The Life and Rides of Burt Levy

Burt Levy was a good race-car driver but not quite good enough to make a living at it. At least not a healthy living, not like Stirling Moss, Phil Hill, Dan Gurney, or Alfonso de Portago. Certainly not like Niki Lauda or Dale Earnhardt.

“I had a brief pro career,” he admitted recently at Autobooks-Aerobooks in Burbank, California, where he was signing and selling books he’d written about racing. “My teammate was P.D. (Peter) Cunningham. I don’t know if you know P.D.”

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Everybody knows P.D.; he won all those races in Hondas and Acuras back in the day. None of us are as fast as him.

“I raced with him as a teammate for two and a half years, and I almost…” Levy paused before recalling what must have been a career enormity. “I almost destroyed one of the team’s cars trying to prove that I could do what he could do. And it finally dawned on me: ‘Burt, he’s better than you.’”

In another later incident, Levy took out a field of Skip Barber Formula Fords in what he has referred to as “the most expensive car crash in racing history.” If you hang around Levy long enough, he will get around to telling you that story, too.

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Because Levy is a storyteller who says he “just happens to be a pretty decent racer.” Then he goes on to list his entire resume: “An experienced (if sometimes ham-fisted) mechanic, a one-time sports car shop owner, a one-time car salesman at an upscale downtown Chicago dealership (during which time he was relieved of a slightly used Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow convertible at gunpoint on a test drive), a second-string stunt driver when The Blues Brothers movie was shooting in his hometown of Chicago, and an enduring and semi-successful writer and novelist with 10 books to his credit and three more on the way.”

Regardless of his talent vis-à-vis P.D. Cunningham, Levy really liked racing and didn’t want to give it up.

“So I realized I had to find a different way to do this,” Levy said. “I thought I was gonna be a professional racer, and I said to myself, ‘If you pursue this, you’ll be one of these guys where a great weekend is the bottom of the top 10, and you’ll bankrupt yourself and everybody that’s stupid enough to lend you money.”

So he discovered vintage racing and thought up another way to finance it. He would talk his way into loaner rides by promising the owner a story in one of the magazines he freelanced for, including Vintage Motorsport, British Car, Classic Motorsports, and the like.

“I started writing about cars and racing as a way to get my hobby for free,” he said, echoing the words he’s used to tell his life story hundreds of times to various racers, reporters and reviewers. “There was a guy named Joe Marchetti that used to own a restaurant in Chicago called the Como Inn. He bought and sold Ferraris and exotic cars on the side—a wonderful, creative, impresario, host-type guy and very old-school Italian. He was buying and selling a bunch of old Ferraris, before the values skyrocketed and sucked them off the racetracks and into museums and private collections, and he started the big July vintage race up at Road America. He knew that I had done some racing and some writing, and it happened that the year before was the only year I ran SCCA nationals, and I won the national up at Road America and set a soon-to-be-eclipsed lap record in Showroom Stock B. At any rate, Joe knew me a little and asked if I would write a story, A Driver’s-Eye View of Road America, for his race program. Of course I said, ‘Sure.’”

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But he wouldn’t get paid in money.

“Instead of writing me a check,” Levy recalled, “because his hand shook whenever he wrote a check, he gave me a car to drive.”

And not just any car. It turned out to be one of Marchetti’s Ferraris, an early, alloy-bodied 250 short-wheelbase Berlinetta.

“That car was probably the last true dual-purpose, drive-it-on-the-street/put-numbers-on-the-sides-and-race-it-on-the-weekends sports/GT cars from Ferrari or anybody else. So I drove it at Road Atlanta—I can still remember the poise, perfectly meshed noise and feel of that car, and the way the air pressure caused the windshield wipers to lift and kind of levitate over the windshield at top speed heading into the infamous old Road Atlanta ‘Dip.’ So I wrote a story about the experience and managed to sell it to Autoweek, and I was on my way.”

From that came a stint as an instructor at the Ferrari national meet, where he got to drive the 250 GT Breadvan and other Ferraris, including “the one-of-a-kind, hot-rod rebel/GTO-beater Ferrari Breadvan.”

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“I actually got to drive that twice, and it remains one of my very favorite cars,” Levy said. “And people started giving me more cars to test-drive and race… cars I could never even dream of affording!”

