Reprinted from unlimitednewsjournal.net
 |
| Billy Schumacher |
UNJ: After the 1970 season, did you know you were going to have the Pay 'n Pak ride the following year?
Schumacher: I have a shortness of memory when it comes to 1971. I don’t know if I raced.
Yes, you won the last few races.
Oh, that was with Pay 'n Pak.
Yeah.
That’s right, that was Pay 'n Pak year.
And in ’72 you raced until Madison and quit because of the debris in the water.
Right.
But in ’71, Jim Lucero was crew chief. How was he for you to work with?
Fabulous.
Yeah?
With the Bardahl I had to watch the manifold pressure constantly. Of course, a lot of that was our high-dome pistons. We built quite a few engines in 1968 and that accounted for a couple of races that I lost, too. Once again, that year my starts weren’t the best and I’ll admit it, but I felt I had a good enough boat to pass anybody anyway. And I did. But we broke engines because of my pushing the boat harder than I should have, but I felt they were gonna live like they did in ’67, and then unfortunately, they didn’t. We blew up a few. Mostly manifold pressure, I think, that caused a lot of that. When I got to the Pay 'n Pak with Jim Lucero, I said, “How much manifold pressure should I look for, and where should I stop?” He said, “Manifold pressure? I don’t want you to even look at the gauge. Just stare at where you’re going and win the race.”
Mmm.
“I don’t want you to even look at the gauges.” He said, “You can do that during testing and let me know what’s going on but forget it in the race.” And you know what? In my whole career with Pay 'n Pak and Jim Lucero, I don’t remember breaking an engine. I don’t think we broke one single engine.
I don’t think you did.
I was able to put my foot on the floorboard I don’t know how many times and leave it there and use the nitrous before two laps were over. And never break an engine. Totally amazing to me, even to this day. I’m amazed at that. And you know, my accident with that boat set us back a few paces. It was turning left at 155 miles an hour, and that’s what caused that, because of the keyway in the rudder.
It took me a while to build confidence in it again. One of the races that year that I did win, in Dallas, I was going to the first turn testing and there’s a rockery. It was at the first turn, so if you didn’t make the turn you were gonna be in the rocks.
Oh, yeah.
I got down to that turn and turned for the corner and the steering wheel wouldn’t turn. It locked up. What happened was a bolt came out, vibrated out of the steering system, and when I went to turn it hit the frame in the boat. It wouldn’t do anything. It turned to the right but not to the left. So, I’m going pretty fast into that first turn and when that happened, I just turned off all the switches I could see and held on to the steering wheel and got up onto the deck, ready to jump off if I had to. But it stopped before the rocks. After my experience in Miami where I almost got killed, to have another steering problem happen in the same year, that was a big concern to me.
Sure.
I lost confidence. I really did. I lost confidence in the boat and some of the people working on it. Not mentioning any names, but it should have been corrected. Those things should not have been happening. So, all of that led to kind of an ill feeling between crew and driver.
And, you know, when the water was horrible in Madison [in 1972], I mean to the point of seeing tires and cows, stuff floating down the river—the river was dark brown, the buoys were laying on their sides from the current and you could see logs coming down. To race on that, I just said no. The rest of the drivers in the evening said no along with me. So, when race day came, they all said, “OK, I’ll do it.” Except me, I said no.
Yeah.
After the race when Sterett didn’t get killed, or nobody else got killed from hitting anything, there was some boat damage and stuff but nothing serious happened, then the crew started thinking that I was just afraid of the boat. After the race, that upset me to the point that I just got in my motor home and drove away.
Mmm, yeah.
I wasn’t very nice about it, but I figured the next race was a week or two away and they could find somebody else. I should have gone to Heerensperger or Lucero and said, “Look, I’ve had enough of this and I’m not gonna do it anymore,” but I didn’t. I just drove away. So, they hired Bill Sterett, Jr., to drive the next…
He finished off the season. You know, they won that race, I heard. I wasn’t there, but I heard the boat was completely out of shape many times, but he drove it hard enough to win. They were pretty proud of that fact that they won it. I wasn’t drivin’ it. So, there were some pretty bad feelings between Heerensperger and me.
 |
| The Pride of Pay 'n Pak team in 1971, from the left, crew chief Jim Lucero, team owner Dave Heerensperger, and Billy Schumacher, |
Yeah.
