Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, July 10, 1993 TAG: 9307100125
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ROBERT MARKUS CHICAGO TRIBUNE
DATELINE: CHICAGO LENGTH: Medium
Freddie Lorenzen may be the only one who left too soon. A winner of 26 Winston Cup races in the 1960s - they were called NASCAR Grand National events at the time - he retired at the age of 33, tired of the traveling and motel living and eager to enjoy the fruits of his victories.
"I'd won everything, ' he said. "It wasn't fun anymore. I just had had it. Run, run . . . I woke up one day and I was filthy rich. I had stocks worth a million dollars. I had an airplane, boats. I wanted to play."
So he retired.
"And then the stock market crashed," he said, "and I lost everything I made from racing, almost a million dollars."
Instead of hustling a race car for Lee Iacocca the way he did in the old days, Lorenzen now hustles real estate for ReMax in Elmhurst, Ill., where he was born and raised.
"After 18 years I've made it all back," he said.
But there are some things he never can get back.
Fred Lorenzen never watches a Winston Cup race now. "I miss it too much," he said. "I quit at too early an age. I was stupid.
"I get sick to my stomach if I watch because of the big bucks they're making now. I was the first driver to win $100,000 in a year. Now that's peanuts."
To put it in perspective, of the current crop of top Winston Cup drivers, only Davey Allison and Kyle Petty are younger than Lorenzen was when he quit driving. At 59 he is six years older than Harry Gant, who still is driving.
"I wish I was still doing it," Lorenzen said.
He got his wish, in a small way, a few weeks ago when he competed in an old-timers race in Indianapolis, driving a $700,000 Jaguar XJ220 against a field that included Bobby Allison, making his return to racing nearly five years to the day after his near-fatal crash at Pocono, former Indianapolis 500 winner Troy Ruttman and current Winston Cup driver Dick Trickle.
None of the four made it to the Aug. 12 final, although Lorenzen finished second in his first heat, and he and Allison were part of a three-way tie for second overall.
"We never got to run the last heat," Lorenzen said, "because they tore up too many cars."
They, not he.
"I never put a nick in mine," he said. "If I had it to do again, I'd drive it harder. I guess you had to put some scratches on 'em if you wanted to run up front."
Being up front never was a problem for Lorenzen during his career. In his time he won every major race on the circuit except the Southern 500 at Darlington, S.C., where he did win the spring race twice. It was there that he scored his first major victory only six years after the day he first sat in a race car.
He had come like a comet out of Chicago, where he saw his first race in 1955 at Soldier Field.
"Andy Granatelli billed it as the biggest dollar show in America," he said. "I went down and watched a demolition derby. My buddy won one of the races and won $100, and he says, `Let's build you a car for next week.' We did, and we both won our races.
"He got tired of driving, so he built a car for me, and I won the championship at Soldier Field in 1956."
A new track opened the next year, O'Hare Raceway, and Lorenzen won the championship there.
"In 1958 and '59 I went up to the Milwaukee State Fair Park, where guys like Jimmy Bryan and Marshall Teague used to race, and I beat all the big guys," he said. "Then in 1960, I built my own car and took it down South and I lost it all. I ran about 10 races and went broke. I was just a little kid from Chicago. You can't beat the factories."
But you can join 'em, and that's what Lorenzen did. At the end of that year he got a call from Ford Motor Co.
"I started winning within three months," he said. "The third race I was in, the Rebel 300 [at Darlington], I beat the big man, Curtis Turner. Ralph Moody was my boss. He taped the word `Think' inside my car.
"He said to me [about Turner], `This guy is the King of the South; watch him.' He did try to put me in the wall, but on the white-flag lap I faked him high and then went under him and got the checker and beat him."
Lorenzen beat a lot of them in those days, winning the Daytona 500. But when his original seven-year contract with Ford was up, he walked away from it.
After his stock holdings went south, he tried a brief comeback in 1971.
"But I didn't win, and I got hurt," he said.
End of story. Or is it? Lorenzen has a 20-year-old son, a student at Miami University of Ohio who never was around the race track, having been born long after his father retired. So he wasn't expecting it when about three months ago, his son told him: "When I get out of college, I think I might try race cars."
According to Lorenzen: "I said, `OK, I'll take you to Martinsville.' That's a track where I won five times, and it's all chassis and brains. I can tell in two days if he's a race driver."
Keywords:
AUTO RACINT
by CNB