In this episode of Break/Fix, we interview Lee Raskin, the leading expert on James Dean, to delve into the lesser-known motorsports accomplishments of the young actor. Lee shares his early passion for racing and his journey to becoming an authority on James Dean. The conversation travels through James Dean’s introduction to car racing, his acquisition of a Porsche 550 Spyder, and the tragic accident that claimed his life. Lee offers insight into the myths surrounding James Dean’s death, the so-called ‘curse’ of his car, as well as the subsequent history and restoration efforts behind Dean’s Speedster. The episode underscores the importance of safety advancements in racing while paying homage to James Dean’s pioneering role in American motorsports.

• 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. 

Crew Chief Brad: [00:00:00] Grand Touring Motorsports started as a social group of car enthusiasts, but we’ve expanded into all sorts of motorsports disciplines, and we want to share our stories with you. Years of racing, wrenching, and motorsports experience brings together a top notch collection of knowledge and information through our podcast, Brake Fix.

Crew Chief Eric: There are so many men and women that we have lost over the years. Ayrton Senna, 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 Brake Fix, 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 [00:01:00] foremost expert on all things related to James Dean, Mr. Lee Raskin. Welcome to Break Fix, Lee.

Lee Raskin: Hi, Eric. It’s a pleasure to see you again. And I’m very excited about talking about My favorite actor racer, James Dean.

Crew Chief Eric: 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 motorsports? What drew you to the James Dean story? Was it through Porsches or the Porsche Club of America or was it something else?

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

Oh, wow. I don’t know. I just fell in love with foreign cars. [00:02:00] I was buying, uh, Road 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, 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 tarmacs. It was a natural. So I remember it was about a hundred degrees that day. There were no grandstands. We just sort of sat on the hillside behind snow fences, wasn’t a real safe 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 [00:03:00] 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 from Kansas City, and they referred to him as the Kansas City Flash.

His name was Mastin Gregory.

Crew Chief Eric: Oh wow.

Lee Raskin: 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 study. So I knew Porsches and Morgans and Austin Healey’s and Ferraris, and I could identify them. And back then you almost could identify them by the sounds.

Of course, the Porsches [00:04:00] were rear engine and the Austin Healey’s were a little bit louder and, uh, they were six cylinder cars. And the Ferraris, they just roared around the track as well as Maseratis. In the third 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 in General Electric Theater, Philco, Schlitz. Both my sister And all her girlfriends were enamored over this great young star, James Dean. Of course, I was 10 years old at 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 to ceiling photos of James Dean. And there were two or three photos that I [00:05:00] 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 Coupe back then in 53 and 54.

The Speedster was a brand new model that came out in 1955. If I was on my best behavior, she would let me enter her shrine and let me read the articles and look at the photos. 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, Revell 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 [00:06:00] the late 50s, there were records that were produced by Riverside Records, and they were sounds of Sebring and Cuban Corners, and there were all these great sounds of sports cars racing. Sebring and you could identify, you could listen to them. 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. There wasn’t, there wasn’t any more 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 Mille Emilia, the Targa Florio, Le Mans, Sebring. 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 [00:07:00] to take place.

And I couldn’t wait to get the morning paper after a race at Sebring and Le Mans to find out who was winning. When I was 13, I begged my father to let me buy a third hand. I would call it as a mini cycle, but it was called a doodle bug. It was made in Iowa, had a Clinton, two and a half horsepower in 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.

Crew Chief Eric: That

Lee Raskin: was a pretty big step. It was [00:08:00] 1, 500. It was a 1960 Porsche. Coupe, 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 and trucks, too. I had a Porsche.

Crew Chief Eric: This would have been a 356 Charlie, right? A C. Yeah, this would have been

Lee Raskin: a B.

Crew Chief Eric: Right on the borderline. Yeah.

Lee Raskin: 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, racing an Arnold Bristol, and racing an Elva Formula Junior, so I guess I’m a multi marked person.

Somewhere around 1977, I, uh, was reading stories about James Dean in some of the Porsche magazines, the Porsche Club of America, Panorama, [00:09:00] 356 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.

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… [00:10:00] 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 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 356 Speedster in after a year and bought a 550, and he was on his way to his fourth 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.

Crew Chief Eric: And we’re going to unpack that as we go through the episode, getting [00:11:00] 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 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 motor sports 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 motor sports past.

So where did that begin for James Dean? James Dean

Lee Raskin: really got his motor sports start on two wheels. And when he was just barely a teenager, He had a little whizzer motorbike. He took a Schwinn [00:12:00] bike and they took a whizzer, 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, everywhere he could. Everybody heard him because it was loud. It was unmuffled. He graduated to a little a 125 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 the nickname, they called him One Speed Dean.

And that was, he, he drove that wide 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 [00:13:00] 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 Enfield 500cc, and then he bought an Indian TT, which was a really neat motorcycle.

I guess it was probably a 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 MGTC 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 discovered by Ili [00:14:00] Kazan in 1954 to start a co star in East of Eden playing the role of Cal Trask. He left his Indian bike in New York, came to California, immediately had some money in his pocket and bought a used MGTD.

His best friend said to Jimmy, you know, I don’t see what you, you’d like about this car. It’s awfully loud and it doesn’t go very fast. And, uh, Jimmy must’ve listened to him because he traded up, he traded the MG for a brand new 1955 Porsche Super. 356 Speedster.