Actually, and Lucero, for a while.
To back up just a little bit to 1971, that was the year Madison—you were still coming off your accident in Miami—won the Gold Cup on their home water and then they won at Tri-Cities, the next race.
Yeah.
In Seattle you won, and you won a race in Eugene, and then Dallas. You finished off the season winning three races. Except for that incident in Dallas, things seemed to be better in ’71, the end of the year.
Yeah, the boat was faster. We had tried different skid fins and made it corner better. It was a goal of mine to set the course record in Seattle in qualifying, which we accomplished. Just barely, but we did it. I started liking driving it again. It was a fast boat that I could use the engines as hard as I wanted to use ‘em and I didn’t have to worry about breaking ‘em. That helped a lot, too.
I felt like we had something really going there. But, I don’t know, things happen in racing that you don’t expect. That thing in Miami really was an experience, you know. Going back to your thing about the Madison race and Tri-Cities, I think Jim McCormick got on a roll. They had, with that Madison boat, they had put nitrous in it. I think I could have actually won that Gold Cup, but he was faster than I expected him to be, and, uh, legitimately won the race.
Yeah.
I couldn’t really go much faster. I think I could’ve made a better start or something where he didn’t get the jump that he got and, uh, done better. It could’ve been driver error as much as anything but, my hat’s off to the way Jim McCormick drove the boat, and they had nitrous in it. He drove the pants off that boat, and it showed. Once you’re on a roll like he was in winning the Gold Cup in Madison, he showed everybody it wasn’t an accident and he did a really good job.
During those years—this is kind of an overview question—a lot of fatal accidents were happening. Were you worried about that being a possibility for yourself in racing as well? This is a dangerous game…
Constantly.
…can I survive this and still have fun?
That was mostly on my mind in the Bardahl days, because of what happened to Ron Musson and others in those years. I had a bucket of Bardahl that I would sit on in the truck, away from everybody, and I would just think about what I was gonna do and how I was gonna do it. How I was going to be concentrating on what I needed to do to win. Period. That was my goal. And I wasn’t the most friendly guy in the world on my way to the boat when it came time to race. In other words, people needed to just get out of my way. I didn’t want a slap on the back, a slap on the hand. I didn’t want anybody saying anything to me. I was just tunnel-vision down to the boat and got in it.
 |
| The Pride of Pay 'n Pak heads out onto the Columbia River at the Tri-Cities, Wash., in 1971. |
Yeah.
I didn’t even want crew guys sayin’ anything to me. I’d been on my bucket and I knew what I was gonna do, and I was thinking about it the entire time. I was very thankful to come back in one piece after every race.
A couple of times you were pretty lucky.
Yeah, that went through my, uh, I was lucky, probably, in my career, talking about Unlimiteds only, probably four or five times. And that’s what really led me to quit when I quit, at 36 years old. You know, that’s pretty young today, but my thought was one of these times my luck’s gonna run out.
Yeah.
There were several times when it was out of my control and I was just flat lucky. And so, there was a lot more I wanted to do in life other than race boats. That’s when I decided to quit. Those people who got killed were on my mind a lot.
Like every driver you think, well, if I’m watching my p’s and q’s, I’m gonna get through it OK where they don’t. We just think that. I still concentrated on every effort that I did to be safe about it, about the dangerous sport I was in. As safe as I could be and still do well. So, yeah, it was on my mind a lot. And you know, it’s tough when you see people, I mean, there were a couple of times when people got killed where I actually knew something was gonna happen. You just know.
Yeah.
In a couple instances I could tell that the driver’s not thinking clear. Just wasn’t thinking clear. The only thing on their mind was to win at any expense. That was never a problem with me. I did not have that attitude. I just knew that was not a healthy attitude, something could possibly happen. And it did. So, yes, it was on my mind constantly.