Revent Lo was going to the races. So they stopped and they chatted for a while, Revent Low, and Bruce Kessler left, I’d say about 10 minutes before James Dean and they agreed to meet at Pasal Robles for dinner a little after six o’clock. So here we are at five o’clock at Blackwell’s Corner.

James Dean told Sanford Roth and Bill Hickman we’re gonna have dinner at six o’clock. They took off it. It basically is a very [00:50:00] interesting stretch of road. It’s the desert, it’s flat. And then it goes through an area called the Polon Pass, and then all of a sudden it shoots down about 45 degrees to the floor of the Shalan Valley.

Today it’s a two lane, three lane highway, but it was a country road, single lane, 22 feet wide, which meant that each lane was about 10 feet wide. And I’ve traveled on it. There’s still remnants of the road. I don’t know that I would have the balls to drive 80, 90 miles an hour down this curvy road, right?

It’s unbelievable. Scary. Really scary, but that’s what James Dean was doing. And as they approached the Shalam Valley down the antelope grade, they passed a Pontiac with two individuals in it, I’d say about a 30 to 45 seconds before the junction of 4 66 and 41. It’s a wide junction at Shalam. The husband said to the wife, boy, look at him.

They were going about 78 miles an hour, and [00:51:00] they figured James Dean was exceeding 85, maybe 90 miles an hour when they passed him. And as they passed the Pontiac, an oncoming car was forced off the road because the road was so narrow. So it’s interesting, James Dean didn’t let up. I think that he came so fast behind this Pontiac that his closing speed was scary.

So scary that he whipped to the left to pass the car. He couldn’t stop. He would’ve run into the car 30 seconds later. There was a horrible accident, a car coming the other way. A 1950 Ford custom that was, had a big engine in it was turning left. In a conventional turn, you would use your turn signal. In those days, you might stick your left hand out horizontally signaling that you were making a left turn.

This driver did not, he cut across the junction at a 45 degree angle, so he crossed over the center line and then all of a sudden he saw an oncoming vehicle. He couldn’t have imagined. This vehicle [00:52:00] 39 inches high. Was traveling at 85 or 90 miles an hour, and it was, and he spiked his brakes to stop. He couldn’t stop, and he went back on the gas and then he realized I’m in trouble.

So he really jammed on his brakes, laying another patch, 30 foot skid. He practically was stopped in the westbound lane. James Dean saw the car, made a racing maneuver, went to the right on the power, no brakes. No brake lights were seen by the witnesses. But in that mid engine Porsche, he lost it. The low center of gravity caught up with him.

The rear end came around counterclockwise, and he hit his left front into the left front of the Ford. That was practically stopped. Dean pushed the Ford 45 feet in the reverse lane, spiraled up 45 degrees and turned over. Actually turned over and landed on its wheels 40 feet westbound. So it was flying in midair as [00:53:00] it rolled over.

Did a barrel roll? All this has been speculated back and forth, but it was the witnesses that said no brake lights, and we saw something fall out of the car as it was turning over. That would be the mechanic Rolfe. He fell out of the car and he’s lucky that the Porsche didn’t land on top of him because he landed about five feet away from where the car was had, and he didn’t have belts, no belt.

The passenger side, James Dean had a belt wast wearing it. So there was some speculation by other witnesses saying, well, no, the person wearing the red shirt, which would be Rolfe, the mechanic he was driving. James Dean was wearing a t-shirt, not a red jacket. That red jacket wasn’t in the car that was at Warner Brothers.

He was wearing a V-neck white T-shirt. This 15 year old witness said no. The man wearing the red was driving. Well, no, he wasn’t driving. The car was upside down so he the right side, became the left side when he saw it. The reason I know all this, despite what everybody [00:54:00] else wants to say, is that James Dean’s left foot got crushed between the clutch and the brake pedal crushed.

He was captive in that car. Ralph flew out. James Dean’s seat broke loose and flew out, and James Dean was stretched, which was not uncommon in a race car accident. Left foot still mangled and crushed between the brake and the clutch. His body was stretched in that little cockpit and he wound up. Hanging over the passenger door.

If it weren’t for the witnesses and if it weren’t for the ambulance driver that had to use a crowbar to extricate him, there could have been more speculation about James Dean letting Roth being the driver. There was no reason for him to be the driver in the first place. That’s speculation. Goes back and forth.

I see it every day despite the fact that I’ve written about it over and over again. That’s part of the myth that he wasn’t driving. I mean, you’ve probably done the math yourself, but have any mathematicians or even scientists sat down with you to say, [00:55:00] okay, a 1300 pound car hitting basically almost a stationary 55 Ford, which probably weighed somewhere in the neighborhood of 3000 plus pounds.

Yeah. To move at 45 feet. Can you back calculate how fast he was going at the time of impact to. Almost triple digits to push a car that heavy that far, it’s like a missile. That speculation has been ongoing for 25 years. As a matter of fact, I’ve been involved in most of these TV documentaries. The interesting thing is they interview me and then I don’t know who they’re interviewing besides, so they went to a company called Failure Analysis around 2005, maybe before then, and they did a lot of computer mockups.

They made several mistakes. First of all, they didn’t get the testimony of Mr. Mrs. Robert White. Directly behind James Dean. It said no brake lights. Somebody fell out of the car. The car veered to the right and it flipped over. They didn’t pay any attention to that. There’s a reason for it. They were going to Portland, Oregon.

There was a [00:56:00] deposition. There was no FedEx back then. The deposition was mailed by postal service. It didn’t show up until after the inquest, so it was never put into the trial, into the inquest. All right, so that’s number one. But it’s readily available. I mean, I, I have it. I’ve used it. I make reference to it.

The second thing is they said that James Dean’s car upon impact turned into a top. It was spinning around, but there are no marks on the ground or, you know, on the, on the road or the ground. If the car was spinning around, there would be impact of all four tires that didn’t exist. And then two witnesses said the car did a barrel roll.