Crew Chief Eric: Is there any backstory to how he went from English Roadster to Porsche?

Because have 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, you had so many other things to choose from in those early 1950s.

Lee Raskin: That’s an excellent question. [00:15:00] The MG was very popular as well as Austin Healey’s Triumphs.

They were cheap cars, they sold new for around 2, 200, 2, 300, some less, 1, 800. 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 SCCA.

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 it, it sold without a side view mirror. So if you wanted a [00:16:00] mirror, it was an extra five or 6 and that took it over 3, 000. So that was their marketing program.

Brand new, stripped down Porsche Speedster, fast, light, fun, perfect car for California, on the road, on the racetrack. And James Dean, being in California, had befriended John von Neumann, who owned Competition Motors, and he had taken a test drive of a Porsche Speedster. And von Neumann 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 MGT 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 [00:17:00] under 1500 cc’s, came in third to Ken Miles and Sy Yetter, and Miles of all things was disqualified in his race.

Bye. flying shingle special because he was using aviation fuel. So Cy Yetter, 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 speedster, he was not only driving on the street, But he was racing him. 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 [00:18:00] Cause 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 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. They didn’t want him to get injured while he was racing.

James Dean had a pick and choose. As soon as the movie was over, he had a few weeks, and if there was a race, he was in it. So his third race would have 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 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 [00:19:00] 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, 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 bale of hay, over revved his engine, and burned a piston, and he was a DNF that 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 [00:20:00] 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 damaged car on the, on the back. And they took that to Competition Motors. Within 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. This 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 right outside of Warner Brothers in Burbank.

And he agreed to purchase a Lotus Mark 9. Actually, it might’ve been an 8 or a 9. We’re not sure. It was in transition. He put down a deposit. As you know, Lotus was like Morgan. [00:21:00] They made racing car bodies. But they used other engines, so Morgan used a Triumph and the Ford and the Lotus used Coventry Climax and also a Crystal engine.

But James 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, Offenhauser, which was made in Los Angeles. He made a deposit for a used Offenhauser. Coffee and he was going to put a v8 in there the british car manufacturers.

They were never in a hurry. So he wanted this lotus to be ready for September because 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 going to be [00:22:00] ready, so he canceled the order. He had told John von Neumann, I’d like to buy a 550. Von Neumann said, well, they’re not going to be coming in until September. And by the way, you’re not really qualified. You don’t have enough seat time to race a 550.

Why don’t you finish out the season in your super speedster? Jimmy was relentless. He said, no, I, I want this 550. And as it turns out, he got his way because of five that were delivered through Hoffman to Von Neumann, 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 because he was making some, you know, some good 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 550 was his. And he settled on [00:23:00] the car on September 21st, 1955, which would be nine days just before the Salinas race.

Crew Chief Eric: Let’s put 6, 855 in perspective. What does that come out to in today’s currency with inflation?

Lee Raskin: Well, it probably comes out close to 150, 000. They’ve only made 9550 spiders. Most of them were erased. About half of them survived. And today, like Jerry Seinfeld sold a 550 for several million dollars. The auctions today at Amelia Island, they’re going to be offering 550 spiders for four and five million dollars going forward.

It’s a lot of money for a car, but they only made 90. So they’re fairly rare. And most of them have a fairly significant race history in as much as some very famous drivers raced 550s. At Lamar at Sebring at [00:24:00] Watkins Glen and California as well.

Crew Chief Eric: More so than the body and the coachwork itself, the other significant part about the five 50 is it was the four cam Porsche motor as the first time it was introduced, basically in a production car, considered a production car.

Yeah.

Lee Raskin: The Furman engine was developed specifically for the five 50. It was used. During 1954 through 1956, then they not only put them into the 550 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 356, that car is approaching a million dollars today.

Uh, in value. They were fairly rare. The engine is a double overhead cam. It 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 [00:25:00] befriended Rolf Widerich, who was sent over from the, uh, factory in Stuttgart to work specifically with Johnny von Neumann in developing their racing program.

So he was the mechanic of choice. in Southern California for all the racing cars, the four cam especially, but also the cc flat fours.

Crew Chief Eric: Curiosity question. There’s later four cam engines, for instance, used like in a 904. Is that a derivative of the five fifties engine or is it a different engine?

Lee Raskin: No, it’s a derivative, and it’s just an improved engine.

And the interesting thing about the 904, that was in the line. The 550, 550A, RSK, RS60, and 61 were type 718 Porsches. that basically were just improved. The engineering was improved. The aerodynamics were improved. The 904 was the first plastic fiberglass Porsche and that was [00:26:00] a fixed coupe. They also made a few open cars.

They used the 904 Carrera engine, which is a very similar engine. They also put a, um, think an eight cylinder engine and a few of those that were raced in endurance races, like the Targa Florio and the Mille Miglia.

Crew Chief Eric: Where did the lineage for that four cam four cylinder stop? Was it with the 904? Did it continue on at any point?

I actually

Lee Raskin: stopped at the 904 because the 906 was a six cylinder engine, and then they used an eight cylinder for some of the Bergmeister cars, the 908, 909, 910. The models didn’t hang around very long. It was 3 56, 5 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. [00:27:00] 2022, the 911 is still around. It’s, you know, it’s got a long shelf life.

