Getting Started Down the Road : Danny Sullivan Had a Novel Idea That Falkner Helped to Realize

When Danny Sullivan rolls his race car onto the starting grid for the Autoworks 200 today at Phoenix International Raceway, the big green No. 1 on its nose will signify the driver as the national Indy car champion.

If Sullivan, as he says, has paid his dues in 16 years of racing worldwide, then Dr. Frank Falkner, 70, a British-born professor, should have a No. 1 on his black Toyota GTS--a car given him by Sullivan. After all, Falkner helped launch Sullivan’s career.

Falkner, dean of the University of California’s Maternal and Child Health department as well as a professor of pediatrics, helped change the direction of Sullivan, the man, as much as Sullivan, the racer.

He and Sullivan made what turned out to be a longstanding connection in the winter of 1970. Sullivan was a dropout, from his family home as well as from the University of Kentucky, where in two semesters he accumulated a D+ average.

Two years earlier, after a showdown of sorts with his father, a prosperous Louisville general contractor, Danny took off for a weekend in New York--and never returned. His family lost contact with him.

“It was expected that I would go to college and take over Dad’s business with my brother,” Sullivan recalls. “I knew I didn’t want to go to college and I didn’t want to run a business. That set up a lot of tension around the house so I just left. It wasn’t really planned. I just took off one day. I had no idea I’d be gone so long.”

Falkner, a longtime family friend, tracked him down. Danny was waiting tables at the Auto Club, in the bottom of the General Motors building in mid-town New York.

“Danny, you can’t go on much longer like this,” Falkner told him late one night. “You’ve got to decide what you want to do, and set about doing it.”

A few nights later, after much discussion of what Sullivan had been doing to earn his keep away from home--as a waiter, busboy, dishwasher, cab driver, chicken farmer, sod cutter and lumberjack in the Adirondacks--Sullivan startled his old friend when he blurted out:

“I think what I really want to be is a race driver. I feel like I have some talent along those lines. Will you help me?”

Falkner recalled the circumstances recently.

“It was about 3 in the morning. (Sullivan had) finished work at the Auto Club and we’d dropped in at Le Drug Store for a nightcap. I must say, I wasn’t prepared for such a suggestion. Racing, I told him right off, was one thing I would not help him with.

“He knew I had a background in racing, but I told him that it was a heartbreaking sport, that it was like the theatrical business, that there was hardly any room at the top, and besides that it was too dangerous.

“I could tell he was serious, though, because he was completely ignoring the girl sitting beside him at the bar. Finally, he said, ‘Think about it. I think I’m going to do it anyway.’ ”

Falkner thought about it, then decided that if Sullivan was going to do it, he wanted him to do it right.

“ ‘Let’s make a gentlemen’s agreement,’ I said to Danny the next night. ‘There’s one way to find out if you have any talent and that’s to go to the best driving school.

“ ‘I will give you a 21st birthday (March 9, 1971) present of tuition at the Jim Russell Driving School in England. If they’ll have you, that is. When you finish, if in their opinion, you have no talent, or even very little talent, then you’ll forget it, give it up, and go back to college.’

“ ‘OK, that’s fair,’ Sullivan said. His parents were not pleased at all with my proposal, but it did please them a bit when I told them we had a gentlemen’s agreement that he would return to school if he showed little or no aptitude for racing.”

The school lasted eight weeks, after which Falkner met with the head instructor, John Payne, with whom he had been associated in England as a young driver himself.

“I called John and told him I wanted to talk with him over a beer about Danny,” Falkner said. “We met at the pub and I told him I wanted an honest assessment about his driving.

“ ‘Frank, he’s one of the best pupils we’ve ever had.’ All I could say was ‘Oh, . . . !’ That was absolutely the last thing I wanted to hear.”

It was no chance meeting that brought Falkner and Sullivan together in an all-night restaurant in New York.

Falkner had been dispatched by Danny’s parents to find their son, who had been incommunicado while bumming around New York. The Falkners and the Sullivans had been neighbors in Louisville from the time their sons were 12-year-old chums at a country day school.

