‘I Lived The Dream:’ IMS Historian Donald Davidson To Step

By Susan Wade

What a treat it was every day for Donald Davidson, to think and talk and to research and reminisce about the Indianapolis 500 and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. He would wrap himself in the romance of the race and its iconic palace, marveling at the machines and the men who made them, who fuss over them, who drive them . . . and all the people who love them just as much.

But recently, Davidson’s world looked a bit different from an unlikely angle. From his sofa at home, the longtime Indianapolis Motor Speedway historian saw the world he had reveled in for more than six decades through a whole new filter.

He said he “did a lot of phone interviews, talking with fans and people with questions. So as I’m lying there on the divan, talking to people all over the country, I’m looking up at my shelves. I’m thinking, ‘Golly, I haven’t watched these movies yet, all these books. There’s things that I would like to do.’”

So Davidson announced this week that he officially will step back a bit as of Dec. 31.

But he insisted, “I’m not going away, I’m just not doing this as my full-time vocation. I’m not going to be at the museum every day. I really don’t have any plans. I just want to kick back a little bit, not have to face deadlines, so on, so forth. I’m probably not explaining this very well. I think I’m just going to do what I want to do. I’m just not going to be there every day. I would like to still come around. I hope they let me in.

“I think I’m still going to be on the Radio Network. Really, you know what? I’ll just go over there and hang out, have a good time. Probably maybe I’ll get into some storytelling sessions and hope that the laughter and noise doesn’t disrupt the people that are trying to work,” he said.

“I’ve been thinking about it for a while, especially in the last several months, when we had to work from home. That’s OK for me, except I’m technically challenged. As my friends will tell you, I’m not really computer savvy. I was using a computer, but I had to do a lot of things. I’ve just been thinking that I don’t want to stop, but I just thought I would like to be able to do just what I want to do. There’s a lot of little things that I’d like to do, straighten the place up, just sort of take care of things around the house, sort my stuff,” Davidson said.

He said he can’t help but at least dabble in what he has become synonymous with: “I like to do silly little statistical projects just for myself, nothing really special. But just still do some of the things that I’d done, but not have the obligation, if you like, of just working every day, because just a lot of things have changed. I mean, this is not a recent thing. This year, of course, it’s been challenging for everybody. As I tell people, I’m outgoing, I’m good with people, but I’m actually a private individual. We’re a private family. I shake hands with everybody. I hug people. I get hugs. Drivers’ wives, even the drivers themselves, I get hugs. We can’t do that anymore. It’s just changed a lot of things. I don’t know how long we will have to do this. I thought that maybe this is a sign to me that being at home is OK. Really, that’s it. There’s nothing to read between the lines. It is my decision.”

Fascinated since his teenage years in Salisbury, Wiltshire, England, with the “Greatest Spectacle in Racing, Davidson first visited Indianapolis in May 1964, returned the next year to begin working for USAC as a statistician. That’s where he started chronicling the history of the 500-Mile Race. In 1997, he worked for Telex, known today as IMS Productions. He has been the IMS historian since 1998.

“I lived the dream. There were some sad times with all of it. But, I mean, basically I was just living the dream,” Davidson said of this obsession which grew into a career that anointed him an ambassador worldwide for the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and the Indianapolis 500, thanks to his encyclopedic knowledge of both. But Davidson was more than that – he was a savant with style, a pundit with personality, a guru with geniality and graciousness.

“Had this ability to memorize stuff, which is kind of a mystery because I was terrible at schoolwork,” he mused about his life’s path. “But I was able to memorize 500 facts. Anyway, I never expected to be able to do this as long as I did.”

But oh, the things he saw, the people he met, and the history that’s as much his as the song “Back Home Again In Indiana” belonged to Alabama native Jim Nabors.

One of his most lasting memories dates back to 1977 and the day A.J. Foyt became the first driver to win four times at the famous Brickyard.