Crew Chief Eric: That’s very true. Although the original 901s as they, as they were dubbed back then versus a 992, like today, they are 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 those numbers that follow the Lotus was all the revisions, right? The Mark 1, the 2, the 8, the 9, you know, the Super 7s, the 7s, those became Caterhams, so on down the line.

So I find that interesting. But switching back to the 550, 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 [00:28:00] 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 want to touch on one more, like, bit of, I guess, trivia that surrounds the 550. It’s been a long standing 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 550 the Little Bastard or Little Bastard.

So why or how did he come up with this particular name for that car?

Lee Raskin: 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. A lot of myths about James Dean, about his racing, and then the curse of 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 [00:29:00] 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 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. 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 driving, driving the Dodge.

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

Crew Chief Eric: Okay.

Lee Raskin: 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 [00:31:00] away. When he bought the Spider, he wanted to name it. He said, I’m going to name this the little bastard and I’m going to show Jack Warner who’s out front.

And in addition to that, all the drivers behind me are going to 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, the tale of his 550. 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 130 and the pinstripes.

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 Barris 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 [00:32:00] himself and he had doodled the little bastard on the tail of a 550 and said, I want you to paint this on.

By the way, my provisional numbers for the race are 130. So he 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 Jeffrey’s or George Barris. They came from the factory that way. There’s a whole story about tail stripes and why Porsche was using those and we can talk about that was very unique to James Dean’s car number 550 055. 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.[00:33:00]

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 tail stripes and sent, you know, as a customer’s car. The tail stripes were used by the Porsche factory to delineate. The cars that usually traveled in a packet, say Le Mans, one, two, three.

They had similar numbers like 32, 33, 34. And, 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. So they had tail stripes, red, blue, green, yellow. They use the colors rather than the numbers to keep score.

And so that’s how the tail stripes were created. And Porsche was one of the first to use that. I think Alfa 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 [00:34:00] Jeffries, painted the gold leaf, but no, it came from the factory.

Crew Chief Eric: So another question about James Dean, before we kind of move on to the tail end of his compressed racing career, he’s often portrayed as a loner, right? You see him, you know, infamous pictures in black and white leaning up against the 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 90210, 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?

Lee Raskin: I think he was a chameleon. I honestly believe, depending on where he was and who he was with, it brought out his persona. [00:35:00] 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 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 the 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 percent 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 [00:36:00] 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 out of that. And he had a lot of friends. He could have been your friend and my friend, and yet we wouldn’t have known each other.

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 L. A., knew a lot of people, wasn’t 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 were really best of friends, but I’ve never seen a [00:37:00] photo of Dennis Hopper and James Dean together.

Other than, you know, on the set of Rebel Without a Cause 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 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 have needed to rent a bus with all those people.

Crew Chief Eric: You were talking about, you know, early on about your sister. You know, kind of fawning over James Dean and he was a heartthrob as described, right? And so there are a lot of ladies pined for him and he was an object of desire. Did he have a lady on his arm or was that sort of interchangeable, just like his friends and scenes like his cars too, in this short amount of time?

Lee Raskin: Yeah, no, I agree. Listen, he died at 24. Whoever thinks they’re going to 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.

[00:38:00] 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. Most of his friends and acting friends have since passed on. But I had the good fortune during the 70s and 80s 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. No, 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.

Crew Chief Eric: He had the right car, let’s not forget.

Lee Raskin: 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 [00:39:00] or Lotus or anything that he wanted.

A lot of people think, well, He was just in it for, you know, the publicity. No, he was serious. I think that he could have been a better driver if he had more seat time. As I mentioned, he 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.

Crew Chief Eric: 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’s that, or did they come to it on their own?

Lee Raskin: Excellent question. I had the good fortune to meet Paul Newman at Seabrook in 1977. I was curling for a very famous Baltimoreian by the name of Bruce Jennings, who had the nickname of King Carrera. And we were [00:40:00] competing in the EMSA series.

under, uh, G. T. U. Smaller C. C. S. Paul Newman came to sea break as a co driver for Bill Freeman in Beverly Hills. Porsche. They 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. 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 going to point them out to you and you’re going to 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 Sebring once and I didn’t want to race it again. It was a race that I love to hate because it was so difficult. And of course, Bruce Jennings had been racing it for umpteen years and once finished third overall in 1962 in a RS, a 61.

I got to know Paul Newman over the years. I would see him at Lime Rock at some of the vintage racing. I actually [00:41:00] raced against him in a race. He was. Racing a Brumos 914 6. I was on the pole. I was probably qualified 15th or 16th of the 356 group. And by lap six, I saw him coming around the corner in my mirrors.

He was going to 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 a Porsche. Since that time, he had bought many Porsches because 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 [00:42:00] 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 motorhead, but I wasn’t. It’s something that he picked up.

Coincidentally, he went to Lime Rock Park and a friend of his said, why don’t you take the 356 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 are retiring at the age of 50.

Exactly,

Crew Chief Eric: exactly.

Lee Raskin: Steve McQueen, on the other hand, was also a motorhead, mostly on motorbikes, and was really tenacious and fearless. But he didn’t have the money to get into racing until he became more successful.

Crew Chief Eric: 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 his tragic demise, [00:43:00] right? The crash itself.

