Word: speedway
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...tracks share the blame. Some old tracks have been modified for today's cars. But the Indianapolis Speedway has turns that are banked 9°-just as they were 56 years ago, when the first Memorial Day 500 was won at 74 m.p.h. It is no surprise that 30 drivers have lost their lives at Indy. What is remarkable is that last week, practicing for this month's 500, drivers were turning 170 m.p.h. laps and though twelve crashed, none was killed...
...outer retaining wall at 162 m.p.h. The car was totally demolished, but Foyt was unhurt. Chuck Rodee was not so lucky. Rodee already had gunned his 500-h.p. rear-engine Offenhauser through one practice lap at 159.9 m.p.h.; now he was trying to top that. Drifting through the speedway's No. 1 turn, he was suddenly blinded by a bit of rag or paper that blew into his face. The car spun wildly, slid 450 ft. backward into the wall so violently that the starting shaft penetrated 5 in. into the concrete. Rodee died of a ruptured aorta...
...face with makeup, and stuffed so much wadding in his boots to make him look taller that he could hardly walk. Yet among the odd collection of restless, thrill-hungry teen-agers who hang out in the garish juke joints and drive-ins along Tucson's East Speedway Boulevard (TIME, Nov. 26), swart, blue-eyed "Smitty" commanded adoration and terror...
...surgeon, came in to report his two daughters missing in August 1965. In Tucson, a boom town with an unusually high proportion of transient residents, more than 50 runaway minors are reported each month. Propelled by the same aimless itch, unrestrained by permissive parents, hundreds of teenagers haunt the Speedway. They were easy bait for Smitty, who was older, more sophisticated and, as they said admiringly, "different." His foster parents, owners of a nursing home, had given him $300 a month since he was 16, and furnished him with his own cottage, which his mother dutifully cleaned after all-night...
...Richard Petty, 28: the $112,000 Daytona 500 stock-car race; at Florida's 2.5-mile Daytona International Speedway. Driving a 1966 Plymouth with a special 550-h.p. "hemi-head" engine, Petty overtook Cale Yarborough's Ford on the 113th lap, led the rest of the way at an average 160.6 m.p.h...