The inertia was 90 degrees up, and then it went over. They said, well, if it’s going faster, You know, he would’ve been a hundred feet down the road. No, the momentum was going up. The inertia was up 1300 pounds in your right. I think the Ford weighed about 2,600 pounds. If you look at the crash photos, you’ll see that the left front wheel was crushed [00:57:00] against the back.

The firewall. It was moved three feet. That’s solid steel. You know, everybody said, oh, well, you know, if James Dean had been wearing a seatbelt, if the car had been made more safer, well, that’s all speculation, but we’re talking about 1955, and this is a race car, right? This is not a passenger car. There were no safety guidelines back then.

I’ve been through this two or three times. There’s been computer analysis every single time, and these people are paid serious dollars for their services. They didn’t do their homework. I’m not saying that they should have talked to me, but they just didn’t do their homework. There were skid marks on the road, but there were other individuals that have come to me and say, look, Lee, this is from a truck.

Look at the, look how wide the skid mark is. You know, it’s not a car skid mark, it’s from other accidents that happened at that intersection, at that junction, rather. Today the state of California Caltran is actually gonna build a ramp over 4 66 is now 46. To avoid the accident of people [00:58:00] turning left that road sees produce trucks hauling ass at 90 miles an hour.

And and matter of fact, when I’m there and I’m looking at the crash site, the biggest thrill for these guys is to honk their horn to let everybody know I know what’s here. It’s James Dean’s crash site. So that brings up a really good point. As you’ve just said, the site itself hasn’t changed much. The surrounding area has, you can go there and see it today with your own eyes and it has a history of incident, it has a history of, of accidents and whatnot.

So it kind of begs the question, when you look at the scenario, whoever engineered that intersection, et cetera, where is fault placed? Is it placed on the Ford or on the Porsche, on James Dean or the other people? And how does it play out? How do you see it? Maybe because I’m a lawyer, maybe because I understand the law, and maybe because I went to the 1955 motor vehicle code, you know, for some answers.

The two California highway patrolmen came. You had a serious accident, you had a fatality. [00:59:00] They had to try and organize what was going on. There were cars. Place was crowded. They needed more help. They didn’t get it. They had an ambulance that took James Dean and the mechanic Ralph to the Paso Robles Hospital.

They tried to sort things out. The C H P officers had never seen a Porsche. They had never seen a race car. They had never seen a damaged race car. They couldn’t figure it out and they’d say, wow, he is going faster than 55. Well, yeah, he’s going faster than 55. Well, here’s what I did. I went to the graphs, I went to the Porsche five 50 books and I looked at the transmission and what gear you had to be in the, the R P M versus the speed.

James Dean was in fourth gear. He hadn’t shifted down the third, you wouldn’t go into fourth gear unless you were going 80 miles an hour and you know, 80 to 125. That was the range of the fourth gear. There weren’t any brake lights. I don’t think he took his foot off the, uh, the gas until, [01:00:00] you know, pr, possibly the impact.

You know, he was clip pretty good because his riding height was the same height as the grill In the headlight of that Ford, he took a huge hit. There was no protection for him. I looked at the speed. Everybody likes to say, oh, it’s not James Dean’s fault. Poor James Dean. Well, they both were speeding.

Donald Turnipseed was a college student under the GI Bill at Cal Poly. Every Friday he was booking home to his pregnant wife and to Laurie, and he’s driving a hot rod, fifties car with, you know, with a big engine. I think that Donald Turnipseed played a game every weekend to see how fast he could get home from A to B.

When he made that left turn, he never slowed down and braked and then made a left turn. He just went diagonally across the roadway cuz he didn’t see anything coming. His attorney said, keep your mouth shut. He did say when I saw him coming, it was too late. Yeah, it was too late, but he didn’t make a decision.

If he had veered over to the [01:01:00] right, they probably would’ve missed each other, but he kept advancing. I think that the California Highway Patrol didn’t understand the dynamics of that crash. I refer to this accident as an unguarded moment for both individuals. There was an in inquest on October 11th.

Donald Turnips was a local boy in a very conservative area. It’s 1955. James Dean was a young actor that bought a $7,000 German car who was carrying a former lu Wafa soldier, not that many years after the war. Yeah. At the inquest, James Dean. This is Lee. The lawyer speaking had no representation. Ralph Wirick was in the hospital, drugged up.

They interviewed him. He didn’t know A from B. When they interviewed him, his testimony should have been thrown out. No one represented James Dean. Donald Turner seemed was represented. The attorney told him to keep his mouth shut. Just say you didn’t see him until it was too late. [01:02:00] There was a jury. They met for less than a half an hour.

They came back. They found no fault of either party. Interesting. If you or I have been driving that forward and made that left turn, failure to yield to an oncoming vehicle, creating a fatality, we would’ve been charged at the least. Donald turn. Epstein should have been charged. With a misdemeanor fatality.

He wasn’t charged at all. Did he come out of the crash Pretty much unscathed. Did the Ford protect him? He had his nose. His nose went against the wheel. He may have broken his nose, that’s all. Okay. The windshield was cracked, so his head may have hit the windshield too. He wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. He’s very lucky.

But you know, that’s a 2,600 pound car. It’s a pretty big car. And you know, incidentally, I’ve never driven a 1950 Ford, but I’ve driven, this is 1954 Ford Sedan. You know, they weren’t known for a lot of stability at 60 miles an hour, making a left turn. He may have been close to [01:03:00] being up on two wheels when he made that turn and he was practically stopped.

So it’s three speed gearbox. He had no torque to get back on the power at that point. Yeah, he was practically stopped at that point. I’ve gone through the accident back and forth, but I have a lot of competition. You know, a lot of people that are Dean fans, they don’t wanna see any blame towards James Dean and he was a victim.

The way I see it is they both were speeding. They both were at fault, but Donald Turnips was more at fault because he caused the fatality. And you mentioned earlier there was this flashpoint in the James Dean story where suddenly you arises myth and legend and, and then we start talking about fact and fiction.

