Parnelli Jones and his Watson-Offy roadster taught Lotus and Jim Clark a lesson or two at the Indy500 60 years ago. DavidMalsher recounts the tale of a controversial month at the Brickyard ⬇️
Jim Hurtubise was the man who warned them all. He set a four-lap qualifying average of 149.056mph on the fourth day of time trials for the 1960 Indianapolis 500 – a new record and about 2.5mph faster than Eddie Sachs’s polewinning average from a week earlier. Then he informed anyone who’d listen that there was someone even better coming soon…
Come 1961, now with the backing of hog-farming and waste-disposal entrepreneur J.C. Agajanian , Jones had a Watson roadster at his disposal and he wasn’t about to waste it. Jones was now most definitely one to watch, and in 1962 he started to move the game on. After a second place at Trenton, he arrived at the Speedway as one of the favourites, and he did not disappoint. Four laps above the magic 150mph barrier sealed pole, and in the race he led 120 laps, even lapping eventual winner Rodger Ward. But a brake line failed, making pitstops a nightmare, and he came home seventh.
Two years earlier, Jack Brabham had put on a decent display in the rear-engined Kimberly Cooper Climax, qualifying 17out of 33 and finishing ninth. Its 2.7-litre engine was some 170bhp down on the 4.2-litre Offenhausers of the front-engined roadsters – 270bhp vs. 440bhp – but he was making up a hell of a lot of time in the turns. Just think, if you could marry roadster horsepower to the rear-engined car’s centre of gravity...
Up front, on pole for the second straight year, was Jones in the #98 “Ol’ Calhoun” Watson-Offy, alongside Hurtubise in the Kurtis powered by the cataclysmically loud Novi, and Branson in the Leader Card Watson-Offy. Two more examples of this go-to chassis-engine combo sat on row two, flanking Clark’s Lotus, with Ward on the inside and Jim McElreath on the outside.
Hurtubise's Kurtis-Novi would lead the first lap and no more, as Jones set the pace for 167 of the 200 lapsWhen Gurney and Clark finally stopped on laps 92 and 95 respectively, Jones re-took the lead, and the now fuel-heavy Lotus duo could do nothing about him. Nor could anyone else, in fact. Clark was able to retain second ahead of Hurtubise and Foyt, but when Jones made his second stop, he was far enough ahead of the little Lotus that he didn’t surrender P1.
“Of course, towards the end of the race I had obviously slowed way down during that time and that gave Jimmy Clark a chance to start closing up a little bit. But I was long gone and then I started picking up the pace again.” “That close to the end of the race, I wouldn’t have come in anyway,” said Jones when discussing the black flag – or lack thereof. “They may have disqualified me or whatever but I was going to win the race one way or the other.
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