Word: zink
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Death was only seconds away. Riding nose to tail pipe, the tight-packed cars skittered around two turns and scrapped all the way down the backstretch. "Nobody was giving anybody anything," said Driver Shorty Templeman. On the very next turn, Ed Elisian's John Zink Special slammed into the pole car and spun out of control; 13 other cars piled up behind him in the worst traffic mess in Brickyard history. "I just went into the turn too hard," said Elisian later. "The brakes locked on me, and I went onto the grass. There wasn't much...
...Indianapolis 500-mile Memorial Day auto race, he wore a jaunty shamrock on his helmet, and he didn't give a tinker's dam for the auto racers' superstition that green is the devil's own color on the track. With his John Zink Special, almost an exact copy of last year's winner, 30-year-old Pat Flaherty had already spun through his trial heats fast enough to set a one-lap record: 146.056 m.p.h. In the big test itself, freckle-faced Flaherty, a truant from his Chicago taproom, felt sure that...
...other driver except Russo, Pat Flaherty rode behind a four-cylinder Meyer-Drake Offenhauser engine that whined up to 6,000 r.p.m. as it put out about 350 h.p. But his engineer and pit chief, A. J. Watson, had planned for the problems of the hopped-up track. The Zink Special had been shaved down four inches in width, its side panels fabricated from magnesium to reduce weight. Its tires, as a result, had an easy ride. Flaherty needed only two pit stops, averaged 128.49 m.p.h. for the 500 miles. Most important of all, his luck lasted. He swept past...
...across the track in an explosion of greasy smoke and flame. (This week he was still fighting for his life in an Indianapolis hospital.) Steadily, Indianapolis' Bob Sweikert, 29, a home-town hero who had never before even finished the 500, climbed toward the lead in his John Zink Special. At 100 miles he was third; by the halfway mark he was first. When the checkered flag dropped, Sweikert was still in the lead, having averaged a respectable 128.2 m.p.h. This year, at the cost of two lives (Manuel Ayulo, 33, was killed in a practice-run crash...