Race car driver Bobby Unser

From the vault: Racing legend Bobby Unser is three time winner of the Indy 500, and his new audiobook WINNERS ARE DRIVEN, written with Paul Pease, features a forward by his friend and fellow racing legend Roger Penske. The book is narrated by Jim Bond for Brilliance Audio. I spoke to Bobby by phone at his home in Albuquerque.

JONATHAN LOWE: Winners Are Driven uses racing as a guide to business success. What gave you the idea to tell your own story this way?

BOBBY UNSER: Well, they wanted me to write a book, and I wasn’t hot on writing another biography, then it dawned on me, since all my talks over the years had been motivational, of doing it this way.

LOWE: We seem to live in a win-at-all-cost era. Your book focuses on integrity, though, using examples from your past to illustrate various points. What is your favorite example of why integrity is important? The Goodyear vs. Firestone tire incident?

UNSER: That was a perfect example, and why we put it in the book. I turned down a tremendous amount of money at the time, over switching tire companies, because your word has to be your bond. People are used to older people saying that, but we should all have integrity, and unfortunately it doesn’t seem to prevail as it should.

LOWE: Wouldn’t it be great if integrity was the rule of law for politicians?

UNSER: Yeah, that would be such an asset. We’ve come to accept politicians openly and outwardly lying to us. But why do we? It shouldn’t be accepted. And they have become used to the fact that they can lie, and that nobody believes them, and it just flows out of their mouths.

LOWE: Wasn’t meant to be that way, with career politicians forever in office.

UNSER: The career politician, what a terrible concept.

LOWE: Internal politics was involved in the race win that they took away from you for a time in 1981, wasn’t it?

UNSER: Yes, they created an infraction after the race was done. At a meeting I was never invited to they said the blending point–where you get back into the race from the pit–was going to be at the end of the pits, not coming off of turn two, which had been the rule. All the drivers that testified on my behalf didn’t remember that change, so it must have really been a deep secret. There was nothing in print, that’s for sure. When ABC does that race, though, you see, they have 25 cameras around the race track, and they all record all the time, so what we did was get hold of the tapes nobody ever sees. So when we saw those, darned if Mario (Andretti) and many other cars didn’t do exactly the same thing. So they were caught with their hand in the cookie jar. They’d wanted to start a war between teams Patrick and Penske, and it backfired on them. Indianapolis should be above that, though. Largest single sporting event on earth.

LOWE: Earlier in your career, you used walnut shells in tire rubber. . .sounds like what Thomas Edison might have tried. What gave your team that idea?

UNSER: Well, the idea was if you put walnut shells in the rubber, when you wear the tire down, the shells are going to flake out. So when that happens it becomes like a sponge, and gets hold of the coarse road a lot better. A gain of about forty percent. We also tried crushed batteries.

LOWE: What gave you the idea to even try that?

UNSER: Because it was some rubber that was made for ice. So I put shells on one side of the car, and crushed batteries in the rubber on the other, and we found the shells got the best traction. That was a secret for us, and I took the concept to Goodyear. I did a lot of tire development for Goodyear, in fact, and after many years of trying to develop rain tires, we finally developed a compound tire that did better than the walnut shells.

LOWE: Traction versus speed, then.

UNSER: Yes, the biggest gain we found was in the turns, not just going faster down the straight away. Traction is most important.

LOWE: You talk about an eight-second pit stop at Indianapolis, which is an amazing time for changing four tires and refueling. Is there a most memorable pit stop for you?

UNSER: None most memorable, as I’ve done thousands. Often things will go wrong, for sure. Probably the worst was in 1981, in the Indy race, when because of the design of the fuel filler that year, there was a tendency of the sleeve to stick. Happened to Rick Mears car, which caught fire. He jumped out, got burned a little. Same thing happened to me, around the same time, but what I did was just take off out of the pits, gambling that the flames would blow out, which they did. It burned my left sleeve, but that could have cost me the race had I just jumped out.

LOWE: About the go-cart accident which laid you up for a year, did you really tell the doctor you needed to go race as soon as you woke from a coma of more than a week?

UNSER: When I woke up in the hospital I was close to dying, for sure, but you have to realize I didn’t even have a headache! Didn’t know where I was. I was like I’d just woke up from one night. So it’s time for me to go, time to be at Indianapolis for a sprint car race.

LOWE: That’s amazing. Did you know Dale Earnhardt?

UNSER: Yes, I did.

LOWE: What is your thought on track safety today?

UNSER: Safety has just steadily gotten better. Racing will never be totally safe, but it’s so much better than it used to be. Goodyear, for one, spent lots of money, not just on winning races, but on safety. Like fuel cells, break-away fittings, clothing. Bill Simpson was a tremendous help with safety. Simpson Safety Products really got technology going that way. My brother died from burns at Indianapolis, and there was just no safety back then. Helmets, clothing, cars, walls, all were just terrible. We used to accept the fact that about fifty percent of the drivers died while racing, and that wasn’t a good number.

LOWE: Fifty percent?

UNSER: Yeah, but it’s changed, now, and you hardly ever see a fire today. The uniforms are a thousand percent better. Drivers I remember used to race in tee shirts, back when there were no bladders in the fuel tanks. Now Indy cars have a lot of shock absorption qualities, whereas in Nascar the frame is rigid. Steel tubing.

LOWE: That’s not good.

UNSER: Now this is turning out to be a negative, and Nascar is looking into remedies, because they’ve got to do something about shock absorbing. An Indy car, where the driver sits, is like a capsule, where everything else can shuck away. Nascar cars, like Dale’s. . .that’s a rigid frame, and one of the reasons why he died. I saw the report on Earnhardt. Best done investigation of an accident I’ve seen. Of course there were many reasons why Dale got killed. Problems that came together all at the same time.

LOWE: Dale Jr. carries on. Do you have children, yourself?

UNSER: Four kids. One daughter has a program to help teach driving safety in corporations, to get breaks in insurance. My other daughter is a real estate appraiser. And I have two boys. Bobby Jr. helps create TV car commercials. Stunt driving for those. He’s won some awards, like for the commercials on the Super Bowl. Then Robby was a race driver too, but he didn’t stay with it either. He was in Indianapolis twice.

LOWE: Jim Bond reads your book on audio. Do you listen to audiobooks yourself, while driving, or recommend them?

UNSER: Absolutely. I have some people who’ve gotten mine, and listen while going to work. Ironically, some are in L.A. with the bad freeways! But what a beautiful way to read a book. I think audiobooks are a fabulous idea.

LOWE: Good way to relieve stress. Better than rock or rap, which only adds to stress.

UNSER: Exactly. A way to keep your mind working, for sure. Something other than being aggravated about the traffic problems. If my wife and I are going somewhere, she’ll listen to tapes and learn Spanish, since we own a home in old Mexico now. Same with my book. That’s how Lisa read it, listening to the tapes. Time on the freeway is wasted time, so why not turn a negative into a positive? That’s the bottom line.

LOWE: What’s next for you, and for your friend Roger Penske?

UNSER: I do expert witness litigation work now. Roger, of course, will keep on racing. He’s got the best team, and he loves the sport. He isn’t slowing down. A good man, and good for racing.

LOWE: As are you. Thank you, sir. It was a pleasure and a privilege to talk to you.