But one of those, Let’s call them tall tales that has grown out of the James Dean ethos is talk about this curse and it’s theorized that James Dean’s death was not his own fault, right? As, as we’re talking about here, but rather that of the car. Uh, some have said that this particular Porsche five 50 spider has its own dark and unsettling past.

They [01:04:00] try to paint this ominous picture. Legends myth and other tall tales surround this story. And some go as far as to say that someone building the five 50 actually died during the construction of the vehicle and his soul haunted the car after its completion at the factory, yada, yada yada, right? The stories go on and on.

The fish was this big, but let’s dive into a little bit of fact versus fiction and unpack. This whole curse story and this whole curse idea, Eric, that’s what keeps us going. There’s no question. I mean, we’re talking about 66 years later. We’re still talking about the curse of James Dean and all these myths.

Well, besides me, there were other famous Motorsport journalists like Matt Stone and Preston Lerner, who you know, have pretty good reputations. They’ve come to the same conclusion I am. We’ve all debunked a lot of the, the curse and the miss. So we have this crash September 30th, 1955. The car is a mess and it’s [01:05:00] towed back to competition motors.

By John von Newman. We have James Dean dead in preparing, you know, for his burial in Fairmont, Indiana. Rol was in the hospital for a couple of weeks. Von Newman made arrangements to have a very famous German surgeon look at him to save his leg. He almost lost his leg because it was so badly twisted.

James Dean is racing against amateur racers. Same guy, same races. And one particular person that he raced against was a doctor. His name was William Ridge, who lived in Burbank, not far from Warner Brothers. Not only was William Ridge, a good orthopedic surgeon, he was a brilliant engineer and he was racing specials that he built himself using, by the way, an offenhauser engine.

In one of ’em. When he heard about the wreck, he said, you know, this is my lucky day. I just bought a a roller, a Lotus from J Chamberlain without an engine. I’m gonna buy that Porsche and I’m gonna put the four [01:06:00] cam engine up front. It’s never been done, but I can do it. And he used an MG transmission in Austin, Healey gearbox, the rear end.

So he bought the car from the insurance company. James Dean’s Solaire was his father. He didn’t have a will, so he was paid off. They gave him about $5,000, maybe a little bit more for the car. The salvage company got hold of the wreck and sold it to William Esri right down the street from where he lived.

He was first up, he bought the car for $1,150. 1,150. What did he get? Practically an undamaged engine transmission was slightly damaged cuz it had been locked in fourth gear. So that needed to be cleaned out. And he bought movable parts. He bought instruments and suspensions and he took what he wanted for his lotus and the rest of it was junk and he gave it to someone that was supposed to take it to the San [01:07:00] Fernando dump.

But somewhere along the way those individuals knew George Barris and George Barris wound up with the carcass, never bought it. Got it for free. George will tell you if you’re still alive cuz he is written about it. I bought the car. No, we didn’t buy the car. William Esri bought it. ESRI created the potus, P O T U S.

Think about that. He should have copyrighted and trademarked the name potus, president of the United States. He named this Lotus the potus, and I have photos of POTUS on the car. It was brilliant. He’s got a four cam engine mounted up front and he’s winning races and he’s racing against who he’s racing against.

Van Newman and Richie Ginther in five 50 s. He’s almost beating them. He races the car. He is got some problems, but he’s sorting it out. In October of 1956, which be a year after James Dean died, they’re racing at Pomona. Which was on the schedule. Pomona was always an October race, and he’s racing the potus.

[01:08:00] Previous to the race, he gave some parts to his orthopedic friend, Dr. Troy McHenry, who also had a five 50. But McHenry wasn’t as accomplished as Dr. Esri wasn’t gonna, uh, driver. They’re both competitive, good friends, but competitive. But down deep inside, sh Troy Henry wanted to beat him. So he decided he had an accident at Paramount Ranch before Pomona.

He decided he’s gonna lighten up his Porsche, which was 1300 pounds. He’s gonna make it a thousand pounds. He’s gonna remove some of the steel and some of the aluminum. He’s gonna substitute that with fiberglass. What he created was a loosey-goosey car, no stability. Everyone likes to say, well, he’s got suspension parts, he’s got the transmission, he’s got this and that.

From James Dean’s car in his car. No, he did not have any of those parts. He may have had ’em in his garage, but they weren’t on the car. This is something I’ve been battling for years and years and years. How can I prove it? Well, I, I couldn’t interview to McHenry, but I interviewed plenty of people that [01:09:00] knew that.

Isn’t it extra challenging though? Because the Germans, unlike the Americans, you know, we have the fabled numbers matching cars, right? The numbers matching system. Yeah. The Germans back then, they didn’t serialize everything to the vehicle the way the Americans did. So doesn’t it make it harder to track down what part belonged to which car and all that?

Yes and no. Trailing arms. Yes. Transmission? No, because on the Card X, we know the transmission number of the five 50. Troy McHenry didn’t have it on his car. After he died, they disposed of the car. It went one direction. The other parts went another eraser by the name of Al Cabi and also a good mechanic.

Got hold of the transmission, opened it up, fixed the fourth gear that was stuck. See, that’s another thing. That transmission wasn’t gonna work in anybody’s car until it got fixed. It was stuck by the accident. Cabi fixed it, kept it for a while, didn’t use it. It was sold to a person by the name of [01:10:00] Ned Mc, a Porsche guy near San Francisco, who then sold it to another Porsche file by the name of Jim Barrington, who lived in Piedmont just north of Berkeley.

Barrington never used it. And when I was writing about James Dean in the eighties, Barrington got hold of me and said, I got something of interest for you. He sends me this photo of the transmission resting on some old tires under his front porch. No, not Porsche, but porch, his front porch up close. He took a photo of the serial number, which matched my Cardex.

Jim Barrington owned James Dean’s transmission, and he had three disassembled five 50 s that were for sale. He sent me a copy. If I had had a spare $14,000, I could have bought one. I just bought a speedster for $6,000 and that was all I could afford. He had three disassembled cars. One car was 5 5 0 0 2 [01:11:00] 9.