Lee Raskin: Well, I mentioned that he missed a lot of racing, a lot of seat time, and he said to his mechanic, I need a faster car, I need a faster car. Well, the guys he was competing against, and they were the 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 brake, when to accelerate, uh, when 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, [00:44:00] 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 with a lot of people. So that’s something that I’ve analyzed about James Dean, that his lack of clear vision or being 20 20 was a deterrent to his racing. So, James Dean wanted a faster car. I mentioned that he tried to buy the Lotus, which would have been a sports racer, but he was lucky enough to get the 550.

It’s interesting, someone asked me, well, how did this 550 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 because 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 [00:45:00] 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 prepared for the race at Salinas and the plan was that they would put it on a rented trailer.

He didn’t own a trailer, although he’s having one made. It wasn’t finished yet. Rolf Witterecht got him a trailer from another Cal Club racer. They borrowed the trailer, two 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 out at 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. Rolf Wittereg, strictly by [00:46:00] the book, said, No, you’ve got to 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 Friday, James Dean had dropped the car off the night before.

Rolf Wittereg, 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 want to put on safety belts for you. 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 of 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 [00:47:00] 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 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 them. 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 Sepulveda Boulevard, went through the Grapevine, south of Bakersfield, on 99, at 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 [00:48:00] 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 15 miles over the limit. CHP officer, his name is Ovie 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 because it was a sports car. Hunter was about six foot two. Spider is 39 inches high from a tire to the 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 shirt pocket. This was at 3. 30 in the afternoon. To do the chronology, [00:49:00] you can figure out when he left, when he got the ticket, they took the racer’s road. They did not go through Bakersfield because the racer said it’s too slow. There’s a traffic signal in every street corner.

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 466. 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 SL Coupe, and it belonged to Lance Raventlow, and his co driver was Kessler, so he knew Raventlow was going to the races, so they stopped and they chatted for a while. Raventlow and Bruce Kessler left, I’d say about 10 minutes before James Dean, and they agreed to meet at Paso Robles for dinner [00:50:00] at 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 going to have dinner at six o’clock. They took off. It basically is a very interesting stretch of road. It’s the desert. It’s flat. And then it goes through an area called the Polonio Pass, and then all of a sudden it shoots down about 45 degrees to the floor of the Chalem 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. It’s unbelievable.

Scary. Really scary. But that’s what James Dean was doing. And as they approached the Chelan Valley down the Antelope grade, they passed a Pontiac with two individuals in it. I’d say about a 30 [00:51:00] to 45 seconds before the junction before 66 and 41. It’s a wide junction at Chelan. And the husband said to the wife, boy, look at him.

They were going about 78 miles an hour. And 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 have 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 [00:52:00] 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 that this vehicle 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 [00:53:00] 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 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, Rolf.

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. And he didn’t have belts. No belt, the passenger side. James Dean had a belt, wasn’t wearing it. So there was some speculation by other witnesses saying, well, no, the person wearing the red shirt.

which would be Rolf 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 [00:54:00] said, no, the man wearing the red was driving. 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 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. Rolf 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 Rolfe being the driver. There was no reason for him to be the driver in the first place. That speculation goes back and forth.

I see it every [00:55:00] 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.

Crew Chief Eric: I mean, you’ve probably done the math yourself, but have any mathematicians or even scientists sat down with you to say, okay, a 1300 pound car hitting basically almost a stationary 55 Ford, which probably weighed somewhere in the neighborhood of 3000 plus pounds to move it 45 feet.

Can you back calculate how fast he was going at the time of impact? Cause he’s had to have been doing. Almost triple digits to push a car that heavy that far. It’s like a missile.

Lee Raskin: 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 mock ups. They made several mistakes. First of all, they didn’t get the testimony of Mr. and Mrs. Robert White, who were directly behind [00:56:00] James Dean and 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 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 have been 100 feet down the road. No, the [00:57:00] momentum was going up.

The inertia was up. 1, 300 pounds and you’re 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 against the back, the firewall. It was moved three feet. That’s solid steel. You know, everybody said, well, 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?

It’s 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.

on the road, but there ar that have come to me and is from other acc[00:58:00]

Today, the state of California, Caltran, is actually going to build a ramp over 466, is now 46, to avoid the accident of people turning left. That road sees produce trucks hauling ass at 90 miles an hour. As a 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.

Crew Chief Eric: 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 accidents and whatnot. So it kind of begs the question, when you look at the scenario, whoever engineered that intersection, etc.,

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?

Lee Raskin: Maybe because I’m a lawyer, maybe because I understand the [00:59:00] 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. 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 Rolf to the Paso Robles Hospital. They tried to sort things out. The CHP 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. They’d say, well, he’s 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 550 books and I looked at the transmission and what gear you had to be in.

The RPM versus. The speed, James Dean was in fourth gear. He hadn’t shifted down the third. You wouldn’t [01:00:00] 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 gas until, you know, possibly the impact.

You know, he was clipped pretty good because his riding height was the same height as the grill and 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 in Tulare and he’s driving a hot rod fifties car with, you know, with a big engine. I think that Donald Turnipsey 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 [01:01:00] across the roadway because 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 right, they probably would have 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 inquest on October 11th.