Since then, he has proclaimed himself a perennial “ride mooch.” A poster that hung behind him at Autobooks-Aerobooks had about 100 of those rides on it. He’s driven everything from MGs, Triumphs, and Alfa Romeos to Porsches, a whole bunch of Lotus sports cars, Elvas, Coopers, Lolas, and Tojeiro Climaxes, the original Jim Hall Chaparral, three Cheetahs, several different Vipers, and two of the five Corvette Grand Sports (the real ones), GT40s, and Mk. IIs, those Ferraris, and the one-of-only-three Scarab/Chevies that won the first sports car race he ever witnessed—“as a 14-year-old-kid on the sidelines with his fingers clutched tight around the fence wire”—at the long-defunct Meadowdale International Raceway near Carpentersville, Illinois, in 1958.

And yet, he wanted more. He wanted to describe that life in a novel.

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“I’ve been around the sport a lot, and I hated all the fiction that I’d ever read about it,” he said. “I didn’t think it captured that life. It didn’t capture the long garage nights and the long tows, rivalries, friendships, and the camaraderie at the races.”

But writing a book was harder than grifting a ride. He started out well enough, but his narrator was a driver.

“It occurred to me that was awfully cliché and wouldn’t work because drivers are so tunnel-visioned and they’re full of (BS), every one of them. I thought, ‘Well, why don’t you have somebody that’s in the scene but like a fly on the wall? A mechanic? That’d be perfect.”

Thus was born Buddy Palumbo, “a young, good-hearted, working-class gas-station mechanic from Passaic, New Jersey, who gets drawn into the glamorous and dangerous world of 1950s American sports-car racing.” Along the way, Levy noted, Palumbo discovers “love, adventure, and himself.”

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Palumbo may be semi-autobiographical.

“I’d been a mechanic, and my wife and I had owned a shop for a couple of years, when we were first married—Mellow Motors on Chicago’s near north side—and that was a disaster. But we had a lot of memorable and occasionally horrific experiences,” Levy said. “So I made my narrator a mechanic. Initially, it was going to be a history, and the mechanic was only a tool to tell that history. It took me eight years to write the first book because I didn’t know how to write a book. I’d work on it in the winter, and then I put it aside during racing season, and then I’d go back to it.”

After eight years he had a beginning, a middle, and an end, and he sent the manuscripts off to every fiction publisher in Manhattan. They all turned it down. They all hated it. One told him, “Those people (car people) don’t read.”

So he got creative. “We took out a second mortgage and published it ourselves,” Levy said.

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He and his wife carried stacks of The Last Open Road in the trunk of their car to race weekends, where Burt would race and sell books between heats. That’s all it took. Racers loved it. Non-racers loved it. They did three printings. But didn’t make any money. So…

“You probably already know this part. I thought: ‘Why not fund a book project the same way racing is funded, with sponsorship and advertising?’”

Yes, ads in the book. But not just any ads.

“So you get to the end of the first major episode in the second novel in the series, Montezuma’s Ferrari, which is about the Mexican road race (La Carrera Panamericana) in 1952, which was the first major confrontation ever between Ferrari and Mercedes-Benz,” Levy said. “And (in the pages of the book) you come on this old car magazine that never existed—AutoWeak—and it’s full of ads, and those were all our sponsors and advertisers.”

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In seven weeks, he raised almost $50,000. He bought back the rights and the remaining copies from St. Martin’s Press, which had published the third printing in a deal that didn’t work out well for either side, and has been publishing that way himself ever since. It worked.

So he wrote another book, with the same characters. And another. And another.

“So now there are seven novels in the series plus two short-story collections and a thoroughly unique audio book of The Last Open Road,” he said, pointing to each of them laid out on the table at Autobooks-Aerobooks.

The Last Open Road is now in its 11th hardcover printing with more than 50,000 copies sold. IPG now handles the publishing, and the book is offered worldwide.

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For the audio version, Levy said he rewrote The Last Open Road as a 1950s radio drama with professional voice actors in the major roles, authentic car and racing sounds, correct period music, incredible sound effects and real race-car drivers in cameos throughout, including including David Hobbs, Ray Evernham, Brian Redman, Tommy Kendall, Patrick Long, Skip Barber, Bill Warner, Marino Franchitti, John Doonan, and many others.

Levy is 80 years old now and still married to Carol, his wife of 52 years, the same woman who believed in him when he wanted to quit being a mechanic and start being a racer, writer, and ride mooch. He still sports the same wry smile that might still convince you to let him race your sports car in a vintage race somewhere, and he’s still telling the same great and entertaining stories to anyone who will listen.

What a wonderful life. And it’s not over. If you see Burt Levy in the paddock, offer him a ride. Or at least buy one of his books. Check everything out at lastopenroad.com. Tell him AutoWeak sent you. Maybe you’ll get a staff discount. After all of those free rides, he owes somebody something. Might as well be you.