Didn’t mean anything to me. Then it wasn’t until decades later that I realized it was Troy McHenry’s car. Oh wow. Troy McHenry’s car. He had all cobbled up. So what goes around comes around. It’s really amazing. Okay. Troy McHenry dies. Didn’t die because of James Dean Sparks. A lot of people say, well, he was cursed.

He died. No. What happened was he was in a hurry, had taken off these parts. He was fiberglass in the car. He had an accident before he needed to have a new Volkswagen steering arm put in, and he was putting it in right before the race. In a Porsche 3 56 Porsche, you have two halves with a coupler and four bolts that holds the coupler together for steering.

Original was a Volkswagen part, then it became a Pittman part. This was pre Pittman. He was putting it together. He put the four bolts in. But what did he forget to put on the four nuts on lap two, he’s in third place. Estridge is in front of him, and Richie Ginther driving by [01:12:00] Newman’s car is in first. I have actual footage of this.

He’s coming along and what I didn’t know was he’s waving furiously at his pick crew that something’s wrong and he’s pointing, but nobody knows what’s going wrong. Well, about 15 seconds, 20 seconds, 30 seconds later, he lost his steering and he drove directly into a tree. And killed himself. How do I know this?

I interviewed a guy by the name of Al Moss who was already in his eighties. He’s the one that created Moss Motors, the famous aftermarket British, yeah. Parts in California. Moss was on the supervisory team, or the judging team. I guess it was the, um, like a commission. If you did something wrong, you had to, you had to meet with them.

The bottom line is he inspected the car. He saw the nuts and the bolts were missing. The two halves weren’t even joined when he saw it, cuz they completely fallen apart. How freaky is that? If somebody was in so much of a hurry? I once forgot to tighten my lug nuts and I’m driving down the [01:13:00] road about one block and I realized either I have a flat tire or my right wheel’s gonna come off.

We’ve all made mistakes like that. He made a fatal mistake. That part of the curse I’ve dismissed. He wasn’t killed because of James Dean at all. A lot of people would like to say was, so George Baris has this carcass. He said that he’s gonna rebuild it, but that was a hercule task. He could never do that.

So what he did was he cut off all the cobbled mess, the crumbled mess, and he took sheet metal and he welded it on. And Dean Jeffries told me that he saw some of George Baris men with two by fours smacking the aluminum to simulate the closest thing to an accident. So if you look at photos of the car, that’s really crashed, and then the cars that went on display with the National Safety Council, they’re not even related.

So George Baris is making money doing this. George Barris also makes money by sending his hot rods on a tour. He had a circus tour of cars in [01:14:00] 1960 in Baltimore. I went to the Baltimore Auto Show. Okay, and what did I see? The little bastard over in the corner and nobody was paying any attention to it.

They all wanted to see the Fords and the Chevy Dragsters, the 4 0 6 and the 4 0 9 s in all the hot rods. Nobody cared about James Dean’s car anymore. Nobody knew what it was. It was traveled around. It was on a dolly, it was on a skid, you know, couldn’t even roll it. And it went from show to show to show.

So I’ve got all these advertisements through the fifties photos. In my book, I’ve shown the chronology of how this car was displayed. And then you can see things are coming off the car. It has tires. It doesn’t have tires. It’s got a front end. It doesn’t have a front end. It completely changed it around if things were missing.

After a while, it was just a piece of junk and nobody wanted to see it. My speculation, Eric, is that the music culture of the sixties brought on the demise of this car. Why? Well, it was [01:15:00] being advertised as Speed kills. Mm-hmm. You speed, you die. Here’s James Dean’s last sports card. That’s how it was advertised.

By 1960, the Beach Boys and the Hons and Jan and Dean were saying, no. Faster, faster, faster. The music culture took over, dragsters took over, and James Dean wasn’t important anymore. And going into the seventies, I can’t picture James Dean wearing a flowered shirt and bell-bottom pants. Which actually brings up a really great question that I’ve been thinking about the entire time.

Had James Dean not selected a Porsche, had he selected, let’s say a Corvette, right? Because the C1 Corvette came out in early 1953, late 1952, would Chevy have benefited the same way Porsche did? Would it have made the same impact? Obviously it changes the whole equation about the accident and all of it, but would it have painted a different picture?

Would he be the James Dean that we know of if he was driving a Corvette, or does the Porsche just really fit his [01:16:00] story more than anything else? Without the Porsche, we don’t have a story. I’ve said this a long time ago. If the Porsche had been on the trailer, we wouldn’t have a story. Two Fords would’ve come together and James Dean might not have been killed.

Here’s the interesting thing, 1955 Corvette had been out for, what, two years? Fifty three, fifty four, fifty five. I don’t recall actually seeing a Corvette racing until the later fifties. I know that they did race. I know they raced at Sebring. The Corvette didn’t handle very well. The brakes were insufficient, the tires were insufficient.

The suspension, the all the programs that I have from California, the time James Dean Race, I never saw a Corvette listed in the program. So let’s put that aside. If James Dean had been driving something other than a Porsche, he might have been driving an Austin Healy or a Triumph. Most of the current generation has no clue what an Austin Healy and a Triumph are.

Right. Here’s the thing. He was killed in a Porsche. Porsche came down on John [01:17:00] von Newman. They would’ve liked to cut his head off. They were so I was gonna ask, humiliated, embarrassed that he sold a car and someone was killed in it. Nine days later, recklessly. They wouldn’t talk to John von Newman. They were so angry at him, and Porsche didn’t mention his name.

Ever until the boxer came along in 1993. Mm-hmm. Created in 19, actually, 19 89, 19 93. It was shown at the Detroit Car Show. Auto Show. Yep. And went into production in 1997, and when they finally mentioned James Dean, and they came out with a anniversary special, but it wasn’t painted silver with a red interior.

