Injected With Inspiration
By RICHARD S. CHANG
Published: December 2, 2007
JAN HYDE remembers Pittsburgh the way it was when he grew up there
in the 1950s and ’60s, at the height of the city’s economic boom and the
peak of its population and pride.
Jan Hyde and his 1960 Chevrolet Corvette.
“Pittsburgh was one of these heavy-duty industrial cities in its
day,” he said. “First you had U.S. Steel. You had Gulf Oil, you had
Alcoa, you had Rockwell. They had 13 Fortune 500 companies.”
Mr.
Hyde, who is 67, also recalls a vice president at Gulf Oil, Grady Davis,
who may be best known for his resolve to win the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
(Steve McQueen drove a Gulf Oil Porsche 917 in the 1971 movie “Le
Mans.”) Closer to home, Mr. Grady supported an amateur Corvette race
team from a local Chevrolet dealership. Its drivers, Don Yenko and Dr.
Dick Thompson, were pioneer club racers and an inspiration to
hot-rodders past and present. They were also idols to a young man who had grown up nearby.
“I
was a kid and I didn’t know much,” Mr. Hyde, who was starting studies
at M.I.T., said. “But it was the neatest thing, and it got me into
Corvette racing.” When
Mr. Hyde graduated from college in 1962, his father helped him buy a
1959 Corvette. About a year later, he walked out of his apartment in San
Francisco where he was working on the construction of the Bay Area
Rapid Transit system to discover it had been stolen.
He drove a
rental car for the next few weeks, “looking for a Fuelie, and I wanted
to get a 1960,” he said. “It took me maybe a month or two, and I found
this one in February of 1964.”
Fuelie was the nickname given to Corvettes with the top-of-the-line fuel-injected engine, an option from 1957-65.
“It
was the hot setup,” Mr. Hyde said, but compared with the
computer-controlled fuel injection systems of today’s cars, Fuelies were
notoriously finicky. Mr. Hyde described a Rube Goldberg contraption
that depended on diaphragms, flappers and vacuum lines. “It’s a
beautifully engineered system that I think was more maybe like a
solution looking for a problem.” Today, few mechanics understand
the intricacies of early fuel-injected Corvettes, “so you have to have
the confidence to take one of these things apart, rebuild it and put it
back on the car,” he said.
Mr. Hyde drove the silver-and-white
Fuelie from San Francisco to Cambridge, Mass., in 1965 to attend Harvard
Business School. He met the woman who would become his wife, and he
took her on their first date in the Fuelie. “There were some issues with
the seats at the time, so I had them removed to be fixed,” he said.
“Phyllis sat on the floor.”
He and Phyllis moved to New York and
settled in Brooklyn Heights. Mr. Hyde established himself as a real
estate and investment banking consultant, while she raised their son and
daughter. (Now their roles are flipped: he is at home, and she has a
medical practice.)
In his free time back then Mr. Hyde read
enough books on motor sports to fill the shelves of a room in their
attic. He also enrolled in racing school, and in 1966 bought a Corvette
race car with the goal of competing on the track, as his idols had done.
“This was calamitous,” he said, prefacing a story that makes you look twice at his twig frame for scars and lingering kinks.
In 1975, Mr. Hyde entered the Duryea Hill Climb in Reading, Pa., driving a borrowed ’64
Sting Ray. “Not a Fuelie,” he said. Everything
was going fine as he crossed the finish line at 130 m.p.h. But he was
unaware that the rear wheels were off the ground; when he tapped the
brakes, they locked up. The car twisted sideways, skidded off the road
and hit an abutment. Witnesses told him that he must have been
going around 90 m.p.h. at the point of impact. “My bones were just
sticking out of my leg,” Mr. Hyde said. “There wasn’t a straight
piece of plastic or metal left in the car,” he said. “That’s when I
thought maybe I’m better as a spectator.”
Now that his status has
changed — semiretired, in his words — Mr. Hyde has more time on his
hands, time that is spent keeping his car in great shape, though he
reminds you it is not a show car.
He has time, too, to keep the
heritage of Corvette racing alive. He has produced a DVD on the subject,
and last year he and two fellow semiretired Corvette fanatics began
trying to record every Corvette that ever raced in an official series —
around 2,500 of them — to create an online registry.
Mr. Hyde said
that no reliable source of information and expertise on the subject of
Corvette racing existed. He said he hoped that the
Registry of Corvette Race Cars would fill that void and eventually become self-sustaining. For now, it
is the beneficiary of Mr. Hyde’s energy and enthusiasm for the car that
captured his heart all those years ago.
“It’s my full-time occupation now,” he said. “I’m enjoying the hell out of it.”
