Bruce Burness – Part II

When last we left Bruce Burness (April VR) he had just initiated his lasting association with Trevor Harris where they performed what he called “the ultimate male-bonding experience.” In this second part of VR Associate Editor John Zimmermann’s interview, Burness discusses the achievement he considers the pinnacle of his career, and more.

While you were involved with Pete Brock on that Toyota GT project, weren’t you also working once more with George Follmer on his Lola T70?

Burness: Yeah, George asked me to take over his Lola T70 MK II for the upcoming 1967 USRRC series. At that point I was only working on our Toyota JP6 project. We were so bucks down, Trevor and I thought if George paid me to prepare and crew chief the Lola T70 we could keep the doors open a little longer. Our shop had two identical industrial units, so we each had our own separate work area. Trevor was designing and constructing the Toyota car on one side and I was the caretaker of Follmer’s Lola on the other side. Both of us did some work on each other’s project.

George’s Lola originally had a Traco Chevy in it, but George did an engine deal with Al Bartz. At the time Bartz engines seemed to be a little bit more powerful than those from Traco, although I’m not sure that they were. I think it depended on which Traco engine you had. I think Penske got better Tracos, and Bartz already knew what they were doing because he had worked there. We were the Bartz official development team, and that’s why our season went upside down. Al Bartz was developing a simplified dry-sump oil system to cope with the high g-forces that came along with the wide, flat tires and the advent of aerodynamic “downforce.” We led nearly every race we entered. George was almost always on the pole and led most of the races, but finished almost none of them. George eventually had to park the Lola because we won very little prize money. After the USRRC series ended, Roger Penske asked George to drive a second Lola T70 MK III as a teammate to Mark Donohue as the 1967 Can-Am series was just about to start.

Weren’t you also George’s crew chief when he won the Indycar race at Phoenix in the spring of 1969?[pullquote]

“It was a real revelation to me that many of those guys, at least three-quarters of the field, had no plans to win the race. I thought, if we don’t have a chance to win the race, what is the point of being here.”

[/pullquote]

Burness: No, I was a just a crewmember. Howard Gilbert was the crew chief. Yes, we won that race with the stock block Chevy-powered Gilbert Cheetah. The Phoenix race was the first and only time working with an Indycar that I was given complete freedom with the chassis setup. Because I was not familiar with oval track technology, I decided to treat it as if the race were a road race and not an oval track race. I was not up to speed with oval track voodoo technology, so I had no choice but to see how far I could go using technology I was familiar with. The setup was completely symmetrical except for tire cambers. There was no stagger because we were probably the only car there with a differential. Everyone else used “spools.” Messing with stagger doesn’t work if your car has a differential. The engine was a Hilborn-injected Bartz 320 Chevy. A month before the race we did a weeklong Firestone tire test at Phoenix. We had 620 hp on 10 percent nitro—they still allowed you to use nitro in those days—compared to something like 900 hp for the turbos. The thing was bog slow on the straightaway. Late in the week Follmer reported that the steering was real heavy and he didn’t know whether or not he was strong enough to do 200 miles like that. He described the heavy steering as needing more rotation of the steering wheel right after corner entry and more and more the farther into the turn he traveled. I suspected the car was pushing badly. At that point in George’s career, none of us used proper terminology. Actually Mark Donohue put me on to this. George would describe how it felt, but he might use the wrong terminology. We were at Riverside with the Lola T70. Donohue pulled into the pit lane right behind us shortly after George pulled into pits. George got out of the car and he’s talking to me and Donohue could overhear our conversation. He took me aside right after my conversation with Follmer ended. “You know, I just followed that car for five laps, and it’s doing the opposite of what he just told you.” I’m thinking, “Donohue’s just trying to put a mental wheel under us,” because we were archrivals, but we were also pals, we drank a lot of beers together. So, anyway, I thought about what Mark had said, and did the opposite of what George said. When George went back out on the track, the car was much better. This backward terminology turned out to be a secret advantage, because George could tell me what he thought was wrong, and if anybody would try to run with that information, they’d be on a wild goose chase. At that point in time I was the only interpreter in the world for George. I don’t know if George ever knew that. So, when George complained about the steering on the Indycar, I made an aluminum “mustache” to pop rivet to the underside of the nose and Bingo! We had been about three seconds a lap off the pace, and suddenly we were within a second, with still no horsepower. He also said, “Boy, that really planted the front end, and the steering’s light as well, I think the car is now possibly loose in the rear.” So I made a spoiler with a little kick-up that we could hose-clamp to the exhaust pipes, George went back out and got within half a second of Big Al’s best time. We came back a month or so later for the race, and this time Bartz said, “We’re going to run this thing on 20 percent.” So we’re rolling 55-gallon drums in the pits trying to mix the nitro with the methanol. We were the only ones doing that because everyone else is running straight methanol, as they had turbos.