The prototype was, but the anniversary special, they made 1,954 of ’em. That was the first year of the spider. That’s when they started to compare the spider to the boxer. Ner saved them from going bankrupt. Mm-hmm. It’s the first time they mentioned James Dean. I have the ad. I have the [01:18:00] ad that they came out with.

They really didn’t mention it until 1997. They were humiliated. There wasn’t any mention of James Dean in the museum, and when they did mention him, they had Donald turnip scene driving a Studebaker. Somebody told me that in the museum and I sent ’em a letter and I said, you’re way off. Porsche almost got to be a partner with Stude Baker in 1953.

They were gonna make a sports coop, but that fell through, but they were just so far off. To answer your question, it’s the Porsche that is so important, the Porsche that keeps this legacy going. Why? Because everybody wants to have a Porsche or a Porsche, depending on how you wanna pronounce it. One syllable or two.

The closest thing is to the Boxster. It’s a real Roadster. It’s a two seater. It looks like a five 50. The generation today, they can equate the boxer to James Dean closer than a 3 56. They don’t really talk so much about the speedster. They don’t really dunno too much about it. And you know, that’s [01:19:00] funny because I associate more with the speedster than I do with the five 50.

I always kind of forget about it because your point is it, it is so limited number. Granted, I have a five 50 model here in my office amongst all my models, and it sits next to a 3 56 speedster next to a 19 89, 9 11 speedster, right? Yeah. I put all three together and going back, I guess in my formative years too, looking at shows like Beverly Hills 9 0 2 oh, where they painted this modern picture of James Dean in the character of Dylan driving a black speedster.

My brain always goes there first, and because look to your point, he only spent. Less than two weeks with that five 50 for me, it, it just never clicked that the five 50 was Dean’s car, except for that was the car that he was killed in. I always thought that the fa the legacy came from the speedster. And what I’m about to tell you, and you’re one of the first to hear this, is that James Dean Speedster went missing for five decades.

Really? Yeah. I’ve written about it in my book. Uh, Lou Bracker, his [01:20:00] best friend, traded his normal in for James. Dean Speedster raced it a few times, and then it was sold to someone in Hollywood around the Hollywood area. He took it to Portland, Oregon traded it. They didn’t believe that it was James Dean Speedster.

They called the California Motor Vehicles and they said, here’s the number. Can you verify this M V A sent Union Porsche in Portland, A telegram that said, first owner James Byron Dean, second owner, Lou Bracker. Third owner is this man named Jenner, and then Jenner traded the car at. Now the car has been, it’s a race car now.

No bumpers, no top, you know, got a roll bar at it. It went through several other individuals, and then it was parked in somebody’s backyard in Portland, Oregon with a tarp over it for about 20 years. Now, when they lifted the tarp, you know what they saw? Moss a mess. Yeah, [01:21:00] rusted. It was rusted in half and it was sold and it went to the uk.

It was just a mess. Nobody could make this a car. Again. It was sold to someone in France who had it for about 10 years, and he finally sold it to someone in Eastern Europe who collected PREA car, but it never owned a speedster, and he bought it as a parts car. And then one day, three years ago, his girlfriend gave him a book called James Dean at Speed by Lee Raskin, which had the VIN number in it, 80 0 1 26.

And he said, my God, my God, I own this car. The car is in Eastern Europe. It’s been restored. It’s about to make it debut. There are some legal problems in the registration because someone decided to make a bogus. Speedster with a fake Vin vin. So there’s two VINs with the same number. No kidding. But I’ve spent the last two years working with this person, working with France, working with Italy.

It’s a long story. It’s gonna be in my new book, but James Dean Speedster is [01:22:00] alive and well, it’s gonna make a debut pretty soon. That’s awesome. And you know, that’s actually a great segue to talk more about your research, where you’ll be appearing, you know, other shows, podcasts, books that you’ve written.

So let’s expand upon that for a moment before we get into our closing thoughts. I was encouraged after writing articles. Other people were writing books. They were paying me for, you know, my content, my archives. You know, some of my friends said, you know, Lee, you can do the book. You know you’re much better than these people.

You know more. And I did. I wrote the book. I went to David Bull, who was a great publisher, and we worked together and we came out with James Dean at Speed in 2005. Prior to that, I had worked with Chuck Stoddard, Jim Parin, Don Zing, Steve Heinrich. We put together a wonderful book called Porsche Speedster.

Type five 40 Quintessential Sports Car. That book today, if you go on eBay, the top end, you might find it for $2,000. Maybe you can buy it for three 50. Very rare book. It is the [01:23:00] epitome of what went into the speedster. Got all the great stuff from Dr. Porsche. Terry Porsche, max Huffman’s got a lot of original archival detail.

I wrote about the celebrities. James Dean, Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, Richard Boone, Paladin. He had a Porsche, few other people, so, but others wrote about how the speedster was created. From there, that was my springboard, and I wrote about James Dean at speed. I ended it at the accident on September 30th. I always knew that I wanted to do something else.

10 years later for the 60th anniversary I did James Dean on the road to Salinas, and I really got into heavy detail about the ownership and the accident, the inquest, the myth facts versus fiction. It’s full of attribution. It’s really good stuff. And now 10 years later, I decided to do James Dean and the 3 56 speed steer because I knew the Speecher was out there.

So we cover a lot of what I’ve written about before, but we cover the [01:24:00] restoration of this car, finding the car. Porsche has never given up on speed steer. I mean, they, they’ve made five new variants since the 55 speed steer. You know, all of a sudden in 59 they decided, you know what? We’re not gonna make this speech stir anymore.

They made the convertible deed cuz people were complaining. Not enough creature comforts. They put roller wind roll up windows. They convert nice convertible top, but the speedster or that or that body stopped in 1959 when I bought my speedster. Nobody really cared too much about it. It was a stripped down car.

A lot of ’em were raised. I bought mine for $5,000. A friend of mine’s father passed away. He’s got it on. Bring a trailer today. The last I looked at it, it was 190,000. It’s probably gonna sell for two 50. Car that I bought for 6,000 is worth $250,000. Imagine that. It’s crazy, isn’t it? Insane. Insane. Crazy.