Davidson said, “Foyt winning for the fourth time and taking the pace car ride with [Speedway owner] Tony Hulman sitting up on the back. That wasn’t about 200-something miles an hour. Tony would often get into the pace car, but Foyt said, ‘No, up on the back with me.’ The fact that we finally had a four-time winner, then Tony Hulman, they took that post-race victory lap, if you like. Must have taken about 20, 25 minutes because the fans were running out on the track, not to disrupt the thing, but just to show their appreciation and admiration. Just the two of them, two of the most iconic figures in the history of the track. Then, of course, [it] was melancholy, because Tony Hulman passed away later that year. But that stands out to me as an amazing moment.

“It’s not all about the Indianapolis 500,” he said. “I mean, I don’t know how many people don’t want to hear this, but Tony Stewart’s two victories in the Brickyard 400, they were hugely emotional moments.

“Golly, there’s been so many great, great moments. Great trivia. To me, the most amazing piece of trivia about the whole place that gets people, because this is general interest, we are now up to the total number of drivers that have driven in the Indianapolis 500 is 785, I believe is the number. I might be corrected. 782. It’s right at that. I think it was 777. Now it would be 782 have driven in the Indianapolis 500. How many with the surname of Smith? None. There’s never been a Smith driving the Indianapolis 500. How can that be? I just love stuff like that,” he said.

“But the iconic moments?” Davidson asked. “Well, there’s been a bunch of them. I can’t put one above them all.”

Some might say Davidson joined the Indianapolis 500 family during the time they consider the “golden age” of the event, with the advent of closed-circuit TV and the spotlight on ABC’s Wide World of Sports.

But Davidson said, “I didn’t have a role in it. I just happened to be on the radio broadcast. Radio was king. The broadcast, there had been radio going back to the ’20s, but it just exploded in the mid ’50s. I think the claim was that the race could be [broadcast] in every country where English was spoken, except behind the Iron Curtain or something like that.

“As far as it being the golden age, I think different people have their version of the golden age. I think when you ask a lot of people, no matter what the sport is – it happens in baseball a lot – when people say, ‘My favorite era was such and such,’ normally that’s when they first discovered it and got into it.’ You sort of accept everything that’s going on now and what’s gone before. You have your heroes. As the new people come along that may be even greater, I think you tend to not hold them in the same esteem as the people when you first got interested,” he said.

“It was very, very exciting times,” Davidson said. “I mean, I remember I had been around for a few years – this had to be probably ’74, ’75 or something – and I was standing with some people the day before the race just talking, media, people outside the old press room. A guy came by. He said, ‘Excuse me, are you Donald Davidson?’ I said, ‘Yes, sir.’ He said, ‘I recognized your voice.’ I said, ‘Are you from around here?’ He said, No, I’m from Sydney, Australia. This is my first visit. I listen to the broadcast, and I recognized your voice.’

“That just gave me goosebumps,” Davidson said. “It was also a lesson to be aware that when you’re talking, any comment that you make, anything you say, you never know who you may be affecting that’s a kid that will come up to you years later and say, ‘Hey, I remember when you did this, that, or the next thing.’ I remember that. It was stunning.”

Paying tribute to the longtime Voice of the 500, Sid Collins, he said, “Thank you, Sid Collins. What a thrill to be part of the Radio Network for all those years. I just had this fantastic three weeks at the track [in 1964.] I thought that I’ve got to pursue this further. I came back the next year on a green card, was hired by a very dear man named Henry Banks, who hired me at USAC. I started there.

“Sid Collins put me on the Radio Network. I was actually a guest. Then I came back the next year, and I’ve been on the network ever since. I think of all the people, and there’s so many people to thank, I have so many wonderful relationships, so many people to thank, but I think Sid Collins and Henry Banks are the two that I would probably put above everybody, because Sid put me on Broadway and Henry Banks was like an uncle to me.”

Davidson hadn’t calculated as a motorsports fan that all those legendary – and kind – people would reach out to him and provide a hand up. He never asked for it. He was just the lucky beneficiary.