Donald Turnipsey 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 Luftwaffe soldier, not that many years after the war. At the inquest, James Dean, this is Lee the lawyer speaking. had no representation. Rolf Witterich was in the hospital, drugged up.

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

They came back. They found no fault of either party. If you or I have been driving that Ford and made that left turn, failure to yield to an oncoming vehicle, creating a fatality, we would have been charged. At least Donald Turnipseed should have been charged. With a misdemeanor fatality, he wasn’t charged at all.

Crew Chief Eric: Did he come out of the crash pretty much unscathed? Did the Ford protect him? His nose,

Lee Raskin: 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 2, 600 pound car.

It’s a pretty big car. And you know, incidentally, I’ve never [01:03:00] driven a 1950 Ford. But I’ve driven 1954 Ford sedan, you know, they were known for a lot of stability at 60 miles an hour, making a left turn. He may have been close to 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. He was practically stopped at that point. I’ve gone through the accident back and forth. I have a lot of competition. You know, a lot of people that are Dean fans, they don’t want to see any blame towards James Dean. He was a victim.

The way I see it is they both were speeding, they both were at fault, but Donald Turnipsey was more at fault because he caused the fatality.

Crew Chief Eric: And you mentioned earlier there was this flash point in the James Dean story where suddenly arises myth and legend 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. [01:04:00] And it’s theorized that James Dean’s death was not his own fault, right? As we’re talking about here, but rather that of the car. Uh, some have said that this particular Porsche 550 Spyder has its own dark and unsettling past.

They try to paint this ominous picture. Legends, myth, and other tall tales surround this story. And some go as far as. say that someone building the 550 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,

Lee Raskin: Eric, that’s what keeps us going. There’s no question. I mean, we’re talking about 66 years later, you know, we’re still talking about the curse of James Dean and all these myths.

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

by John von Neumann. We have James Dean dead and preparing, you know, for his burial in Fairmont, Indiana. Rolf was in the hospital for a couple of weeks. Von Neumann 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 guys, same races, and one particular person that he raced against was a doctor. His name was William Eskridge, who lived in Burbank, not far from Warner Brothers. Not only was William Eskridge a good orthopedic surgeon, he was a brilliant engineer, and he was racing specials that he built himself, using, by the way, an Offenhauser [01:06:00] engine in one of them.

When he heard about the wreck, he said, you know, this is my lucky day. I just bought a roller, a Lotus from Jay Chamberlain without an engine. I’m going to buy that Porsche and I’m going to put the four cam engine up front. It’s never been done, but I can do it. And he used an MG transmission and Austin Healey gearbox, the rear end.

So he bought the car from the insurance company. James Dean’s sole heir 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 Eskridge, 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 because it had been locked in fourth gear, so that needed to be cleaned out. And he bought movable parts. He bought [01:07:00] 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 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 because he’s written about it. I bought the car.

No, we didn’t buy the car. William Eskridge bought it. Eskridge 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 4 cam engine mounted up front and he’s winning races.

And he’s racing against, who’s he racing against? Von Neumann and Richie Ginther in 550s. He’s almost beating them. He races the car, he’s got some problems, but he’s sorting it out. [01:08:00] In October of 1956, which would 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.

Previous to the race, he gave some parts to his orthopedic friend, Dr. Troy McHenry, who also had a 550. But McHenry wasn’t as accomplished as Dr. Estridge, wasn’t a good driver. They’re both competitive. Good friends, but competitive. But down deep inside, Troy Henry wanted to beat him. So he decided he had an accident at Paramount Ranch before Pomona.

He decided he’s going to lighten up his Porsche, which was 1300 pounds. He’s going to make it a thousand pounds. He’s going to remove some of the steel and some of the aluminum, and he’s going to 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 [01:09:00] car.

No, he did not have any of those parts. He may have had them 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 couldn’t interview Troy McHenry, but I interviewed plenty of people that knew that.

Crew Chief Eric: 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, 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?

Lee Raskin: Yes and no. Trailing arms, yes. Transmission, no. Because on the Kardex, we know the transmission number of the 550.

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. A racer by the name of Al Qadrobi, and also a good mechanic, Got hold of the transmission, opened it up, fixed the fourth gear that was [01:10:00] 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. Kodroby fixed it, kept it for a while, didn’t use it. It was sold to a person by the name of Ned McHedry, a Porsche guy near San Francisco, who then sold it to another Porsche phile 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 80s, 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.

Crew Chief Eric: No, not Porsche,

Lee Raskin: 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 550s that were for sale.

He sent me a copy. If I had had a spare 14, [01:11:00] 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 550 029. Didn’t mean anything to me then. It wasn’t until decades later that I realized it was Troy McHenry’s car.

Crew Chief Eric: Oh wow.

Lee Raskin: 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’s parts. A lot of people say, well, he was cursed, he died. No, what happened was he was in a hurry, had taken all these parts. He was fiberglassing 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, 356 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 Pitman part.

This was pre Pitman. [01:12:00] 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, Eskridge is in front of him and Richie Ginther driving by 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 pit 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 80s. He’s the one that created Moss Motors, the famous aftermarket British 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 [01:13:00] nuts and the bolts were missing. The two halves weren’t even joined when he saw it because they completely fallen apart.

