American road racing star Jim Jeffords has passed away at the age of 87. Jeffords was a Wisconsinite who started racing at the age of 27, driving his own Jaguars. In 1956 he heard that Chevrolet was organizing a Corvette racing team, and contacted GM’s Ed Cole to see if he might be able to be part of it. Although he was initially rejected, an impressive performance at Lime Rock, where he ran away from the Corvettes with his Jag until it failed late in the race, meant that by Sebring the following Spring he was a member of the Corvette team.
For 1958 he was retained by Chicago’s Stephani brothers to lead their Nickey Chevrolet team racing Harley Earl’s 1956 SR-2 Corvette. Ronnie Kaplan was hired as crew chief for the effort, and with the car named the Purple People Eater after a popular song of the day, Jeffords won consecutive SCCA B Production National Championships in 1958 and ’59. In the midst of those successes, he also won a pair of Tourist Trophy races during Speed Week in Nassau, the first American driver ever to do so in an American car.
Under the Nickey banner, in 1959, he also raced a Scarab purchased from Lance Reventlow, and in that car scored a pair of impressive USAC Road Racing Championship overall victories at Meadowdale Raceway, near Chicago.
In 1960 he posted a double victory in Cuba, taking Lucky Casner’s Camoradi Corvette to GT class triumphs in both ends of the Grand Prix of Havana—again, the only wins there for an American driver in an American car. That same year, in the first professional sports car race held at Road America, he won a third USAC road race, this time driving a J. Frank Harrison-entered Maserati Tipo 61 Birdcage.
During the following off-season, however, Jeffords contracted a mysterious allergy that kept him in intensive care for nine months and put an end to his driving career. He would resurface in 1968 as team manager for Ronnie Kaplan’s factory Javelin effort in the Trans-Am with drivers Peter Revson and George Follmer.
Termed a “gentleman racer with a heart of gold” by current Road America president George Bruggenthies, Jeffords was a constant presence on the track’s Board of Directors beginning in 1958. He had contested the very first race at the four-mile Wisconsin circuit in 1955 with his Jaguar and, as noted, won the track’s first professional race. In recognition of his exploits with Corvettes, Jeffords was inducted into the Corvette Museum Hall of Fame in 2002. To his family and friends in and out of the sport, Vintage Racecar extends its deepest sympathies.