You may have seen my speedster. I showed it, you know, in Porsche Club for years and years and years, and took them best in show. And then someone came along with a, a good [01:25:00] friend of mine, had a little nicer speedster. And, you know, I started finishing second, but I had this car for 35 years. A wonderful car.

I rarely drove it. It only had 4,000 miles. And with my hands on the steering wheel just didn’t drive it very much. I was afraid to drive it. In addition to the books, you’ve been recently on a bunch of podcasts and you’ve been on the History Channel. Do you wanna talk about those as well, where people could find more parts of this story at other places you’ve been quote unquote published?

I always wanted to put this James Dean thing down, but it’s impossible. Every day there’s something on the Nets. I get phone calls or I get an email. So I love doing the podcast. Like I, I get to tell the story. So I’ve done like three or four of ’em. They get better and better and better. Next week I’ll be going to New York to be interviewed, just like you’re interviewing me about the curse.

It’s gonna be for William Shatner’s. Episode series called The Unexplained and uh, by the History Channel. It’s exciting. I’m very excited about it. I’ve done a lot of TV documentaries. [01:26:00] Each one believes that it’s gonna be the best ever. Some of them are better than others. I decided it’s about the budget.

It’s about how much money you have. And who you can interview and where you can interview. There are new facts that I have that I haven’t shared yet. They’ll be in my coming book. There’s always something that pops up. I just saw something the other day. Somebody sent me an email. I’m not gonna mention your name, but he’s published books about restoration of Porsches.

He got an email from someone in Germany that has a steering wheel who says Roth WoodWick. The mechanic gave his father the steering wheel. It’s a spider steering wheel. It’s fairly rare. It’s probably worth about 10 grand, but that’s just popped up. All these things just pop up. There’s always somebody, you know, James Dean’s glasses have never been found.

These are his glasses. I’m wearing his glasses. These are his frames. They’ve been duplicated. I wear ’em. I don’t think I’m James Dean when I put ’em on or take ’em off, but his glasses [01:27:00] were OB obliterated in the accident. So every time I’m at the accident site, I’m sort of pawing the ground looking for the glasses.

They’re out there somewhere. Well, he had a pair of racing goggles that I have photos of that he wore. Over his glasses at Palm Springs. I spoke to his friend Lou Bracker. They said they both bought ’em. They came with three interchangeable lenses. One was real dark, one was amber, and one was clear at the accident site.

One of the witnesses saw the glasses on the ground, made mention of it in his testimony. About two years ago, I was contacted by someone at Blackwell’s Coroner, the person that owns it, saying that this woman came in saying that her mother was at the accident site, picked up a hubcap that belonged to the Porsche, which is not true cuz the Porsche didn’t have a hubcap.

Right? The Ford did, and her husband said, don’t touch that. It’s an accident scene. She picked up the goggles and she put ’em in her pocketbook and took ’em home. And kept them and died. [01:28:00] She told her daughter there, James Dean’s goggles, racing goggles. The daughter sold them to the owner of Blackwell’s Corner and they’re on display there.

I haven’t been offered, but at some point I’m gonna ask the owner if he’ll let me try ’em on. Now, I am not afraid of any curse. I’m not afraid that when I put those goggles over my eyes that I’m gonna die. I might even see better. I don’t know. But isn’t that amazing? Two years ago, three years ago, these goggles pop up 60 years later after his death.

So there’s always something that happens and there’s always something to write about. That’s the most amazing thing. Somebody’s always coming to me. I can’t give it up. Here’s the most amazing thing is that we are probably in the midst now of trying to make a film using a CGI character of James Dean. A James Dean two oh.

To create him digitally. I would be used as the consultant for his mannerisms. Oh, that’s cool. [01:29:00] And I’ve been involved in the script. It, it can go two ways. It can be James Dean revisiting who he was, or it can be about James Dean, the artistic genius that I believe that he is and be a completely new venture.

And it would be good for this gen new generation to see that this person, this was compassionate, he was artistic, could have been, you know, somebody really important down the road. And that’s what I would like to see in a film. So there’s a lot going on right now. Let’s close out with one thought and it’s, I think it’s an overarching thought on this entire story.

In the end, it’s really important that we highlight. The most important aspect of the James Dean story, which is safety. A lot of engineering and thought has gone into vehicle design since 1955, keeping drivers and passengers as safe as possible on the roads. There’s also been a lot of advocates for this, both on the commercial side, from folks like Koka on the racing side, from folks like Sir Jackie Stewart pushing the boundaries [01:30:00] to make racing and driving safer even more.

Research has gone into racing cars right into motorsports. A lot of people don’t realize that what happens in the motorsports world does trickle its way down into passenger cars. It takes several years to get there, but those advancements in racing have helped to keep other folks up to their old age and continue to be these heroes rather than dying because of faulty equipment or reckless ment or whatever it might be.

So I just wanna remind people that safety is paramount. We talk about racing and how glamorous it is, and, and, and on this show episode after episode, The overarching thing is that there’s positives to even tragic stories like James Dean’s. I think it’s a, a significant point, something that I have thought about.

I see a lot of commentary. Someone will write a story, you know, it could be Esquire, could be, uh, just some kind of motorsport rag shows up on, um, you know, on the internet. And then you have 200 comments. The comments go from thoughtful to the absurd. The [01:31:00] thoughtful ones are usually from individuals that know a little bit about James Dean and what happened.

The absurd are from individuals that speculate or just talk about hearsay. The safety aspect I hear a lot, well, he could have survived if he had been wearing his seatbelt if he hadn’t been driving so fast. Those ifs exist in just about every incident where I live in Mar, in Maryland and most other states, seatbelt is mandatory.

You get fined if you don’t have a seatbelt on. I raced for 25 years with a six point belt, with a snail helmet that had to be replaced every five or six years, and belts as well. You don’t replace ’em, you don’t get the race with no max clothing and shoes and socks and when it’s 90 degrees out, I don’t mind telling you and you probably know it’s uncomfortable, that’s for sure.