How freaky is that? Somebody was in so much of a hurry. I once forgot to tighten my lug nuts and I’m driving down the 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 it was. So, George Barris has this carcass. He said that he’s going to rebuild it, but that was a herculean 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 Barris’s 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 really crashed, and then the cars that went on display with the [01:14:00] National Safety Council, they’re not even related. So George Barris 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 1960, in Baltimore, I went to the Baltimore Auto Show.

Crew Chief Eric: Okay. And what

Lee Raskin: 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 406 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, it 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 coming off the car. It has tires. It doesn’t have tires.

It’s got a front end. Doesn’t have a front end. It completely changed it around. The things were missing. [01:15:00] 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 60s brought on the demise of this car. Why? Well, it was being advertised as speed kills.

You speed, you die. Here’s James Dean’s last sports car. That’s how it was advertised. By 1960, the Beach Boys and the Hondels 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 70s, I can’t picture James Dean wearing a flowered shirt and bell bottom pants.

Crew Chief Eric: 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 in early 1953, late 1952. Would Chevy have benefited the same way Porsche did? Would it have made the same [01:16:00] 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 story more than anything else?

Lee Raskin: 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 have come together, and James Dean might not have been killed. Here’s the interesting thing. 1955, Corvette had been out for What two years, 53, 54, 55, I don’t recall actually seeing a Corvette racing until the later 50s.

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. In all the programs that I have from California at the time James Dean raced, 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 [01:17:00] Porsche, he might have been driving an Austin Healey or a Triumph. Most of the current generation has no clue what an Austin Healey and a Triumph are. Here’s the thing. He was killed in a Porsche. Porsche! came down on John von Neumann. They would have liked to cut his head off.

They were so humiliated and embarrassed that he sold a car and someone was killed in it. Nine days later, recklessly, they wouldn’t talk to John von Neumann. They were so angry at him and Portia didn’t mention his name. Ever until the Boxster came along in 1993, created in 19, actually 1989, 1993. It was shown at the Detroit car show auto show 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, [01:18:00] 954 of them. That was the first year of the spider. That’s when they started to compare the spider to the Boxster.

Boxster saved them from going bankrupt. It’s the first time they mentioned James Dean. I have the ad. I have the 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 didn’t mention him, they had Donald Turnipsey driving a Studebaker.

Somebody told me that in the museum and I sent him a letter and I said, you’re way off. Porsche almost got to be a partner with Studebaker in 1953. They were going to make a sports coupe, 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 want to 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 550. [01:19:00] The generation today, they can equate the Boxster to James Dean, closer than a 356.

They don’t really talk so much about the Speedster. They don’t really know too much about it.

Crew Chief Eric: And, you know, that’s funny because I associate more with the speedster than I do with the 550. I always kind of forget about it because your point is it is so limited number. Granted, I have a 550 model here in my office amongst all my models and it sits next to a 356 speedster.

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 1 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 550. For me, it just never clicked that the 550 was Dean’s car, except for that was the car that he was killed in.

Lee Raskin: I always thought that the fame, the legacy came from the [01:20:00] 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.

Crew Chief Eric: Really?

Lee Raskin: Yeah, I’ve written about it in my book. Lou Bracker, his 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? MVA 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. Now the car has been, it’s a race car now, no bumpers, no top, you know, got a roll bar and it went through several other individuals and then it [01:21:00] 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. It was rusted. It was rusted in half and it was sold and it went to the UK. It’s 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 to someone in Eastern Europe who collected pre A cars, 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, 80126. 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 its debut. There are some legal problems in the registration because someone decided to make a bogus speedster with a fake VIN pin. So there’s two [01:22:00] VINs with the same number. I’ve spent the last two years working with. This person working with France, working with Italy.

It’s a long story. It’s going to be in my new book, but James Dean Speedster is alive and well. It’s going to make a debut pretty soon.

Crew Chief Eric: 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.

Lee Raskin: 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, 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 Perrin, Don Singh, Steve Heinrich, we put together a wonderful book called Porsche [01:23:00] Speedster Type 540 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 350. Very rare book. It is the epitome of what went into the Speedster. Got all the great stuff from Dr. Porsche. Ferry 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, a few other people.

So, but others wrote about how the Speedster was created. From there, that was my springboard. Uh, 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 miss facts versus fiction. It’s full of [01:24:00] attribution. It’s really good stuff. And now 10 years later. I decided to do James Dean and the 356 Speedster because I knew the Speedster was out there. So we cover a lot of what I’ve written about before, but we cover the restoration of this car, finding the car.

Porsche has never given up on Speedster. I mean, they, they’ve made five new variants since the 55 Speedster, you know, all of a sudden in 59, they decided, you know what, we’re not going to make the Speedster anymore. They made the convertible D because people complaining. Not enough creature comforts, they put roll up windows, a nice convertible top, but the Speedster, 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 them were raced. 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. Probably going to sell for 250. Car that I bought for 6, 000 is worth 250, [01:25:00] 000.

Imagine that. 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 been best in show. And then someone came along with a good 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.

Crew Chief Eric: In addition to the books, you’ve been recently on a bunch of podcasts and you’ve been on the History Channel. Do you want to talk about those as well, where people can find more parts of this story and other places you’ve been quote unquote published?

