Winning: The Racing Life of Paul Newman Page #2

In 1971, I was at Lime Rock

on a Tuesday testing,

and it was not unusual

for Jim Haynes,

who owned the track, to say,

"would you take so and so

from the Hartford courant,

the Norwalk hour,

The Stamford advocate,"

one of the newspapers,

"around for a couple laps?"

So I said, "sure.

Send him over."

It was Paul, in blue jeans

and sunglasses, and his son.

I didn't recognize him.

He didn't look like a plastic,

Hollywood guy to me.

So I took them both

around for a couple laps,

and somebody said, "that was

Paul Newman, wasn't it?"

I said, "it was Paul

something or other."

Well, and there was a place

called Bob Sharp Datsun.

So, that was sort of one

of those legendary places.

"Bob Sharp?"

You know, I'd go visit him.

I'd go, "my God,

that's Bob Sharp."

I'd watch it like the Beatles

were performing there,

and that's who he raced for.

He was 48 years old

when he started racing,

when most people are retiring.

Hi. I'm Sam Posey.

I used to drive cars

like this for a living.

It's been 17 years now

since I started racing.

And, recently,

I've tapered off a bit.

After all, racing's supposed

to be a young man's game.

We met right here

when he was first starting out.

He'd made the movie "Winning"

and kind of fallen in love

with racing.

I sort of made friends with him

and tried to help him

with his driving.

He was terrible at first.

At the beginning, I mean,

he was not very successful at all.

You know, he wasn't too quick.

He was just taking it all in,

easy, easy, easy, and practicing.

He knew how major

the skills and knowledge

that was necessary

to drive those racing cars.

He was very sensitive that

he wanted to learn the craft

of racing cars.

He knew

that it's very, very difficult

with celebrities who

are very professional.

They're used to being a winner,

and in racing, how do

you win the next month?

You got to pay your dues.

But I said, "Paul,

you will be a better driver

if you race an underpowered

car for a year or two.

You will learn

to not scuff off speed.

If you screw up, you want

to know, 'don't do that again.'"

He sensibly got a Datsun 510,

a small, boxy car.

And he wasn't racing Ferraris,

and he wasn't racing 'm...

He was racing Datsuns.

It was something

the average guy could aspire to.

He didn't live at the top

of the food chain with the cars.

He started at the middle or,

as some would say, even lower level

and earned the respect

of the average guy.

He would come on Tuesdays when

the track was open for practice.

So there'd be other

cars on the track,

but he would make a lot of laps.

You're always competing

with yourself.

You're trying to bring a little

extra to your performance.

The objective is just

to get the car through each turn

as fast as it can possibly go.

For some drivers,

I think that's intuitive.

I kind of see

that they're pantsing.

My own approach has just

been to work up to the limit

a step at a time.

He slowly just chipped away at it.

He would pound around

at Lime Rock,

just pound around,

pound around, pound around,

and just, he got better

and better and better.

When I started out in racing,

I knew that the guys

were saying, "oh,

balloon foot out there."

I said, "well,

that's their problem," 'cause

I'm a slow study, and I know

it's gonna take me a long time.

But you can't quit simply

because they're laughing at ya.

And one thing that you learn

in acting is to go out there

in order to do it right,

you have to do it wrong.

And the same things

is true in racing.

I crashed the car 'cause I

was just too eager, that's all.

I knew, you know,

that you've got

to drive your own race.

Can't drive somebody else's.

So I got sucked

into that and made a mistake.

Paul knew the importance

of learning a skill

just as the importance

of learning the skill of acting.

He was not good when he

started, and he admits that.

But as he worked and developed

and worked and developed,

he became a very good actor.

Now, you look here.

You've had 24 of my 34 years

working for you on this ranch,

and, daddy, you have had

top-grade cheap labor.

But it took a while

to realize that that was not

his "A-One" passion.

It was really cars... racing.

So when he realized that,

he went at it hammer and tongs.

I mean, he went at it fully.

Well, he approached it a bit

like, in a way, in his acting.

We got a racehorse here,

a thoroughbred.

You make him feel good.

I teach him how to run.

When he got a part, he really

investigated the character

and investigated where he

was gonna go with it and the arc

that he was gonna take.

You're talking about a guy

who'd kill a grifter

over a chunk of money

wouldn't support him for two days.

He obviously used some of that

in approaching the racing.

At one point,

he said to me, "you know,

I'm acting out the role

of a racing driver."

That's the lovely part

about being an actor

is that you get to assume a lot

of different personalities.

And a lot of those personality

traits stick.

I look at that, and I say,

"gee, there's a little bit

of Hud in there

or fast Eddie Felson."

Acting is an enormously

disciplined thing

to do in terms of work,

of preparation,

and Paul is extreme

about preparation for any film,

whether he's acting or directing.

And I think all of that kind

of preparation

lends itself to the work

that you have to do as a racer,

that you can't just leap

into the car and start driving.

Paul and Joanne could walk

from our motor home,

two blocks to the false grid

with movie people

with a motorized bottom

taking 200 hundred pictures,

and I think

he was oblivious to that.

He had an ability to not let

those kinds of things upset him,

and I think the movie concentration

helped his racing concentration.

Really be able to know

that you can discard

all the extraneous stimuli

and depend on the one focus

that you want to focus on.

And when you really accomplish it,

I think you just

feel really good about it.

For about 24 years,

I had a place in Connecticut,

Westport, just about a mile

from where he was.

And it was then

that he was racing up Lime Rock.

He'd been with Sharp.

So he said, "why don't you

come up?"

So I went up there

and got on the track.

I whipped around about five

or six times.

But he jumps in and zips around

in about half the time that I did.

When I saw that, that's

when I first saw Paul race,

and I said:
"Whoa, he's really good."

I think you pick up 300 rpm

from where I look at it.

He became so boring, because

that's all he'd talk about.

I'd go to talk to him.

I'd say, "so, how you doing?"

"Well, let me tell you

about the car..."

It started to drive me crazy.

The runoffs would be

all the factory teams

competing against each other.

Paul was driving Tullius' Triumph

Against Jim Fitzgerald

in the "D" production category

at the 1976 SCCA runoffs

at Road Atlanta.

Fitzy ended up breaking the car,

giving Paul his first

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