Howard Gilbert was the most professional guy I ever worked with in motor racing, an amazing guy. Not amazing in the same way that Trevor is amazing, but as a professional guy who could take a car to a race and have a trouble-free weekend. He’s so organized and never gets hysterical. He let me have full rein—maybe Follmer insisted on it—he let me do my thing, whatever I wanted to do. Anyway, we went back for the race, and at the 11th hour Follmer qualified 2nd, on the front row, right next to Big Al, and Howard and me are really pissed off because we thought we could get the pole. One of my friends, a guy named Frank Keller, says, “What’s wrong with you guys? You’re on the front row!” He says, “I was here last year with Jerry Eisert and we were the last car to get in the race, and we had a big celebration and a party. You guys are on the front row and you’re pissed off.” So I thought about that, and it was a real revelation to me that so many of those people, at least three-quarters of the field, had no plans to win the race, they just wanted to get in. I thought, if we don’t have a chance to win, what is the point of being there. For most of those guys it was good enough just to be there.

So the race started and immediately Follmer dropped back to about 10th or 12th, until finally the field got strung out. We had cornering power on those guys, but when the track was full, he couldn’t use it, there was always a car in the middle of the turn going slower. On an oval you can’t just lean on a guy. It took about half the race before the track had opened up enough so that George could wick it up. He started marching forward and got up to 2nd place. Big Al’s leading it, and he breaks down and we win the race.

With the Lotus-Porsche, we prevailed because of a fluke in the rules, but in this case everybody was playing by the same rules. It was my first and only time that I had total control of the chassis setup, and we prevailed, so for me as a personal achievement, it’s the pinnacle. I’ve done a lot of stuff, but that one, at that stage of my career, not knowing what I’m doing, never been part of an oval track race, ever, that to me was a big deal. A few months later a very famous USAC regular accused us of just backing into the Phoenix victory. I jumped on the moment to remind him that we backed into the win from the front row of the grid.

Then didn’t you later go to Indianapolis with George?

Burness: As soon as we won the Phoenix race, Ford called up and said, ”How’d you like to have a brand new Turbo Ford in the back of your car?” So Howard installs the new Turbo Ford before we head toward Indy. The car originally had a Ford, but not a turbo. After we had been practicing for about a week George was way off the pace, like 15 mph off the pace. One day a long time crony of Howard’s comes into our garage and says, “I’ve been down in Turn 1 and I think I know why he’s off the pace. He’s not using the whole racetrack.” George had run there a couple of previous years for George Bryant with Howard as his mechanic. “Yeah, he’s so far away from the wall, he’s not using the whole track.” Shortly, George comes in and he’s complaining about the car being loose, scary this and that, and Howard does the opposite of what I would have done, and I said, “Why did you do that?” And he said, “You just watch. We’re going get him used to running close to the wall,” so he made the thing looser yet. George comes back in and says, “I can hardly drive the thing.” Howard says, “OK, I’ll make another adjustment,” and he makes it worse yet and sends him back out. Follmer says he wants to come in, and Howard says, “Nope, stay out there a little longer.” After this went on for an hour or so, George finally comes in and says, “God, it’s awful.” Then Howard goes the direction Follmer wanted originally, and bingo, 12 mph. Just because he got used to being close to the wall. Howard knew how to do that with a driver without the driver ever knowing. I almost had a nervous breakdown.

Later on you were involved in that Lotus 70 Follmer drove in F5000 with Ryan Falconer engines, can you tell us about that?