Lee Raskin: I always wanted to put this James Dean thing down, but it’s impossible. Every day, there’s something on the net or I get phone calls or I get an email. I love doing the podcast. Like I get to tell the story I’ve done like three or four of them. 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 [01:26:00] about the curse. It’s going to be for William Shatner’s. episode series called the unexplained and by the history channel. It’s exciting. I’m very excited about it. I’ve done a lot of TV documentaries. Each one believes that it’s going to 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 going to mention a name, but he’s published books about restoration of Porsches. And he got an email from someone in Germany that has a steering wheel who says Rolf Wutterich, the mechanic, gave his father this steering wheel. It’s a Spyder steering wheel. It’s fairly rare, probably worth about 10 grand.

But that just popped up and all these things just pop up. There’s always somebody, you know, James Dean’s [01:27:00] glasses have never been found. These are his glasses. I’m wearing his glasses. These are his frames. They’ve been duplicated. I wear them. I don’t think I’m James Dean when I put them on or take them off, but his glasses were 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. over his glasses at Palm Springs. I spoke to his friend Lou Bracker that said they both bought them. 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 Corner, 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 [01:28:00] because 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 them in her pocketbook and took them home. and kept them and died. She told her daughter they’re 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 going to ask the owner if he’ll let me. Try them 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 going to 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 is always coming to me. I can’t give it up. Here’s the most amazing thing, is that we’re probably in the midst now of trying to make [01:29:00] a film using a CGI character of James Dean, a James Dean duo, to create him digitally.

I would be used as the consultant for his mannerisms. Oh, that’s cool. And I’ve been involved in the script. 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 generation to see that this person that 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.

Crew Chief Eric: 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 [01:30:00] 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 Lee Iacocca, on the racing side from folks like Sir Jackie Stewart, pushing the boundaries to make racing and driving safer.

Even more research has gone into racing cars right into motorsport. 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.

Dangerment or whatever it might be. So I just want to remind people that safety is paramount. We talk about racing and how glamorous it is. And on this show, episode after episode, the overarching thing is that there’s positives to even tragic stories like James Dean’s.

Lee Raskin: I think it’s a significant point.

Something that I’ve. thought about. I see a lot of commentary. Someone will write a story, you [01:31:00] know, it could be Esquire, could be 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 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 Maryland and most other states, the seatbelt is mandatory.

You get fined if you don’t have a seatbelt on. I’ve raced for 25 years with a six point belt, with a Snell helmet that had to be replaced every five or six years, and belts as well. You don’t replace them, you don’t get to race with Nomex clothing and shoes and socks. And when it’s 90 degrees out, I don’t [01:32:00] mind telling you, and you probably know it’s uncomfortable.

That’s

Crew Chief Eric: for sure.

Lee Raskin: 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. 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 seatbelts, 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 [01:33:00] incorporated into a car. And that’s why cars are selling on an average of 40, 000 to 50, 000 a piece because of the expense. When I interviewed some of the racers from James Dean’s era that raced SCCA, 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, but you had to have something there. Now the roll bar’s got to be inspected, it’s got to be up to spec, it’s got to be spec’d. I would never cheat on safety. If this is what I had to wear, this is what I had to wear.

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 pressed the button and hopefully it worked. Fuel cell? Of course.

Riders 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 [01:34:00] at Blackwell’s Corner. There’s a reason for it. He gassed up at the Mobil station on Ventura Boulevard. He got free gas. Mobil gave away free gas. If you wore their Pegasus, and James Dean wore it proudly, Mobil 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 a 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 40s 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 [01:35:00] 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. 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 the, 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 was some speculation on that.

But as a result,

Crew Chief Eric: we all wear Hans devices or equivalents now because of that. That was, yeah, I forgot about the Hans device.

Lee Raskin: That’s something that’s not a comfortable thing to wear. Oh, jeez. Tell me about it. And look at the expense. See, a lot of people look at the expense. Look at this expense. They’ve got to buy a new, you know how many helmets I have?

I’m sure you do too. I have a big collection of helmets. You’re barely worn,

Crew Chief Eric: but they’re worth every penny though. At the end of [01:36:00] the day,

Lee Raskin: you are my first helmet is actually like a Steve McQueen bell helmet, the exact same helmet, you know, with the little visor. The funny thing is it’s all friable.

Everything inside is just all junk, you know, 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 going to wear it, you know, the next race.

That wasn’t a good thing to do. Yeah, safety is really important. And I think Porsche has really capitalized and other manufacturers have capitalized. And we don’t really appreciate that for a reason, because we don’t think anything’s ever going to 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 go in 85 or 90 miles an hour and you have a blowout. It’s hard to control.

Crew Chief Eric: And that can happen on the street as well as on the racetrack. So anything can happen.

Lee Raskin: I’ve seen this ad. James Dean would have lived if he was driving a new Porsche. Something, something similar, silly and similar to that.

I’ve [01:37:00] seen that on the internet. Well, that’s pure bunk. There’s no comparison. It’s apples and oranges.

Crew Chief Eric: 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 complete bunk.

Lee Raskin: 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 Shillam Junction between two individuals. They were in a hurry to go somewhere was an unguarded moment.

Crew Chief Eric: Just to wrap that whole thought up there before we close out. I mentioned earlier, you know, with 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 have changed probably the whole course of what we’re talking about, but. In the case of the accident, if you replace 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 [01:38:00] the five 50?

I know it’s total conjecture, total speculation, but just your thoughts on that.