“The first time I think I was really aware of [the Indianapolis 500] . . . I was always aware of motor racing. The Brits embraced motorsport. The country is not very big. You would hear the drivers’ names all the time. I’d heard of Stirling Moss, Mike Hawthorn, Alberto Ascari, names that you would hear all the time. I had just entered my teens, so I knew about racing,” he said. “I would get dinky toy racing cars in my Christmas stocking, things like that. Then somebody gave me a magazine, an autosport magazine that was a couple of years old, had no cover on it, but it had the report of the Spanish Grand Prix, which was the last Formula race of 1954. It wasn’t 1954 when I was looking at this – it was a couple of years after that.

“Anyway, because it was the last race, and I loved the way that the grid was printed out on the page, the stats and everything, then it had a table to show the points accrued for the world championship, because that was the final race of the year. You have the Belgian Grand Prix, the Argentine, the Swiss, German, Italian Grand Prix. All of the same names showed up,” Davidson said. Then, puzzled, he said he remembered thinking, “There’s this thing called Indianapolis. How do you pronounce that? What is that?”

He studied it a bit: “When I looked at the names of the people that accrued points, it was Vukovich and McGrath and Rutman and Carter and Nazaruk. I thought, ‘Who are they?’ Dunlop had a promotional thing that you could send away for. They sent you this little booklet which had the map of all the main Grand Prix circuits. Indianapolis was in there. Well, the Nurburgring had 176 turns per lap, and this thing was all just left hand. I asked my dad about it. He knew what Indianapolis was. A lot of people at that time did not. So it just started from there. One thing led to another. I wanted to know more about it.

“Eventually in probably late ’56 there was a review in Motorsport Magazine for the Indianapolis 500 yearbook. My mother got me that for Christmas. When I got my first 500 yearbook, 1956, just a whole new world opened up for me,” Davidson said. “The pictures of the cars, they were so beautifully done, so shiny . . . the car names . . . all of this.

“In 1957 and ’58, Monza in Italy had a high-speed section for record breaking. The Americans went over there to race the Europeans. When they showed up there, I mean, these amazing cars that were just so beautiful – paint jobs, pinstriping, everything like that – I just hooked onto that and started memorizing results,” he said.

And Davidson worked to get to his first Indianapolis 500-Mile Race.

“Over a period of the next few years, I saved up the money. I mean, I didn’t know about charge cards and all this other stuff. I actually saved up the money from zero to enough to be able to come. I almost came in 1963. That didn’t quite work out. But then ’64 was when I made the debut, or at least my first appearance.”

He said, “There was a lady named Miss Frances Derr who was the director of ticket sales. We struck up a correspondence. When it finally came time for me to come, I bought a ticket, which was like a week salary for the ticket. She told me how to get accommodations. I stayed with a family right outside of Turn 3. She said, ‘Because you’re coming from overseas, we’ll furnish you with a bronze badge, which will get you in the garage area.’ I thought, ‘You’re kidding me? I didn’t even have to ask for this.’

“Things happened in a hurry. I showed up. I got the bronze. Within a very short time, I met Sid Collins. He gave me a little card so that I could get into the pit area. Within less than 24 hours, I already had a silver [badge].”

Davidson made the most of those connections and those kindnesses. And it led to his carving his own niche in a unique environment that’s not just a race but a community. It’s a colorful community full of racers, racer wannabes, revered chief mechanics, crew members, team owners, manufacturers, sponsors, tech specialists, reporters, photographers, celebrities, and peripheral people who all loved this spectacle, which back then was spread over the entire month of May, complete with a parade.

And now Davidson is pulling back, if it’s possible to pull away once the spirit of the world’s largest single-day sporting event has pervaded his life.

“One fellow said it’s like Johnny Carson leaving NBC,” Davidson said. “I thought, Whoa, c’mon. Well, I’m really, really blessed and very grateful to those people.

“As I sort of became a senior citizen, I began to think about a lot of other things I would like to do, really, locally, just around the house,” he said. “I don’t want to go to every baseball park or any Formula 1 Grand Prix, anything like that. There’s just a lot of stuff. I bought a lot of books I never read, movies that I’ve never watched.”

For all those books he bought but never read, for all those movies he never sat down to enjoy, Davidson could have spun a series of books and scripted a dozen films about the Indianapolis 500-Mile Race. This “old soldier” won’t fade away – literally and in the hearts of anyone who has been immersed in the Indianapolis 500.