We all know that motorsport is dangerous and drivers will do whatever they can to mitigate the risk of crashing, sustaining injury or worse. They normally do this by being in the right car, the right team, staying fit, wearing the best safety equipment and driving within their own capabilities. Some drivers go even further though and engage in strange rituals or superstitions in order to stay safe.
In this article, we’ll look at lucky underpants, lucky teddy bears, unlucky numbers, why peanuts are forbidden at some circuits, why you should never race with a green car, why you should never handle a $50 bill, why you should never visit a spiritualist medium as a racing driver and why certain circuits are cursed.
One of the most well known superstitious drivers is the Formula One driver Stefano Modena. Amongst his pre-race rituals, Modena would only get into his car from the left hand side. This is probably linked to karting, where the hot engine is on the right hand side. But Modena went further.
He would also refuse to get into his car if it wasn’t on a specific side of the garage. After pre-qualifying at Rio in 1989, his Brabham team had one hour to get both cars from the pre-qualifying paddock into the pit garage.
Modena’s team mate Martin Brundle takes up the story, “They (the mechanics) had just about completed the job when Stefano Modena walked in and looked as though he had seen a ghost. ‘No! No!,’ he said. ‘I don’t want my car on the left. I’ll only have it on the right.” The poor sweaty Brabham mechanics then had to swap everything around just in time for free practice to start.
Once he was in the car, the same mechanic each time had to fasten Modena’s seat belts, nobody else. Once he was strapped in if anyone touched him, be it a good luck tap on the shoulder, or if another mechanic tightened his belts, he had to unbuckle, get out then go through the whole procedure of getting back in again. Modena would also drive with his gloves inside out, but years later he confirmed this was due to the seams irritating his hands.
The great Italian driver Alberto Ascari also had some superstitions, like only driving with his lucky blue helmet. He also avoided black cats and would never let anyone handle the bag containing his racing gear. During the 1955 Monaco Grand Prix, Ascari crashed at the chicane and famously ended up in the harbour. He bobbed to the surface with minor injuries, but he had damaged his lucky blue helmet.
Four days later he went to Monza to watch his team mate and protege Eugenio Castellotti test a Ferrari sportscar. Unexpectedly, Ascari decided to take the car out for a few laps himself. His lucky helmet was being repaired however, so he decided to borrow Castellotti’s. On the third lap he crashed fatally at the curve where the Ascari chicane now sits.
The cause of his crash is still unknown to this day. There are numerous theories on what caused him to veer off the circuit. Did he black out? Did his flapping tie distracting him? Did he have to avoid a track worker in the road? Was he avoiding a black cat? Nobody knows. There are some eerie similarities though between Ascari’s death and his father Antonio’s. Both died on the 26th day of the month at the age of 36. Both had 13 Grand Prix wins and both had survived huge crashes four days before. Both left behind a wife and two children.
Like Ascari’s blue helmet, colour is a big factor in US racing, particularly green. It has always held certain connotations and drivers would go out of their way to avoid having green on their cars. This started in 1920 when Gaston Chevrolet crashed fatally in his green Frontenac. Thereafter, drivers ensured that any green part on their car was painted over, they even threw away green pencils in the garages. Someone that took this very seriously was three time AAA national champion Ted Horn, who made sure that any item of clothing that he wore had to be green-free.
Horn also wouldn’t let fans pose for photos with him or sit in his car just before a race, as he’d seen that in the past where the driver then went on to be killed. Horn avoided shaving before a race, as fellow driver Doc MacKenzie shaved his beard off only to be killed at the next race at the Wisconsin state fairground. Horn quipped “Doc shouldn’t have shaved. That jinxed him.”
Horn also had a lucky trinket, a dime which he had found on a track walk. He put that dime into one of his racing boots and promptly won the race. He would always race with it in that boot. Then in 1948 Horn raced at DuQuoin and was killed in a crash. That was the only day he wore green on his shirt and when they took his boots off, found the lucky coin in the other boot.
How much the Horn story has ‘evolved’ over time we do not know, but the green car myth was still very much in place up to the early 1960’s. Rodger Ward on his retirement famously wore a green suit to dinner with the other drivers and was widely criticised as a result.
Then the ‘British invasion’ of Indy took place. Green happened to be the national racing colour of Great Britain and I imagine Colin Chapman didn’t pay much attention to the green curse and prospect of repainting his cars.
Like Horn, another driver that likes lucky coins is Sebastian Vettel. During his Formula One debut at the US Grand Prix in 2007, he kept a quarter in his pocket which he found on the streets of Indianapolis. Tucked beneath his race boot laces to this day he has two coins, one of which is the quarter, the other one is a medal for St Christopher, the patron saint of travellers, given to him by his grandmother.
The other great German driver Michael Schumacher didn’t have a lucky trinket, other than a necklace which son Mick now wears, but he didn’t like racing with even race numbers on his cars. All of his seven titles came with odd number race cars (five with the number one and one each with three and five).
Others drivers have been picky about numbers, particularly the number 13, although this is hardly surprising given the wide spread superstition about the number. In Formula One, crash prone driver Pastor Maldonado used number 13 from 2014 (make of that what you will).
In NASCAR for example, only one win has ever been attributed to a car wearing number 13, Johnny Rutherford at Daytona in 1963. That’s one win in over 500 starts. NASCAR driver Joe Weatherly once qualified 13th for a race, but the organisers allowed him to start in position 12a instead. At Indianapolis, the number 13 wasn’t even available for competitors for many years, not that anyone would use it anyway.
Another thing that wasn’t available at Indianapolis for many years was the ability to buy peanuts, in fact if you even brought your own to the circuit it would be frowned upon. Why, I hear you ask? Well in 1937 peanut shells were found in the cockpits of recently crashed cars at Langhorne and Nashville, both of these being fatal.
