I offer this tidbit on the off-chance that you have not encountered a certain series of books by the well-named racer and sometimes author, Burt “B.S.” Levy. Levy claims to have made a racing career off persuading others to loan him their wheels for a high-speed circuit. To fill his open moments, he has recreated an era when every race car was unique, when it cost less than a king’s ransom to field a race team, and when a boy from Passaic could make it to the big time on the strength of his skills and commitment to his craft. At a time when BMW was struggling to remake its marque in post-war Europe, British (and a few American) automakers were advancing the driving art on U.S. shores, and Levy tells the story through an inimitable series of fictional works that are firmly grounded in the rich history of American racing.
In The Last Open Road, first published privately in 1994, Levy introduces his own young Walter Mitty, New Jersey denizen Buddy Palumbo, who comes to motorsport as a teenager at the very dawn of the motorsport era. Given a chance to work on the MG-TCs and Jaguars of the sometimes wealthy, sometimes impoverished clients of Old Man Finzio’s Sinclair garage, Buddy succumbs to track fever, an insidious and usually incurable disease that renders many of our own members helpless in the face of an opportunity to put their foot down on a closed twisting course. Buddy demonstrates a fine talent for tweaking the persnickety S.U. carburetor and troubleshooting the truly perverse Lucas ignition, and he quickly earns a reputation as a top wrench among the members of the snooty and pseudonymous SCMA (not to be confused with the fledgling SCCA, of course). The Club races at now-historic tracks from Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin to Bridgehampton, L.I. to Thompson, Connecticut. Levy makes the reader care about the fate of our budding race mechanic hero (and the sweet Julie Finzio) while dishing up a generous and genuine helping of 1950s racing intrigue.
In 1999’s Montezuma’s Ferrari . . . and Other Adventures!, Levy moves his cast of characters to the international circuit, tracing the entry of Ferrari and Mercedes Benz into the western racing tradition, as Buddy graduates from local grease-pit mechanic to co-driver in the epic Carrera Panamericana of 1952. Think MB 300SL vs. Ferrari Mexico on a two-thousand-mile tear through the mountains of Mexico on muy malo dirt roads. Back in the states, Buddy learns the ropes at the original Sebring track, derived like many racetracks of the time from the runways of General Curtis LeMay’s Strategic Air Command. In an apparent moment of weakness, Buddy even brings us on the Bridgehampton rally, offering up the racer’s cynical (not to say inaccurate, however) view of that noble sport during its formative years. And -- ah! -- that sweet Julie Finzio.
In The Fabulous Trashwagon, Levy’s 2002 offering, Buddy makes the final leap from mechanic to builder as he assembles his own race car to compete with the likes of Briggs Cunningham and Alfred Momo. Otherwise known as the “Jagillac” for obvious reasons, Buddy’s masterpiece strives for the small victories that call to all of us, from hill-climbing to the Bonneville Salt Flats of the mid-1950s. En route, Levy puts us in the pits at the original Watkins Glen road circuit, to the Indianapolis 500 with Bill Vukovich and, with chilling realism, to the tragic 24 Hours of LeMans in 1954. In each case, the details ring true because they are true. Ah, yes! In the end, does Buddy wed the lovely Julie? I’ll not tell.
In a remarkable turn of entrepreneurial strategy, Levy has managed to finance the publication of books that the mainstream press considers to be of limited interest. Tucked into the middle of Montezuma and Trashwagon are 20-odd pages of “advertising.” The ads -- some real, some imagined -- are as well-executed and authentic as the books themselves, and they add immensely to the atmosphere that Levy has generated in the body of his work. Marketing is done on-line and, if the books interest you, you might check out www.lastopenroad.com
Levy writes fiction, but his plots and backgrounds are so authentic that the noise and dust and oil-stink often threaten to overwhelm the reader. The names Fangio, Hill, Fitch (yeah, THAT Fitch, driving for Mercedes), Masten Gregory and Kling and Lang resound through the pages of all of Levy’s books, as do the marques that helped make us who we are today: Ferrari, Mercedes, Cunningham, Aston-Martin, Allard and Crosley (um, okay, maybe not Crosley). No BMWs, but it wasn’t time yet. Mind you, Levy is no Steinbeck, although there is a certain Cannery Row flair to these books, as if Cannery Row were a neighborhood in Passaic. For sheer storytelling, these books have justly achieved cult status among those who are prone to that sort of thing. I loved them all.
