Remembering 'Death's Corner' - Langhorne Speedway | Frank's Place
It was a big attraction when the Philly area was a hotbed of Indy car racing.
W ho won the 2017 Indianapolis 500?
Several days after last Sunday's race, I still didn't know. So I asked a few people, some of them devoted motorheads.
None of them knew either.
Despite the huge crowd that packed the Indianapolis Motor Speedway for the race won by Japan's Takuma Sato, Indy has joined the growing ranks of sporting events that don't interest most Americans.
Tracking "the 500," whether on radio or TV, used to be as universal a Memorial Day tradition as parades and baseball doubleheaders. This year's telecast, by contrast, attracted the lowest ratings since ABC began airing the race live in 1986.
Overall, Indy car, or Championship car, racing has virtually vanished from the United States. It disappeared years ago from the Philadelphia area, where it once was a vibrant and popular sport.
Trenton had a busy racing oval. So did Nazareth. But the best-known and most notorious of all the local tracks was Langhorne Speedway.
I was simultaneously introduced to both Langhorne and the sport that thrived there for nearly a half-century in 1960, at the first wedding I ever attended.
It was no Union League affair. The bride was pregnant and not yet 15. The groom had a criminal record, which is probably why the police showed up so quickly to quell a dance-floor brawl he initiated by sucker-punching a guest.
I'd met the bride, the slightly older granddaughter of a family friend. But all I knew about the greasy-haired groom was what I learned that Saturday: He had a quick left hook and he worked - and occasionally raced - at Langhorne Speedway.
"What," I asked with an 11-year-old's innocent curiosity, "is Langhorne Speedway?"
A considerably less-than-sober groomsman said it was "a hell of a race track," one that was just a short drive down Route 1 from the Langhorne reception site he'd soon help to trash. "If you're interested," he added, "there's a race there tonight."
I didn't get there and I'm sorry about that now. Because the more I learned about Langhorne Speedway in the years that roared by at the speed of Indy qualifiers, the more compelling it became.
Originally Philadelphia Speedway, it was constructed in 1926 by local auto-racing enthusiasts who hoped to lure visitors to that year's Philadelphia Sesquicentennial Exposition.
A circular track, Langhorne was for most of its mid-century heyday a big-time racing venue and allegedly the fastest one-mile oval anywhere. It hosted races sponsored by NASCAR, the United States Automobile Club, and other national sanctioning bodies.
But it also grew to be the least favorite stop of almost everyone who raced motorized vehicles for a living.
L. Spencer Riggs, who wrote its history, Langhorne! No Man's Land, called the track a "man-breaker."
Three-time Indy 500 winner Bobby Unser's description of Langhorne provided the headline for a 2014 MotorTrend article by Preston Lerner:
"The Most Dangerous, Most Treacherous, Most Murderous Track There Ever Was."
Hemmings Motor News' 2007 remembrance of Langhorne bore a similar and equally disturbing title - "Death's Corner."
"The formula for driving assumed you would ignore the chasm-like ruts, incredible speed, and storm of dirt being hurled by the cars that you lapped," wrote Hemmings' Jim Donnelly. "It took for granted that you'd ignore the constant, mortal danger of attacking Langhorne flat-out."
That danger helped explain why, in the 1950s and 1960s, crowds regularly filled Langhorne - which could accommodate more than 50,000 spectators - to watch Indy cars, motorcycles, stock cars, and midget and dirt racers.
The excitement usually occurred on a rutted downhill turn that drivers derisively called "Puke Hollow." A nickname that also could have applied to that 1960 wedding, it referred instead to the nausea and nerves drivers experienced before, during, and after Langhorne events.
"Many drivers refused to go," Lerner wrote. "And some of those who did never came home. . . . Nearly two dozen drivers were killed at the 'Horne, along with another dozen or so motorcycle riders, flaggers and spectators."
One racer miraculously survived a "Puke Hollow" wreck despite being impaled by a 4-foot-long section of wooden guardrail.
To keep a car steady and on the track through "Puke Hollow" required a special combination of resolve and physical strength. Mario Andretti, who debuted there after a sleepless night in 1964, said he used to grip the wheel so tightly at Langhorne that he'd wrap his hands in electrical tape beforehand. Still, after the races, they'd be bloodied and blistered.
The quality of racers who finished first in Indy car events at Langhorne is a tribute to its difficulty. A.J. Foyt won four times, Andretti and Bobby Unser twice, Al Unser and Gordon Johncock once.
Langhorne not only punished recklessness, it rewarded it. Full-tilt drivers such as Foyt, who relished the Bucks County oval's challenges, ran well there, both when it was a dirt track and after it was paved in 1964.
But most racers dreaded going to "Death's Corner."
"Nobody liked it," Unser told Lerner, "and the ones who say they did are lying."
Ultimately, the fear and loathing Langhorne bred in competitors was its downfall. In 1971, drivers voted to boycott a USAC race scheduled there. Before the year ended, the speedway was shut down, giving way initially to a shopping center and later to several big-box stores.
They still run a traditional, open-wheel event at Pocono Raceway in August, but most Indy car events are Grand Prix, run through temporary courses on the streets of cities a long way from here.
Nine years after Langhorne closed, Trenton Speedway shut its doors. Nazareth Speedway went under in 2004. They're all members now of the constantly growing roster of area sports ghosts.
I'm happy to report, however, that all of those speedways outlasted the marriage that began so inauspiciously on a race day in Langhorne.
@philafitz