Charlie Kemp

Charlie Kemp was born in Mississippi, and his inimitable southern drawl once led Carroll Shelby to say that had Charlie raced as slowly as he talked he’d never have won anything! Charlie did win, however, and he won big. He finished 3rd in his very first race in a jalopy in 1953 at age 16, and won state championships drag racing in his supercharged 1955 Thunderbird. From there, among other events, he won 17 straight races in the winningest Shelby GT350 ever. From there he raced the ex-Penske Porsche 917/10 turbo with Bobby Rinzler Racing, winning the 1973 Mosport Can-Am race. Kemp has not given up racing and is in the process of recreating the Shelby GT350 R he raced with such success in the 1960s. VR contributing author John R. Wright caught up to the peripatetic Kemp at last summer’s Road America vintage weekend, where they found the track’s medical center the quietest place to chat.

Charlie, your accent leads me to ask, where were you born and raised?

Kemp: I was born in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, a town that was named after an old railroad man.

You told me you were always mechanical. What did you mean by that?

Kemp: Well I thought I was, so I went into engineering school, but I found it boring so I switched to economics. I had a fabulous teacher and did well. I should point out that I liked finance. My father would buy stock for me and by the time I got out of university I had a portfolio. I worked for Merrill Lynch and liked working there.

So how did racing get in the way?

Kemp: I started racing early. When I was 16, I started dirt track racing in Mississippi in a jalopy. I finished 3rd in my first race. I wore my football helmet and a face guard. A local Chevrolet dealer gave us an old Ford and we put chicken wire on the front to prevent the dirt from clogging up the radiator. In university, I took up drag racing with a supercharged 1955 Thunderbird and won two or three state championships with that car. However, I was drawn to road racing, but you have to remember that in Mississippi there wasn’t much of that. There were NASCAR races, however, and I once saw Fonty Flock racing with Chryslers in West Memphis, Arkansas.

That introduction to automobile racing led you to the 12 Hours of Sebring, but in an informal way. Could you please elaborate?[pullquote]

“The 917/10 was an extremely difficult car to drive. Follmer talks about the car in his book. The car weighed 1,800 pounds and had 1,400 horsepower. You could spin the wheels in fourth gear.”

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Kemp: In my junior year in university we went to Sebring. I think it was 1958, the year Fangio was kidnapped in Cuba. At any rate, we were on the front straight and I had a friend in his MGA. As night wore on I thought, I can do this stuff. I said to my friend, “Let me have your car.” He did and we pushed the fence down and I entered the track and did some laps. I spun out at what they called the Warehouse Turn and then pulled back off. They were waving flags at me!

Didn’t you tell Alec Ulmann that story years later?

Kemp: Years later I was on Bobby Rahal’s houseboat, and he had invited Alec Ulmann and Randy Smith, the Registrar and Executive Director of Sebring, onto his boat. At the time, I had broken the record in the GT Class but crashed. When I told my story to them, Alec said, “My God! We always wondered who did that!”

You drove a Shelby GT350R and were very successful with it. You ran 54 races in that car and finished 42 of them, winning 34, 17 in a row. You knew Carroll well and didn’t you attend a roast for him?

Kemp: That was a fast GT350, the fastest of them all, Cobras included. I was officially timed in that car at 184 mph at Daytona. At a roast given for Carroll, I told the story of Carroll stirring a big pot of chili. He’d stir the chili, take a swig from a vodka bottle he was holding and then pour some into the chili. Great chili. I got through the story of my GT350 and the story about the chili and then Carroll got up and said, “If Charlie drove as slow as he talks he’d never have won anything!”

You owned and flew a P-51 Mustang, and a few years ago an artist did a painting of it. Can you tell us about that?

Kemp: An automotive artist did the painting of my Mustang, called “Mustang Charlie,” and my GT350 five years ago and it won best painting at Pebble Beach. We sent posters of the painting to Shelby and he ended up signing six of them.

We’ll jump ahead a few years to take us from the Shelby to one of your first Can-Am races, which was at Mosport in 1971. Can you take us back in time to that race?

Kemp: We had just got the car from Lothar Motschenbacher over the winter of 1970-1971 and it was a customer McLaren. We had a little bit of sponsorship from RC Cola. We had a crew of friends and one real mechanic. It was my first time in the car and I had only driven it a bit in qualifying. We had a 454-cubic-inch engine, not a super engine. The McLaren team had 460s by comparison. We were running okay in 14th but I missed a shift and blew the engine. It was kind of strange… I pulled off the track and Jackie Stewart blew his engine in the same spot. There we sat, the two of us in the back of a pickup truck, just chatting as I had already met Jackie somewhere else.

Could you give us your impressions of Mosport?

Kemp: I raced there about two or three times and I didn’t think it was a difficult track. I always did reasonably well there, winning in 1973. I did think you had to use finesse there. I was on the throttle a lot. There were some good times there. On the straightaway, I liked that it gave you time to think. Can-Am racing gave you a new perspective, racing against the best people. The McLaren team was always good to other teams, helping them out. For example, at Mosport we had trouble with our fuel pump and they worked on our car and got it going.