Burness: Ryan called me and said he and John Dunn had a whole bunch of these Ford Trans-Am 305 dry-deck Fords. They had supplied the engine for the Lotus 70 Mario Andretti had driven at Sebring the year before, and wanted to know if I would prepare the car if they supplied the engines, so I agreed. The car was radically different. Martin Waide was the designer. Later on we became good friends. When we received this car it arrived as an erector set in a big box. We had no pictures, no anything. It was like a jigsaw puzzle. The more we played with it we thought, “Boy, this is a clever car.” We took it to Elkhart Lake for our first race. The only races we could go to were ones where George was going to be there for the Ford Trans-Am team because there was no budget for this thing. He finished third. Then Ford invited us to Kar Kraft in Dearborn, because our next race was in St. Jovite, Canada. Joe Cavaglieri took the car up there and spent the two weeks between races working on it. The Kar Kraft guys made us some beautiful downswept stainless headers that were really simple and light. Also we did a few other minor improvements to it. We went up to St. Jovite and Follmer lapped the entire field. That car had a spindle that went into a magnesium upright, and the only thing that kept the spindle in the upright was a shrink fit and one snap ring. After the race all the other guys said, “You guys must be cheating;” they were furious with us. So they were measuring our wing and this and that, and I’m looking at the car and I’m wiggling the front wheel and I realize the wheel is about to fall off! The only thing keeping it on was the brake caliper. George had barely noticed it, but said, “I thought it felt a little funny up there.” (Laughs) Then we went to Mosport and didn’t do too good there, It rained during the race and George lost some time with an off-track excursion. We finished 7th, two laps back, Next we went to Mid-Ohio and killed them. We set the ultimate track record there that stood for about a decade. The big reason the Lotus was so blindingly fast was that dry-deck Ford. The Ford was powerful and had massive torque. We had an “unfair advantage.”

After that you worked in international motocross, and got involved with Ohlins shock absorbers, how did that happen?

Burness: Follmer had called me and asked me to work with him on the Bobby Rinzler team that was about to run the ex-Penske 917/10 Porsches. I was all set to go to Zuffenhausen for indoctrination, but at the last moment I changed my mind. I told George I no longer wanted to find a new team to work for at the end of each season. At that time most of the teams were privateer/driver owned. I had been involved with motorcycles since the early days of my fascination with motor racing. The difference between motorcycle racing and car racing is that in car racing most all the teams are privately owned and in motorcycle racing the teams are mostly factory teams. My thought was that that maybe I had a better chance of employment stability beyond one year if I went back to my motorcycle racing roots. I told George, I don’t want to be having to do this every year and be gallivanting around, so I’m just going to stay here and try to build a reputation in something that’s not just a sport, but a real business.”

The first thing I did in my return to motorcycling was to go to work for S&W. I already knew Art Sparks and Tim Witham, who were the S and the W. Sparks was the silent partner, and Witham was the guy who ran it. Cliff Collins of Harman-Collins, was one of the best cam-grinder guys, S&W made motorcycle shock absorbers and a gazillion suspension springs. They also made front fork kits for several motorcycle brands. Their original product line was the progressive engine valve springs and collars. All the valve train parts were designed by Cliff Collins. I went to work for them and little by little I got really entrenched in motorcycle suspension. Eventually, in ’77 I believe, my friend Steve Whitelock was running the whole Honda motocross program in Germany, and I had earlier worked with him for S&W in the USA for Honda. Steve said there was a guy in Sweden who was making wonderful suspension stuff. He was working for Brad Lackey at that time, and he told me, “Brad and I want to be the importer for this stuff, but we can’t do it, and still work for Honda, so we want you to run it. We’ll own it and you run it.” They flew me over to Germany and from there Steve and I drove to Namur in Belgium and met Kent Ohlins. In the meantime, Brad had decided that he wanted to have the whole deal to himself, and he’d made a pitch to Kent before we got there, but Kent knew that the original proposal was for the three of us. Kent didn’t know me, but when Brad tried to do an end-run around us, he took a dim view of Brad’s proposal. So we went to Namur and I met Kent Ohlins there, then we drove back to Frankfurt and I flew to Sweden to spend a week up there and get to know those guys.

