Rose Delights In Memories Of Both Drag Racing, Indianapolis 500

By Susan Wade

The rather low-key, mustachioed man took his routine noontime break June 1, 1948, at the Allison Engineering plant at Speedway, Ind.

The day before, just a couple of blocks away, he – Mauri Rose – was the toast of the auto-racing world for becoming only the second (after Louis Meyer) to win the Indianapolis 500 Mile Race three times. But true to his code of responsible workplace ethics, Rose was back on the job as an engineer.

After all, almost every day during May he had taken practice laps around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in his race car during his lunch time. He would clock out, dash across the street, take care of his racing obligations, clock back in an hour later, and finish his workday at the operation that had become a division of General Motors. Rose took pride in not missing a day of work.

He actually didn’t have a perfect record there. In his very first race, in a sprint car, he crashed and was knocked unconscious. He woke up in a hospital in Ohio and noticed he was in a flimsy hospital gown. “Where are my clothes?!” he asked excitedly. “I’ve got to get back to work Monday morning!” The hospital attendant told him, “This is Tuesday.”

Nevertheless, less than 24 hours after achieving something no other man would repeat for 19 years, he shrugged off racing glory and calmly started to polish off his sack lunch.

His co-worker sitting beside him struck up a conversation: “Did you see the race yesterday?”

“I saw some of it,” Rose replied nonchalantly.

“Yeah, good race, huh? Some guy . . . Manny . . . Murray . . . something like that . . . won it.”

Rose nodded and kept eating. The gentleman sitting next to him had no clue he was speaking with a three-time winner of the Indianapolis 500.

Mauri Rose, Jr. gets a kick out of that story and so many other tales about his famous father – and about his own connections to “The Greatest Spectacle In Racing.” He has settled into a slower life in Warren, Mich., after working on championship (open-wheel) cars – including for team owner Mickey Thompson on Duane Carter’s Harvey Aluminum Chevrolet in 1963 – and driving vintage 500 cars as pole-day exhibition entertainment at the famed Brickyard.

But Rose Jr. also can spin plenty of yarns about his own racing days – NHRA drag-racing days, when he competed in Comp Eliminator with a small-block Chevy dragster after campaigning a D/Altered Corvette. (His father, incidentally, had played a key role in deigning and fabricating the first production Corvette and shaping it into a racing car.)

Rose Jr. also raced at Indianapolis – Indianapolis Raceway Park, that is, starting with the 1964 U.S. Nationals. The facility today is called Lucas Oil Raceway at Indianapolis, and for the first time ever, the Indianapolis 500 and NHRA’s U.S. Nationals will run two weeks apart. The Labor Day classic drag race will be Sept. 3-6.

“I don’t get out to the races much,” Rose Jr., 79, said about today’s travel to Indianapolis, but he had been well-known at both Indianapolis racetracks since he was about five years old. When he was eight, he had the distinction of meeting movie idol Clark Gable, who had starred with Rose’s father in the 1950 movie “To Please A Lady.” Some segments of the show had been filmed at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, as 1941, 1947, and 1948 “500” winner Rose had played himself.

“I’ve got a picture of my dad and me and my dad’s fiancée at the time – the only good wife he ever had . . . No. 3. He married four times. My dad and I were alike like you wouldn’t believe, except for one thing: I’ve been married once, to the same lady, for 54 years. He was married four dang times. He was like oil and water with women,” Rose Jr. said.

“So I’ve got a picture of Clark Gable shaking my hand when I was eight years old,” he said, sharing that Gable “spoke nicely. He wasn’t a wiseguy or nothin’. He was not trying to impress anybody. I remember that pretty good. But I’ve got a lot of memories about the old days at Indy.”

And he has developed what he has called “Mauri-isms.”

One is: “There are natural drivers and then there are ones who have to work the trade to learn it. Not everybody is a race driver – might claim to be, but they’re not.” Parnelli Jones, the 1963 Indianapolis 500 winner and victor in many stock car, sprint car, midget cars, sports cars, and off-road races, was one of “the naturals,” both Rose and his father concurred.

Another is: “When you’re a racer of any kind, you become a psychologist, whether you want to or not, because you analyze this guy and that guy and so on.”