We’ll come back to the Can-Am again, but can you talk about racing at Sebring in a Corvette with Oscar Kovaleski as your co-driver?

Kemp (Chuckling): Well, you’ll have to ask him! He’ll wax poetic! He does tell a funny story. We had that Corvette in 1972, and Bobby Rinzler had signed him to drive with me. I had broken a record down there with Peter Revson. I was on the pole in our class. Oscar tells a story about the Ferrari people. We had outrun them. The Chevrolet people held me on their shoulders and paraded me past the Ferrari people in their hospitality tent. We were sitting on the grid for the race and Oscar is leaning in the window of the car telling me Polish jokes—while I was trying to be serious for the start of the race! The start of a race at Sebring is always a madhouse, and we had some brake problems. So we lose our 3rd position and go further down in the first two hours of the race. ABC was making a race program about Peter and me and it doesn’t work out. Someone blows an engine and drops oil in the esses. I hit the oil slick and there’s this sand berm, and am launched into the air and land on a fence. I crashed the car and I’m out. Peter presses on but passes on a yellow and is black-flagged. Charlie Earwood the steward penalizes Peter, who was then in 2nd place. Charlie says he must sit in the pits for a period of time. Peter had a temper and he seizes Charlie’s hat and throws it onto the track. Now he’s out. ABC is now without Peter and me. They end up making a big deal—with Jackie Stewart commentating, about the amateurs like me who shouldn’t be out with the professionals. My Corvette was faster on the straight than the prototype Alfa in the race! By that time I had 300-plus races under my belt, and in various cars and the Can-Am, but here I am an amateur. That really hacked me off. The next year I won a Can-Am race at Mosport, but here I was just another amateur, according to Jackie.

Jackie, of course, was an advocate for safety in all aspects of automobile racing, including tracks. Can you please discuss the safety aspect of racing back in the day?

Kemp:  We were doing 225 miles per hour in the 917 at times. In third gear we were doing 190 miles per hour and, especially at The Glen, it seemed as if you were in a tunnel. Barriers ruined The Glen. If you had an accident you were ricocheting between the barriers. You didn’t have any wiggle room. Anyone who drives fast cars doesn’t like barriers.

Could you tell us how the deal came together where Bobby Rinzler put together a Porsche team to challenge Mark Donohue and Roger Penske in the 1973 Can-Am season.

Kemp: Bobby had driven sports racing cars, B12 Chevrons, three of them. He was in Atlanta real estate. He had been involved in the Think Pink racing team as team manager with Donna Mae Mims, had sold the McLaren we’d raced in 1971 and was wondering what to do next. He called me to drive two cars, the Corvette and a Lola T222, and to participate in the ownership of the team. He got a Holiday Inn sponsorship and I brought my RC Cola sponsorship with me as I was the first driver to have an RC Cola sponsorship. We started in 1972 and we signed up for IMSA, Can-Am and SCCA races. We raced in 22 races and I won two divisional championships in SCCA racing, but I have to say I didn’t like the Lola T222.

You must have had several interesting experiences during your Can-Am days, could you share some of them for our readers?

Kemp: Well, one of the major reasons the Chaparral sucker car was banned was not for what people thought it was banned for. It was banned because that sucker car was blowing sand and dirt on you if you were following it. Not only was it blowing sand, it was blowing rocks. It was like a machine gun. It was bad enough when a bug hit your helmet at 200 mph! Here’s a funny—or maybe not so funny—airplane story in connection with bugs. There was this wing walker at an airshow and a bug hit her on her bare leg. It was buried one and a half inches into her thigh! At Atlanta a big bug hit me in the helmet and left a streak all down the back. I’ve been behind cars when the engines or transmissions let go and there have been car parts bouncing up and flying past my head.

Could you tell us how the RC Cola sponsorship came to be, and what development you did with the year-old Porsche 917/10s?

Kemp: At the end of 1972 we were approached by RC Cola as a major sponsor. I knew the president from the early 1960s, and he was hot into racing. He had sponsored me in 1969-1970 when I was running the Shelby GT-350. Bobby and I got some big sponsors, as well as Goodyear and an oil company. We took George (Follmer)’s car to Cal Tech for some research. You see, it was unstable in the corners and in high-speed corners it would wiggle. Then we sent it to Cornell and used their moving test bed for aerodynamic wind tunnel testing. The front end on George’s car just wouldn’t work, so we put a bigger wing on it and designed bodywork to angle out. The front end was not too different from the way it was the year before. My car was original. I still have that front end in my shop. As a result of our Cal Tech work we had wings designed into the louvers in the front fenders and we could vary them to adjust them and set them at different angles.

In 1973, you had a terrible crash in a 917/10 at Road Atlanta. Can you tell us what happened?