Husqvarna in Kearny Mesa, near San Diego, was the American importer at that time, so I was working through them and covering all the USA motocross races. Eventually, in the beginning of 1979, Kent said, “Why don’t you just move over here and work here?” So that’s what I did. I moved over to Sweden in early ’79 and I was kind of commuting, I’d be over there four months and over here two months. That went on until ’82. I covered all the World Motocross Championship races—125s, 250s and 500s—so for those four years there was a total of 12 World Championships awarded. Ohlins Racing AB won nine of those World Championships. Two of the three championships we didn’t win, were not contested by Ohlins AB. That is when I really got submerged in shock absorber development. The first time I had ever seen the inside of a shock was at that USRRC race in Pensacola when we had the shaft and piston pull out of the body in an early practice session. Since I had to repair that shock to start the race I got my first look inside a shock absorber. If I knew then what I know now, I could have dominated any series in the world because none of us had any idea of the performance potential lurking inside a shock absorber. Now everybody knows it.

Then you were involved with Trevor and Joe Cavaglieri on a Can-Am car for Rick Galles. Can you talk about that?

Burness: Going back and forth to Europe for the motocross races I lost contact with all my friends here, and I wasn’t there for long enough periods to make any lasting new friendships. I was feeling like I was without a country, and finally I decided I’d had enough. I came back and Joe and Trevor were building the Frissbee Can-Am car for Rick Galles. Once they heard I was back they asked if I would make some parts for them, suspension arms and such. I worked in their shop on that car for the entire season. Little Al (Unser) won the Can-Am championship that year. Then Jacques Villeneuve (the uncle –Ed.) won the championship with it the next year. I believe another driver won a third championship with the same car later on. That car was mind-bogglingly fast. I wasn’t really part of the team, I was just this hired fabricator guy. I didn’t go to any races, but I did go out to the shakedown tests at Willow Springs. I think they might have raced it once before the next test, which was at Riverside Raceway. This Riverside test was a big all-day test. That car had so much downforce none of us could believe it. Little Al said he could just leave the throttle wide open from the exit of Turn 7 and keep it down all the way down the back straight, around Turn 9 and all the way up the front straight, through the Esses and up to the entry of Turn 6 without lifting. It was unbelievable how much cornering power that thing had. That day the Frissbee broke the ultimate lap record at Riverside Raceway that had stood for a decade. The previous record had been held by Mark Donohue in the Porsche 917-30 which had at least 1300hp. The Frissbee’s maximum power was 575. The next year Little Al switched to Indycars and had some difficulty because of the reduced grip of those Indycars. He had a real hard time adapting to Indycars—for the first year anyway. Galles hired Trevor as engineer and Joe as team manager. They had an Eagle, and Trevor had been involved in that car with Dan, but then later Little Al fired Joe, and then he fired Trevor, but the bottom line is that all those Indycars were like ice racers compared to that Frissbee. John Morton told me that the original Frissbee was the first car in which he needed a neck restraint strap. John could not hold his head up at Willow Springs. It had 13-inch wheels in the front, and he said if you went flat-out for any more than three laps it would blister the front tires. So, the way you raced it was you would go like hell for three laps and then you’d cruise for a bunch of laps and then you would go like hell again, that was the only way you could get through a race without blistering the tires.

After that Can-Am experience where did you work next?

Burness: From there, I became a consultant with Doug Shierson’s Indycar team, where Dennis Swan, another bloke from Pasadena, was working. He knew I’d been fiddling around with shocks, so he called me up and said he remembered I had been doing shocks. They were testing at Phoenix with Al Unser Jr., and the car had been losing rear traction in the dogleg. He asked how he could make his shocks better, so I said loosen up the rebound so the tire can get back in contact with the track. That was what I discovered—there was a lot of voodoo technology in shocks, not so much now, but in those days there was—but the conventional wisdom was tie it down with the shock. Well, if the tire can’t follow the road surface it’s gonna fly. I said loosen up the rebound in the rear suspension, and if anything else, give it more compression. So he did that and some time later he called me and said, “You know, we were totally lost, and I was scared to death to loosen up the rebound, but it was like magic. The problem just disappeared.” So we began collaborating and he got kind of intrigued, and I became sort of an adviser to him. He’d send me shocks and then finally he asked me to be a full-time consultant for Shierson. Ian Reed was Shierson’s engineer, and he called me up and said he and Terry Satchel had been fiddling, trying to get different damping in jounce than in roll, but they didn’t know how to do that. I flew back there to Michigan in the dead of winter, and he had primed the pump so that I could invent right on the spot. Anything that I came up with, he could immediately punch some numbers and see if it was going to work. It was an amazing experience because it was really one of only a couple of times where I could invent on demand. Trevor can do that all the time, but for me it was a revelation that if you’re primed with the right information, and even if you’ve never thought about this issue before, you could come up with a solution. What it got down to was I found a way to cross-couple the shock absorbers from side to side, from the bottom of one to the top of the other. I had valving in the cross-coupling and I also had valving in the pistons. So in jounce the oil would have to go over the pistons and in roll it was the valving that went the other way to the shock on the other side, the compression would drive it over to the other side and so you could have two completely different valvings.

