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Injected With Inspiration

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Injected With Inspiration

By RICHARD S. CHANG, New York Times
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.

“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 racecar 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 Hillclimb 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 registryofcorvetteracecars.com 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.”

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Jan Hyde and his 1960 Chevrolet Corvette.
 

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