Kemp: In 1973 I won the first Can-Am race at Mosport, and Porsche must have liked that because we finally got the 5.4-liter turbo engines that Mark and Penske Racing had. My teammate George Follmer was in the #16 car and I had the #23 car. Now, George was off doing the GP circuit and I was doing all the setup and testing. We went to Road Atlanta—it must have been two or three weeks after Mosport—to do testing and we got our new engine in and I set a new lap record in the car. We had done about two days of testing. Mark had set a lap record the year before of 1:14. Well, after we changed our gear ratios I went out and broke the record. Then, I got in George’s car. George’s car, the #16 car, had a lot of work done on it. It had different bodywork, a different wing and extended rear bodywork. The car had a tendency to wiggle on fast turns. It also had different gear ratios. I went out and the car got light on the hump on the back straight. I came in and we lowered the front end and gave the rear end some more wing. I started off driving slowly and gradually picked up speed. I wanted to see if I could beat the times I had set in my car. I did some more laps, picking up speed. Going past the pits, I gave Bobby the thumbs up, indicating that I was going to go all out. Third gear in George’s car, the way it was set up for Atlanta, was a bit too long. Normally I would shift from third to fourth and get the nose down at the hump. I had seen Denis (Hulme) flip the year before at the hump. However, the car felt stable. I accelerated over the hump and was probably going 190 mph. I shouldn’t have… I made a mistake. The car lifted off probably a hundred feet in the air did a loop and landed on its nose. I blacked out. The car spun down the straight. I woke up and the first thing I saw was the red ignition light. I switched it off instinctively. There was nothing in front of the dash panel, nothing left of the car. I undid my harness, stepped out of the car and fell down. I had broken my back when the nose came down and broken my ankle. I had also ruptured my spleen and pulled my ribs away from my chest.

In his book on the Can-Am, Pete Lyons calls you the “Iron Man” because you were up and racing again not all that long after your accident. In fact, you appeared at the July 22 Can-Am race at Watkins Glen and finished 4th.

Kemp: I was up after ten days in the hospital. Bobby got another car from Porsche. In the Glen race, I got a doctor’s permission to race and I wore a corset device for my back and extra straps across my chest. Wilbur Pickett was driving a Rinzler Corvette in a supporting race—he’s a doctor by the way—and gave me a big cortisone shot in my right ankle so I could manage the accelerator. Yes, we did finish 4th.

Then there was the Mid-Ohio race of 1973…

Kemp: I did not qualify well.

You qualified 6th…

Kemp: I didn’t feel well at Mid-Ohio.

I guess not. You had broken your back and your ankle in that horrendous wreck at Road Atlanta!

Kemp: We decided to do basically two heats and have less gas in the cars. We had over 100 gallons of fuel in the tanks of our cars for the 200 miles of racing. We all knew if we crashed we were done. So, we said, let’s cut the races in half. We’d have 75 gallons of fuel instead. You know the Can-Am cars had strange handling. During a race we’d go from 700 pounds of fuel to 60 pounds near the end of a race. There were major height differences in the cars. In addition we’d get air under the cars, and at 220 mph some people would get airborne. That’s what happened to me. We had too much wing on the rear of the car pushing it down. You’d get a two-inch ride height difference.

Didn’t Porsche have a big horsepower advantage over the other non-turbocharged cars?

Kemp: Right. It was just a question of how much horsepower you wanted to dial in. We started out with 1,143 horsepower and then went to 1,200 horsepower. Finally, we’d get 1,400. When I told Denis Hulme that later on, he said, “If we had known that, we’d have put the cars on the trailer.” At Riverside Mario (Andretti) was there with a turbo Chevrolet-powered car, and he turned a 1:15, but even with my sick engine I outqualified him.

When you look back at that era, what’s your major impression of Can-Am cars?

Kemp: Looking back, those cars were dangerous. The 917/10 was an extremely difficult car to drive. Follmer talks about the car in his book. The car weighed 1,800 pounds and had 1,400 horsepower. You could spin the wheels in fourth gear and it wiggled at high speeds. However, the 917/30 was superior. They had extended the wheelbase, and that made a difference. I drove the “normal” 917 in Europe and it was easier to drive.

You also drove the Lola T222 in the Can-Am, but didn’t you say earlier you didn’t like that car?

Kemp: It understeered so much. Then, when it was understeering and you got off the gas it oversteered! It was overweight and had terrible brakes. I encountered the bad brakes at a race at Brainerd. Brainerd has a long straight and I was alongside Follmer with Mark behind us and they could go deeper into the corner than I could because they weighed 400 pounds less than my car. They could pick up perhaps a quarter of a second in the corners. At Road America the brakes overheated so much they caught fire! I had to pull into the pits and have my crew throw a bucket of water over the brakes. It was a difficult car to drive.

You raced Corvettes with Oscar Kovaleski, you’ve flown your own P-51 Mustang and you are not done with racing yet. You’re recreating your Shelby GT350R you raced in the 1960s. Can you tell us something about that project?

Kemp: We are working on that recreation in our shop and my crew chief is building it from scratch. The plan is to get it going and drive it. I went to the recent 24 Hours of Daytona for historical cars and got into the cockpit of one of the Chevrons I used to race. As I remember we won the race for under two liter cars in that car. The fellow who drove it was good.