I’ve been involved in a couple of incidents. Fortunately they were my own incidents, you know, spinning out, going down a track backwards into an armco. [01:32:00] Not a lot of fun. I was never injured or hurt or anything. Car was damaged. That’s spirit of racing. But I’ve also seen fatalities in amateur racing at Summit Point at Sebring.

Uh, you know, have I been upside down in a car? Yes, once, but I would never, ever think about racing without the right equipment because I know what the dangers are. 1955 versus 2022. We’ve come a long way. We wear seat belts, we have airbags, we have additional structure in our door panels, energy absorbing parts.

We have better brakes, electronics that warn you of faults, tire pressure, brakes, whatever. A lot of this has been developed for racing, as you say, and it does trickle down and it’s expensive, so it has to be incorporated into a car, and that’s why cars are selling on an average of 40 to $50,000 a piece because of the expense.

When I interviewed some of the racers from James Dean’s error that [01:33:00] raced Cal Club or S E C A, they told me that there were deaths all the time. Why before 1961 there were no roll bars and when they had roll bars, they were square roll bars. They weren’t roll bars with, you had to have something there.

Now the roll bar’s gotta be inspected. It’s gotta be up to spec. It’s gotta be specked. I would never cheat on safety if this is what I had to wear. This is what I had to wear. If it was 90 degrees and I was sweating and I had a mustache and I had to wear a balaclava, well, that’s the way it is. Cut your mustache off and it’s one less thing you wear.

Why? Well, because it’s gonna save you. If there’s a fire, I had a fire bottle and press the button and hopefully it worked. Fuel cell, of course, Rogers like to say, oh, James Dean died in a fiery crash. No fire. Did he have a full tank of gas? No, he did not gas up at Blackwell’s Corner, there’s a reason for it.

He gassed up at the mobile station on Ventura Boulevard. He got free gas mobile, gave away free gas if you wore their Pegasus, and James Dean [01:34:00] wore it proudly. Mobile gave away free gas at the races. So you gassed up when you got there and before you left you gassed up. So James Dean had probably less than an eighth of a tank of gas when the car crashed.

Probably was a savior for him of not having a fire. The gas tank didn’t rupture, but he had very little gas in there, so if he had full tank of gas, it may have come out and exploded. Anyway, we don’t know about that, but that’s another reason why we race with fuel cells because gasoline has killed more drivers.

Fires have killed more drivers, you know, in the forties and fifties and sixties. Famous drivers. I see a lot of conjecture about what if, what if Porsche has capitalized on James Dean’s accident and the accidents of hundreds of other racers. They’ve made safer cars. If you have a fiberglass car, you know, whether it’s a Corvette or a Lotus, you may have a problem.

You don’t have the integrity. And I’ve seen these cars come apart in races. You know, all that’s left is the frame. [01:35:00] So yeah, I think there are more injuries, you know, that can happen in a fiberglass car, but I think racing in general has improved. Look at nascar. I mean, it’s all structural. It’s just a facade around a, you know, a steel structure.

It’s as safe as you can get. Dale Earnhardt’s death freak accident. He wasn’t going that fast. He just, you know, he just hit it head on. It was just a trauma. And there may have been some problems with the seatbelt, you know, there were some speculation on that. Um, but as a result, we all wear Hans devices or equivalents now because of that.

That was point, yeah. I forgot about the device. Exactly. That’s something that’s not a comfortable thing to wear. Oh geez. Tell me about it. And look at the expense. See, a lot of people look at the expense. Look at this expense. They gotta buy a new, you know how many helmets I have? I’m sure you do too. I have a big collection of helmets.

They’re barely worn. But they’re worth every penny though. At the end of the day, they are actually, my first helmet is actually like a Steve McQueen bell helmet. Oh wow. The exact same helmet, you know, with the little visor. The funny thing is it’s all fryable. Everything inside is just all junk. You [01:36:00] know?

It didn’t, it didn’t hold up. Whether it’s the humidity or condensation, I don’t know, but that’s the life of a helmet. And then I would see some drivers that would get pissed off and they would throw their helmet down and you know what? Probably cracked and they were still gonna wear it, you know, the next race.

That wasn’t a good thing to do. Yeah. Safety’s really important and I think Porsche has really capitalized in other manufacturer of capitalized, and we don’t really appreciate that for a reason, because we don’t think anything’s ever gonna happen to us. We don’t think our car is going to have a flat tire and roll over.

But it does happen. If you’re going in 85 or 90 miles an hour and you have a blowout, it’s hard to control. And that can happen on the street as well as on the race track. So anything, anything can happen. Exactly. I’ve seen this ad James Dean would’ve lived if he was driving a new Porsche, something, something similar, silly, and similar to that, I’ve seen that on the internet.

Well, that’s pure bunk. There’s no comparison. It’s apples and oranges. If you think about it, he was driving the newest Porsche of the time. That was the cutting edge car at that moment. It makes no sense. It’s [01:37:00] complete bunk. Getting down to the accident, and I’ve said this over and over again, and I actually borrowed this from Jim Barrington.

The accident at the Shalem junction between two individuals that were in a hurry to go somewhere was an unguarded moment. Just to wrap that whole thought up there before we close out, I mentioned earlier, you know, would James Dean, his life. Been different had he chosen a Corvette or chosen, like you said, an Austin or a Lotus or something else.

Right. I would’ve changed probably the whole course of what we’re talking about. But in the case of the accident, if you replaced the five 50 with a 3 56, like a coop or even his speedster, I know that they couldn’t go as fast as the five 50. They were heavier. But would the outcome of the accident been any different had he been in his speedster versus the five 50?

I know it’s total conjecture, total speculation, but just your thoughts on that. Well, I think the structure of the 3 56 would’ve been, uh, more of a preventive vehicle in terms of being hurt cuz it had [01:38:00] structure. Look, the Porsche was only 39 inches high and I have a nice photo of the so replica Porsche next to the Ford custom 39 inches high and it, the forms twice as tall.

