Yahoo Autos David E. Davis Jr.: Car Enthusiasts Lose a Couple of Good Friends
Les Richter died on June 12. He had been a colorful player for the Los Angeles Rams of the National Football League— eight times he was voted to the all-pro team—and went on to become an important figure in automobile racing on the West Coast. We are told that when Richter was voted the dirtiest player in the NFL, his eyes moistened at the award ceremony and he got a catch in his throat. All choked up, he is reported to have said, “You guys, this is the most wonderful thing that’s ever happened to me. I can’t thank you enough.”
When Les Richter and another great football legend, Heisman Trophy winner Glenn Davis, were the capi di tutti capi in charge of the Los Angeles Times Grand Prix at California’s Riverside Raceway, Car and Driver’s European editor, New Zealander Bill Gavin, showed up to collect his press credentials and was pulled aside by Davis and Richter, who objected to his haircut— the first actual Beatles haircut they had ever seen. Glenn Davis was so upset he offered to pay Gavin’s entire bill at Riverside’s Mission Inn if he would agree to get his hair cut immediately. To his friends’ astonishment, a grinning Gavin readily acquiesced, shook hands on the deal, and went to the nearest barbershop to have the offending Carnaby Street locks shorn.
It was the talk of the pits and the paddock for the next three days. Gavin had never surrendered so easily, nor so gracefully. He was up to something, and the racing community wanted to be in at the finish.
On Sunday evening, the racing had ended, the heroes were recognized. Now was Bill Gavin’s moment, and he struck hard. Armed with the Richter/Davis promise to pay his hotel bill, Gavin arrived at the hotel dining room with a motley crowd of multilingual co-conspirators who ate the best food and drank the best wine until the wee small hours of the morning. If the maitre d’ or the hotel manager expressed concern, Gavin airily assured them that Mr. Glenn Davis was paying for everything. And the real beauty of it all was that three days had gone by and Bill Gavin’s hair was already beginning to reassume its former tousled George Harrison look.
Some victories are sweeter than others, especially when served with a really nice 1961 Nuits-Saint-Georges.
Another good friend, Spen King, died during the World Cup fiasco. If British football fans went away with a sense of tragic loss in the World Cup, off-roaders all over the globe should pause for a moment of mourning for the charming, funny, and enormously talented man who set the off-road performance standard for everything from Toyota 4Runners to Mercedes-Benz Geländewagens with his series of Land Rovers and Range Rovers. I have memories of way too much fun in these in a hundred roadless landscapes in a dozen countries.
Charles Spencer King was also the leader on Triumph TR6 and TR7 design and development teams, as well as the Rover 2000 models, which culminated in the Rover 2000 TC, which Brock Yates and I decided was the best sports sedan in the world after an epic February drive from Chicago to New York. Nobody agreed with us, but we stood our ground and Car and Driver of May 1966 shouted our diet-pill-stoked epiphany to the multitudes. Within 24 hours, Rover 2000 TCs began falling apart all over North America.
Years later, I asked Spen King how that particular Rover became such a maintenance nightmare. He mused thoughtfully, “We were quite young in those days, and I think we wanted to build the most complicated car that had ever been undertaken.”
On another occasion, the great Phil Llewellin fiended the driveline in a Range Rover when he went charging through a Welsh drainage ditch for a great “splash” photograph. He asked Spen King what he had done wrong, and Spen replied, “You listened to a photographer.”
Bruce and Gertrude “Jimmy” McWilliams ran Rover in this country in the Sixties, and as their 50th wedding anniversary came nigh, Bruce told Spen King that they were hoping to get a restored MG TC and repeat their honeymoon, driving the TC through the winding roads of Devon. Spen counter-suggested, “Bruce, you must reconsider. You are both much older now. That MG will destroy your lower spines and your kidneys, and you won’t be able to see over the hedges. Let me get you a Range Rover, to which we will attach a flatbed trailer. We will tie the MG down on the trailer, one of our mechanics will be your chauffeur, and you will not only be more comfortable, you will be able to enjoy the unfolding beauty of the Devon countryside.”
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