Lee Raskin: Well, I think the structure of the 3 56 would’ve been, uh, more of a preventive vehicle in terms of being hurt ’cause it had structure. Look, the Porsche was only 39 inches high and I have a nice photo of the replica Porsche next to the Ford Custom, 39 inches high and the Ford’s twice as tall.

What was, how

Crew Chief Eric: tall was the 356 in comparison to the 550?

Lee Raskin: 356 is about five feet high. 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 356 scoop had the structure because it, you know, had a top and a frame, the door frame and the door was heavier.

I think that what we’re really talking about, we’re talking about the Ford, which was really a tank.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, exactly.

Lee Raskin: And so whatever ran against it, you know, there could be some damage, but. It goes to show you Donald Turnipsey wasn’t hurt. He had a bruised [01:39:00] 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 have been a serious injury, if not a fatality. Here’s what I’d like to address. James Dean was 24. If this hadn’t happened, if James Dean had zagged rather than zigged, in other words, James Dean went to the right is an instinct because 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 have missed Donald Terpsey, but he may have run into the car that was behind Donald Terpsey head 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. The average person couldn’t comprehend that. A small sports car like that, they’d 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 [01:40:00] on, um, you know, my phone all the time. Accidents where they have a camera in the car and truckers and all these crazy accidents and you hope it doesn’t happen to you. You hope that you’re not there. They’re really terrible. Most of them are in Europe, but I see them 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.

Crew Chief Eric: And I think that’s part of the moral of the story. That was a point I was going to drive home, that safety is always paramount, but we talk about it several times on this show and various. different guises and episodes where the number one mod you should make to any car is actually seat time before you do anything else.

Learn to drive that car before you modify it or before whatever, because [01:41:00] you never want to 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 there were out there.

He was a bit of a pioneer. There weren’t too many that were, you know, road legal that were just out there and about. So it was all new territory, but unfortunately he was taken away too soon and it makes it a sad and tragic story. So, you know, as we’re talking about this. 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 head first into racing for the rest of his career? Who knows? Many other actors have flirted with racing names like Steve McQueen. You mentioned Patrick Densi, Michael Fassbender, 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 [01:42:00] 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 loss without them.

Or are they? Because Lee has been filling in the gaps.

Lee Raskin: 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 have hoped that, you know, he would have been successful with the 550. Perhaps he would have realized that Salinas, that he wasn’t going to be a winner, that he needed more time to be more patient.

I would have hoped that that would have happened. It didn’t happen. The one thing that I’ve come away with recently is that [01:43:00] 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 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 spirit and the legacy of Porsche’s racing by what he accomplished in the months of 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, especially now, since we have found his 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 and put back. It’s completely authentic. Now, I wouldn’t say that it’s a monument, but [01:44:00] it’s certainly a tribute to James Dean, what he accomplished. And I would hope that Porsche, you know, we’ll finally recognize that. And get on board where, where I’m headed.

I hope that they will.

Crew Chief Eric: So Lee, I can’t thank you enough for 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.

Lee Raskin: I want to thank you. It’s good seeing you again and I want to thank you for your energy and your energy brought out, you know, my enthusiasm. I love talking about this. I think that there’s a generation out there that would love to know more about James Dean and you’re bringing it to them and I commend you on that.

Crew Chief Eric: So again, Lee, thank you so much for coming on the show. This has been absolutely fantastic. And maybe we’ll follow [01:45:00] up with you soon to see where this story progresses, because as you said, it never seems to end. So no, it won’t,

Lee Raskin: it won’t end. It’s going to, it’s going to go. I’ve always said, James Dean lives on.

Crew Chief Eric: That’s right, listeners. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to check out our Patreon for a follow on Pitstop Minisoad. So check that out on www. patreon. com forward slash GT Motorsports and get access to all sorts of behind the scenes content from this episode and more.

Crew Chief Brad: If you like what you’ve heard and want to learn more about GTM, be sure to check us out on www.

gtmotorsports. org. You can also find us on Motorsports. Also, if you want to get involved or have suggestions for future shows, you can call or text us at 202 630 1770 or send us an email at crewchief at gtmotorsports. org. We’d love to hear from you. [01:46:00]

Crew Chief Eric: Hey everybody, Crew Chief Eric here. We really hope you enjoyed this episode of BreakFix, and we wanted to remind you that GTM remains a no annual fees organization, and our goal is to continue to bring you quality episodes like this one at no charge.

As a loyal listener, please consider subscribing to our Patreon for bonus and behind the scenes content, extra goodies, and GTM swag. For as little as 2 and 50 cents a month, you can keep our developers, writers, editors, casters, and other volunteers fed on their strict diet of fig Newtons, gummy bears, and monster.

Consider signing up for Patreon today at www. patreon. com forward slash GT motorsports, and remember without fans, supporters, and members like you. None of this would be [01:47:00] possible.

Skip ahead if you must… Here’s the highlights from this episode you might be most interested in and their corresponding time stamps.

There’s more to this story…

Some stories are just too good for the main episode… Check out this Behind the Scenes Pit Stop Minisode! Available exclusively on our Patreon.

To learn more about James Dean, or talk to Lee follow him on instagram @leeraskin or check out his books available today on Amazon. And for more information on “The Curse” check out Crew Chief Brad’s write-up.