BALLSTON SPA, N.Y.
Since a recent effort describing owner/mechanic Cliff Wright’s remarkable racing odyssey, more interesting information has come to light.
It seems that Wright’s memory was off when he related the details of the ’59 Lebanon Valley Speedway season. But unlike so many oldtimers, instead of exaggerating his success, he shorted himself.
Historians Brian Bedell and Ed Biittig have reconstructed the season using Howie Westervelt’s wife’s scrapbook, and Westervelt did not win 12 of 17 as Wright recalled. He won 17 of 21, with Doug Garrison winning three features and Stretch Van Steenburg one.
Westervelt’s amazing season record was 17 victories, three seconds and a third.
We dug further and found that Connecticut racer and still-active owner Bob Devine, now 80, originally built the car used by the Wright/Zautner/Westervelt team.
“It was a ’37 Ford with a four-inch bore and a three-and-three-eighths-inch stroke flathead, running on alcohol when I sold it to him,” recalls Devine. “It was an unusual car because I cut the frame in half over the rear axle, put the rear section on top of the front and rewelded it, which lowered the car considerably. That moved the rear axle ahead, so I cut a chunk out of the cowl and moved the body ahead to restore the proportion and make it look stock.
“I won a dozen or so races with it before I sold it, running on asphalt at Rhinebeck and Menands, N.Y., just outside Albany, for promoter Ed Ryan. I ended up selling it to get money to buy a Grand American car to run with the United club under promoter Harvey Tattersall, where I won two series championships.”
Devine loves to recall those days in the “new car” division, when his team bought a new ’55 Chevy from a dealer, put a single-hoop rollbar in the car and went racing.
“We had another ’55 with some miles on it, so we swapped engines, figuring the older one was broken in already. I put it on the pole at the old Eastern Exposition Grounds in Springfield, Mass., the first time out.
The only thing we changed was installing a Chevy truck rear, because they offered all kinds of gear ratios, and we ran the car through 1956 and ’57. Then we bought a new ’57 Chevy and ran that for two years.”
Devine went on to explain that racing purses paid for the two cars, with the team’s profit coming from an unusual move.
“We’d taken the seats and interior out of the first car and stored them away,” relates Devine with a twinkle in his eye. “After we’d raced it for two years, we put the interior back in and sold it as a used road car.”
The team found the scheme worked so well that they continued it, running a new ’61 Chevy through the ’61 and ’62 seasons, when they won the final race on the Springfield half mile to claim the point title in the season’s last event.
“We ran about 15 United shows for Harvey every year, but on off weeks, we’d sneak off and run with NASCAR or ARCA or whoever had a race,” recalls Devine. “Some weeks we’d drive to Southside, Va., for Friday nights, then hit Manassas on Saturday and maybe Williams Grove on Sunday on our way home. By then we had a little fifth-wheel trailer that owner Walt Schutt built and we could go like hell.”
Schutt eventually took up driving himself but perished in a crash at Lebanon Valley many years ago. Ironically, the cars of that era were much safer than those Devine raced.
“They were a bit shaky, especially on the Langhorne mile,” says Devine. “But that’s why I raced, for the excitement. I started in 1948 with a forged birth certificate that I used to run at the ARDC midget driving school at Cherry Park, Conn. I’d been flying but quit that for racing because it was too tame.”
All these years later, Devine is still in the pits every Saturday night, ministering to the big-block engine he supplies for DIRT driver Guy Sheldon’s modified. He obviously enjoys their trips to victory lane, but one can’t help but feel he’d still like to be the guy in the middle of the photo, holding the checkered flag.