{"id":610652,"date":"2020-01-13T14:46:47","date_gmt":"2020-01-13T14:46:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/archive\/article\/\/\/a-regular-guy-in-jeans"},"modified":"2020-02-05T15:51:50","modified_gmt":"2020-02-05T15:51:50","slug":"a-regular-guy-in-jeans","status":"publish","type":"issue_content","link":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/archive\/article\/may-2019\/72\/a-regular-guy-in-jeans\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cA regular guy in jeans…”"},"content":{"rendered":"
Paul Newman had a strange request at the 1995 Daytona 24 Hours. The Oscar-winning actor and long-time racer had just turned 70 and was struggling to get in and out of the Ford Mustang he was driving in the US enduro. He was insistent that his team-mates manhandle him out of the car during pitstops to save vital seconds. The story reveals a lot about Newman\u2019s attitude to his racing: he was fiercely competitive and wanted to be treated as an equal by team-mates and competitors alike.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou had to climb in and out NASCAR-style with those cars,\u201d recalls Tommy Kendall, the young hotshot in Roush Racing\u2019s Daytona assault alongside Newman, NASCAR star Mark Martin and Mike Brockman in the GTS-1 class Mustang. \u201cPaul felt like he was slowing up the driver changes and told us to grab him by the epaulettes and drag him out.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was thinking, he\u2019s 70 years old and a national treasure, I can\u2019t do that! But he was adamant. It showed how competitive he was, that he wasn\u2019t there just to make up the numbers, and that he wanted to be treated as one of us.\u201d<\/p>\n
But that was Paul Newman the racing driver, or \u2018PL Newman\u2019 as he had originally designated himself when he set out upon what became a second career \u2014 as a driver and team owner \u2014 more than 20 years before. He didn\u2019t play the big shot movie star in the paddock. Quite the reverse. He could and would talk for hours about racing, but the movie industry was off limits when he was in Nomex.<\/p>\n
\n\u201cI had to ask after the passenger lap if he was the<\/i> Paul Newman\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
It was his starring role in the 1969 movie Winning<\/i> that turned Newman onto the sport. His role as IndyCar driver Frank Capua involved driving the real thing, which explained why Universal Pictures sent Newman and co-star Robert Wagner to the Bob Bondurant Racing School in 1968 to get a handle on big, powerful racing cars.<\/p>\n
That whetted Newman\u2019s appetite for the sport, an appetite he felt he\u2019d better sate a couple of years later. A call to his local track in Connecticut, Lime Rock Park, resulted in a handful of hot passenger laps with Bob Sharp, a successful racer whose team was based just up the road.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe would test at Lime Rock on a Tuesday, and sometimes the track manager would ask me to take someone around from this newspaper or that newspaper,\u201d recalls Sharp. \u201cOne day, he asked me to take someone called Paul Newman and his son around. I didn\u2019t really put two and two together. I thought all movie stars were 6ft 4in, but he was only 5ft 9in and came across as a regular guy in blue jeans. I had to ask someone afterwards if it had actually been the<\/i> Paul Newman.\u201d<\/p>\n
The real thing visited Sharp at the Datsun dealership from which he ran his race team a couple of weeks after that. \u201cHe said, \u2018I\u2019ve wanted to be a race car driver ever since I did Winning<\/i>,\u201d recalls Sharp. \u201cI would love to lease a car from you so I can go racing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Newman suggested that Sharp build him a racer around one of Datsun\u2019s Z-cars, but the man who would become his racing mentor had other ideas. He told him that he should race one of the Datsun 510B saloons that his Bob Sharp Racing team was building, to learn his craft.<\/p>\n
There was also the matter of securing a racing licence. The 510Bs weren\u2019t ready, so he took a Sports Car Club of America course in a Lotus Elan borrowed from a friend of one of Sharp\u2019s employees. There are stories that Newman won a race in this car at the Thompson Raceway in Connecticut some time in 1971. It remains uncorroborated, but Sharp believes it would have been no more than a school event.<\/p>\n