What was, how tall was the 3 56 in comparison to the five 50? 3 56 is about five feet high. The speedster would be, um, probably about 45 inches high. You know, the speedster didn’t have a lot of protection either. The doors were very light. The 3 56 COU had the structure because it, you know, it had a top and a frame.

The doorframe and the door was heavier. I, I think that what we’re really talking about, we’re talking about the Ford, which was really a tank. Yeah, exactly. And so whatever ran against it, you know, there could be some damage, but. He goes to show you Donald Turnips. He wasn’t hurt. He had a bruised nose. His head hit the windshield, his nose hit the steering wheel.

Pretty well protected, but James Dean had no protection. Whether it was James Dean or Joe Blow, there probably would’ve been a serious injury or if not a fatality. [01:39:00] Here’s what I’d like to address. James Dean was 24. If this hadn’t have happened, if James Dean had zagged rather than zigged. In other words, James Dean went to the right as an instinct cuz he saw more roadway.

You know, he thought he could get by, but he lost it. The car came around. If he had gone to the left, he probably would’ve missed Donald Turnips, but he may have run into the car that was behind Donald. He had on. Who knows. It’s a millisecond. I think about this all the time. What did Donald Turnipseed see?

He saw a car coming. He had no idea that the car was moving at 85 or 90 miles an hour. No, the average person couldn’t comprehend that. A small sports car like that, they had never seen that before. I’ve been in accidents before. How do they happen? Boom. You’re lucky if you see it happening. Most people don’t.

It just happens. I see these videos on, um, you know, on my phone all the time. Accidents where they have a camera in the car and truckers and all these crazy accidents, and you hope that doesn’t happen to you. You hope that you’re not there. You’re really terrible. Most of ’em are in [01:40:00] Europe, but I see ’em here too.

What I’d like to talk about is that if James Dean had lived, if there hadn’t been an accident, he had raced and he got through that. I think that James Dean may have had an accident somewhere else, a different time. I think that James Dean was driving over his head. In a car that he really didn’t have any knowledge of.

He needed more seat time in that car. Most of the drivers say that that car was over his head, he wasn’t ready for it. And I think that’s part of the moral of the story. That was a point I was gonna drive home. That safety is always paramount, but we talk about it several times on this show and in various different guys guise and episodes where the number one mod you should make to any car is actually seat time before you do anything else.

Yeah. Learn to drive that car before you modify it or before whatever, because you never wanna have a car be beyond your limit and you need to grow into those vehicles. But again, this car was new to him. He was only nine days into it. And come to think of how many other mid-engine vehicles [01:41:00] there were out there, he was a bit of a pioneer.

There weren’t too many that were, you know, road legal, no. That were just out there and about. So it was all new territory. But unfortunately he was taken away. Too soon. And, and it makes it a sad and tragic story. So, you know, as we’re talking about this and, and closing out, who knows what his racing career could have been like had he made it to that race in Salinas the next day?

Would he have won? Would he have given up on acting altogether and jumped headfirst into racing for the rest of his career? Who knows? Many other actors have flirted with racing names like Steve McQueen, you mentioned Patrick Sey. Michael Fastbender. Paul Newman, which we talked about just to name a few.

Allegedly James Dean’s dream was to compete in the Indy 500. Had the crash not happened, maybe we wouldn’t be speaking about James Dean, the actor, but rather James Dean, the Indy 500 winner. Unfortunately, we’ll never know. All we do know is that a young and talented life was taken from us way too soon.

And the Motorsports history books are at a [01:42:00] loss without them or are they? Because Lee has been filling in the gaps. I agree with you, and I’ve written about this just recently. Unfortunately, the James Dean story usually ends with his tragic death. I see James Dean as an artistic genius. I think that he was, he was interested in photography, directing.

I think that he was a superb actor. He really understood the method acting, and I think that he was well ahead of his time in terms of racing. I would’ve hoped that, you know, he would’ve been successful with the five 50 I. Perhaps he would’ve realized that Salinas, that he wasn’t gonna be a winner, that he needed more time to be more patient.

I would’ve hoped that that would’ve happened. It didn’t happen. The one thing that I’ve come away with recently is that James Dean, as an actor slash racer, was really the first celebrity for Porsche to have won to been on the podium, back to back races. Despite what a lot of [01:43:00] people thought would be grandstanding or for publicity, he was the real deal and he really did promote, despite his death in a Porsche, he really has promoted the.

The spirit and the legacy of Porsche’s racing by what he accomplished in the months of, uh, March through May of 1955. He was a pioneer and he was successful at it, and you can’t take that away. And that’s something that I’d like to promote a little bit more in, especially now since we have found his speed speedster.

And hopefully we can bring that car over from Europe and we can bring it to, you know, Amelia Island or some Porsche events and people can actually see what the car was like. It’s been put back, it’s completely authentic. Now, I, I wouldn’t say that it’s a monument, but it’s certainly a tribute to James Dean and what he accomplished, and I would hope that Porsche, you know, will finally recognize that.

And get on board where, where I’m headed. I hope that they will. So Lee, I can’t thank you enough for [01:44:00] coming on the show. This has been fantastic. This has been an education and this is yet another story in the corners and the depths of motorsport where it ties us all together. It brings us together and it gets us thinking, right?

And this is why we enjoy doing these types of episodes with folks like yourself to remind us that there’s more than just turning laps when we talk about the motorsports world. So thank you. I wanna thank you. It was good seeing you again. And I wanna thank you for, um, your energy and your energy brought out.

You know, my enthusiasm, I love talking about this. I think that, uh, there’s a generation out there. I would love to know more about James Dean and you’re bringing it to them and I commend you on that. So again, Lee, thank you so much for coming on the show. This has been absolutely fantastic and maybe we’ll follow up with you soon to see where this story progresses, because as you said, it never seems to end.

So again, no, it won’t. It won’t end. It’s gonna, it’s gonna go. I’ve always said James Dean lives on.[01:45:00]

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