Nobody could really explain how they came to be in smouldering wrecks, but the most logical explanation is that peanut shells found their way onto the circuit, or were dropped from the stands, and one or two made their way into the cockpit along with other detritus. Thereafter, people put two and two together and came up with the assessment that ‘peanuts caused fatal crashes’.
Another random item which was perceived to bring bad luck was a $50 bill. This can be tracked back to NASCAR racer Joe Weatherly, who was killed in a crash at Riverside in 1964. Two $50 bills were found in his racing overalls and drivers have avoided handling them ever since. This superstition carried on into modern times, with both Dale Earnhardt Snr and Tony Stewart being wary of handling the cursed bills.
Perhaps the most famous curse in racing is the Andretti-curse at Indianapolis. This stems from the fact that many Andretti’s have competed in the race, but only one win has been achieved, for Mario in 1969. Legend has it that when Andretti’s team owner, Andy Granatelli, kissed Mario on the cheek after that 1969 win, that triggered the curse.
Robin Miller’s view was that it was triggered by Clint Brawner’s wife Kay, who supposedly placed a hex upon Andretti and Granatelli after their team split up. Miller stated that Kay “visited some kind of voodoo princess/soothsayer/fortune teller in the Arizona desert and requested a curse that nobody named Andretti would ever win the Indy 500 again.”
Curse or not, the stats show why people believe a curse does exist. Mario led 555 laps in his career at Indy and scored only one win. Son Michael, who was arguably in the top five drivers never to win at Indy, led 441 laps yet never made it to Victory Lane. Mario’s grandson Marco has led 141 laps and came agonisingly close to winning in 2006, but still hasn’t put his face on the Borgwarner Trophy. Michael has won the race five times as a team owner though, so it’s not all bad.
A lesser known curse is supposedly hanging over the Talladega Super Speedway. Many years ago a native tribe was driven out of the area where the speedway now sits. The legend goes that a medicine man chanted a curse on the land to bring bad luck to anyone that settled on there.
In the 1970’s s in particular, some very strange things occurred at the circuit. During a race in 1973, Bobby Isaac parked a perfectly fine race car because a voice in his head had told him to stop. That same year Larry Smith had a minor crash, so minor that people thought he’d be able to drive the car away. Smith had actually been killed on impact from head injuries.
Other happenings include 26 cars being sabotaged in one night all in locked garages. Further bizarre crashes taking place in 1974, then in a race in 1977 David Sisco suddenly had a premonition, stopped his car and ran into the paddock only to see his mother had been fatally hit by a truck.
Premonitions have occurred elsewhere in motorsport. The French Formula One driver Francois Cevert once visited a clairvoyant, who read his future and said he would not make his 30th birthday. Cevert jokingly said “no problem, I will be world champion before then.” To be fair, any fortune teller at that time reading the palm of a racing driver could likely guess there was a chance they wouldn’t live long.
By 1973 he was turning into a very good driver, often on the pace of team mate Jackie Stewart. The final race of the year was the US Grand Prix at Watkins Glen. Cevert went out to practice and was killed in a huge crash at the fast section after the first corner. What is strange are the numbers surrounding his crash. He was killed on 6th October, driving car number 6, which was a Tyrrell 006 and his engine number was 066. Cevert was 29 years old.
Another driver that never believed he would live to see 30 was Formula One driver David Coulthard. This nearly came true when he survived a plane crash, aged 29, which killed the two pilots. DC was a little superstitious however and even had a pair of lucky underpants. DC realised whenever he got a good result in his junior career he tended to be wearing the same pair on briefs.
This got into his head and would constantly wear them when racing. That is until he crashed at Spa and with a leg injury had to have his overalls cut open. To the embarrassment of the nurses tending to him a certain part of his anatomy was protruding from the now very worn pants and thereafter they were retired. He would still carry them with him to all his races in Formula One, that is until a personal assistant in his McLaren days accidentally threw them away.
The 1980 world champion Alan Jones also had a lucky pair of red undies. He was ready to race at the Canadian Grand Prix when he realised he couldn’t locate them. Jones takes up the story, “I’m really superstitious and I felt uneasy because I thought I’d lost them,” admitted the Australian. “But Bev [his wife] drove to Brands Hatch where I’d left them in a motorhome and rushed them here [to Montreal] by special express.” Jones clinched the championship with that win.
Even the way drivers put their clothes on holds special significance. NASCAR driver Brian Scott admitted that he would get dressed in a certain way each time he got ready to race, including putting everything on from the right side because apparently the right side of the body holds the luck. Alex Wurz famously spent most of his career wearing odd coloured racing boots (one blue and one red). This stems from a race in New Zealand where a team mate hid one of his boots, so he borrowed an odd coloured one and promptly won the race.
We will finish with a highly superstitious competitor who wouldn’t drive without his lucky teddy bear called Mr Whoppit. Donald Campbell was a land and water speed record holder from England. He is the only person to hold the world land and water speed records in the same year (1964). Not only did he visit spiritualist mediums and fortune tellers, but he believed his teddy bear would bring him luck. Part of his ritual every time he got into a car or boat was for his wife Tonia to hand him Mr Whoppit, who used to then come along with him for the ride.
In January 1967, Campbell visited Coniston Water in Cumbria to attempt to break the 300mph barrier in his Bluebird K7 boat. His first run average was 297.6mph. Campbell decided to do a return run almost immediately and achieved 328mph before taking off, somersaulting and landing nose first into the lake. The boat was destroyed and quickly sank along with Campbell’s body. As the crew raced over to the site there was a scattering of debris floating on the surface and amongst it was an intact Mr Whoppit.
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