Maybe one of his more entertaining ones is his longtime opinion that “in racing, in just about everything, especially NASCAR and IndyCar, they are so sophisticated they’re constipated. That’s exactly what it is. They’re not racing cars anymore – they’re racing checkbooks. Whoever spends the most money in development is going to win the race nine times out of 10 – and that’s Penske.” He still acts surprised at the memory of 1995 qualifying, when Team Penske drivers Emerson Fittipaldi and Al Unser Jr. failed to qualify (one of the rare instances when “Penske” and “fail” have appeared in the same sentence). But Rose recalled, “The stands were [full of people] clapping and cheering like gangbusters.”

One feat Rose Jr. takes pride in is the fact he never stalled an engine in any of the vintage cars during “filler runs” at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. His favorite was the Bowes Seal Fast Watson roadster in which A.J. Foyt won the 1961 race. (That happened to be the final race in which the competitors raced on original bricks besides the ones – the “Yard of Bricks” – that remain at the start/finish line. The main straightaway was paved that October, burying the last of the 3.2 million bricks except for the yard of them that is exposed today.) “It was like the car was made for me,” Rose Jr. said of the Foyt machine in which he felt so comfortable.

The 1934 Cummins Diesel Special in which Dave Evans drove to 19th place without ever making a pit stop was another matter. Rose Jr. called it “the biggest pile of crap I ever drove in my life.”

He said, “The clutch pedal and the brake pedal were reversed. The clutch pedal was close to the throttle, and the brake pedal was on the outside to the left. I don’t know why anybody would do that. The throttle pedal was about 13 inches long, and you’d move the throttle about two inches before you got any RPM reaction at all. It had such a high gear in it, in the rear end, that it shuddered, like how somebody would drive a car who has never driven a stick [stick shift] before. That’s how that car was. But I didn’t stall it.” However, it did start blowing smoke like a chimney. Knowing the drivers were about to begin qualifying and needed a pristine racing surface, Rose just nursed it around under the inside line back to the pits and parked it. “And that was that,” he said.

Rose Jr. has had about as much patience with the NHRA through the years as he had with that Evans car.

“I’m a guy who speaks my mind. I’m not into politics. I don’t sugar-coat it. When there’s something wrong, I’m going to tell you my opinion,” he said. He doesn’t suffer fools gladly, and he found more of those than he would have liked. So it’s no shock when he chided an NHRA official once because that official ignored him when he asked a question, pretended to read a paper rather than respond to Rose. “Is it too much trouble to stand here and listen to what the hell I’ve got to say?” he grumbled. “He had a dumbfounded look on his face, and I just walked away.” He referred to particular former NHRA employees as “idiots” and one of them as “a horse’s a—” and said the sanctioning body has gone downhill following the death of founder Wally Parks.

But his fond remembrances outweigh the annoying. He said he especially enjoyed starter Buster Couch. “Buster was a heck of a starter,” Rose said, “but he was a really good guy. And he looked out for the racers.”

The sight of Couch tangling with Connie Kalitta was one he still laughs at. “Buster told Connie Kalitta, when Connie was still running Top Fuel, to shut it off one time. And he didn’t shut it off. And Connie’s a pretty tough old bird, and he was pretty good sized, too,” Rose said. “Buster unhooked the [seat] belt and yanked Connie right out of the car. It was something else.

“My boy and my daughter, when they were like [aged] eight to 10, would back me up. After I did my burnout and backed up, Buster would always grab my son, Scott, and he would hang onto him until we left the starting line. And then my boy would always run over to the side and get in the tow truck with my wife and daughter to come down and get me,” he said. “Buster was known for looking out for everybody, and when something wasn’t right with the racers, Buster would go to war to help remedy that problem.”

He said, “Another one who was real good was Keith Ferrell, the Division 3 director. He was a straight-up guy. He fought for the racers.” He put Lynwood Dupuy and Steve Gibbs, the former directors of competition, in the same category. Ditto for innovator-crew chief Dale Armstrong and a handful of others.

One character he can’t forget is the late Smokey Yunick, the legendary car builder, mechanic, and crew chief who was revered in garages throughout NASCAR and IndyCar. After Rose Sr. retired in 1951, his son said, “he got hooked up with Smokey and all his projects. I met Smokey when I was 14 years old” and worked on one of those projects. He described Yunick as “smart, real smart, with a dry sense of humor” and said, “If my dad and Smokey had gotten together in the same era, they would have kicked some serious butt for years, believe me.

“I could talk for hours about some of the stuff that went on,” Rose said.

He had one more “Mauri-ism”: “All racers mellow when we get old.”

Um, don’t believe that one.