Eventually you did become the American representative for Ohlins. How did that happen?

Burness: At the end of ’95 Kent Ohlins called me and said that they had a new product line. Patrick Racing had done a year of development on this new shock and now Ohlins wanted to offer them to the public and wanted me to be the point guy, so I agreed. The deal was for all classes of road racing and ovals in the USA. In the process I got hooked up with Lynx Racing running Patrick Carpentier in Toyota Atlantic. Steve Cameron owned the team and his brother Ricky was the chief mechanic, and they had Jim Griffith as their engineer. Those guys were game for anything. We tested two or three days a week, every week. They were relentless, and they were already way out of the box compared to the other teams. They had already done some really effective modifications. With Carpentier we won nine of 12 races that season, the last eight of them in a row. In the following year they had Alex Barron and Memo Gidley and won the championship again with Alex. I believe of every driver I ever worked with, as far as pure natural car control, the best guy I ever saw was Alex Barron. In this day and age of high downforce, he could still four-wheel drift ’em—I mean really drift ’em, not slide them—and keep it right on the line where it needed to be.

Subsequently, you got to work with Alex Zanardi at Chip Ganassi’s, what was he like? 

Burness: Zanardi is the most amazing driver and human being I ever worked with. I was the lucky one who was delegated to introduce Chip Ganassi to Ohlins shocks. Elkhart Lake was the venue and Alex Zanardi was the test driver. This test was the first time that Zanardi had seen the Elkhart Lake track. In 45 minutes we totally turned their car around so that he was the fastest car there. All I had to do was turn the shock adjustable knobs in the direction that I thought would provide what Alex requested. I learned to do whatever Alex requested. He said, “I need more support in the rear,” which meant it was rolling too much. So all I had to do was turn the knobs on each shock two or three clicks and send him back out. Bingo, he’s faster. Comes back in and says, “That was a lot better.” Then he says, “do you think we could do a little more of that? Is that possible?” I said, “Sure.” So I did three more clicks and he went back out, first time he’d ever been to Elkhart, and he was the fastest guy on the track. He came back in and says, “That was really good, we don’t need to do any more today. The rear end is good now, we need to work on the front, but we’re gonna do that on our own because we don’t want to educate you too much!”

The following year, Ganassi didn’t want to run Ohlins unless they had a Ohlins guy who was exclusive to them; they didn’t want anything they were learning to go anywhere else, so Ohlins agreed to do that and they created a technician dedicated only to them. Jim Anderson was that guy, he did it all, but all the new settings were done here at my shop anyway. He did all the work because I had 40-some-odd teams between Atlantic and Indy Lights, Indycars, Trans-Am, IRL and Formula Fords. Zanardi was so incredible we didn’t want to let loose of him. He didn’t like hanging out with the team owners and all that routine. Alex preferred to stay with the mechanics, and he would cook them pasta in the middle of the night. One day we were at Firebird Raceway, and I was on one track with some Atlantic cars. Anderson was on another track with Zanardi. I got done early so I went over to where they were and they were just kind of wrapping up. Zanardi’s rocketing around, first time he’d ever been to Firebird—immediately a new lap record—so Anderson asked him, “Alex, what should we work on tomorrow? We’re already under the record, do we need to do tomorrow?” And he says, “Oh, yeah, we need to do it, I can make a long laundry list of things to work on, but at the top of the list I would work on the initial turn-in, the first part of the turn, and when we get it perfect we move to the middle and then to the exit. If we do the exit first and then we change the turn-in, we’d have to go back and do that again.” I’d never really thought of it in those terms; it was so clear how he thought. He said: “We’re going to work our way around the turn.”