“They were quite concerned, as all parents are when an offspring disappears for long,” Falkner said. “A mutual friend suggested to Dan Jr. that perhaps I could find Danny, who is Daniel John Sullivan III. They knew we had a good relationship from the time when he and our son, Mike, were schoolmates.

“They were best friends and sometimes it seemed as if Danny spent more time at our house than his own. We lived just outside Louisville on a tiny farm on the side of a steep hill.

“I owned a Mini-Cooper at the time, a present from John Cooper, an old and dear friend of mine from England. It was a rather unique car for Louisville and Mike used to drive it around the farm at times. One day I looked up and here comes the Mini down the hill, a very steep one I might add, going full speed. Guess who was driving? Danny was 14 at the time.”

Sullivan laughs when reminded of the incident.

“It’s a great story but I never had racing on my mind in the least,” Sullivan said. “I do remember looking at all the pictures and racing memorabilia that Dr. Frank had in his house. They fascinated me, but only in a curiosity sense. I never went to races of any kind. I was too busy playing regular sports and chasing girls. I was what you called a party boy.”

Sullivan played soccer, a little football and ran track at Kentucky Military Institute, where he was a member of the state champion 880-yard relay team.

Falkner was a club racer in England before moving to the United States in 1956.

He came to Louisville for one year to be an assistant professor of pediatrics at the university and never returned.

“I spent 14 years there and ended up as chairman of the department, but racing was always my disease,” Falkner said.

In 1960, Falkner spent a year on leave in Paris at the Children’s Hospital and during that time met with his old friend Cooper, whose cars had just won two Formula One championships.

“We were chatting about when John said that one of his drivers, Jack Brabham (the reigning Formula One champion at the time), had a thing about giving the Indianapolis 500 a try. I told him that he couldn’t be serious, that Indy cars at that time had 4.2-liter engines and the Cooper had only 2.5. I told him there was no way he could give away that much horsepower at Indy.

“John said that he thought he’d take a crack at it anyway, and that as long as I was living in Louisville and that wasn’t too far from Indianapolis that I should manage the project when he was in Europe with his Formula One team. The idea seemed as preposterous as Danny Sullivan going racing, but I agreed to give it a go.

“I remember that we arrived late and there was quite a crowd waiting to see what the British were going to unload. A.J. Foyt was nosing around and when he saw our tiny car, he said in a loud voice, ‘This race ain’t for midgets.’

“Well, you know what happened. The Cooper-Climax people stretched the engine from 2.5 to 2.75 liters and Jack finished ninth (in 1961) in the first rear-engine car ever to run at Indy.”

Two years later, Dan Gurney persuaded Colin Chapman to send two Lotus-Fords to Indy with Jimmy Clark and Gurney as the drivers and Indy car racing has never been the same. They finished second and seventh, respectively, In a few years all Indy cars were rear-engine machines.

Ken Tyrrell was another of Falkner’s old British friends who had a role in Sullivan’s development.

After getting his credential from Russell’s driving school, Sullivan began racing Formula Fords in England. Between races he worked for Tyrrell as a team gofer.

“Danny knew of my earlier involvement with Formula One so he asked for my help in getting a job and I talked to Ken about him,” Falkner recalled.

“Jackie Stewart was the world champion and was Tyrrell’s driver. Danny was exposed to a lot of racing, but he was strictly a pit boy. He never got near the cars to work on them, or even sit in one, but he was very well liked. He rode in the transporter from race to race and often slept in it. He was a young American with no money learning how to race in Formula Fords.”

Sullivan recalled his dependency on his older friend:

“Dr. Frank was like a surrogate father to me. He came to New York to get me back on the right track, but from then on he helped raise money for my rides and made sure I had enough to pay the rent each month.

“I was just 21 and alone in England with nobody I knew and no money. It was comforting to have a friend like Frank that I could call, even if he was 5,000 miles away.”

Early in 1983, after moving up the road racing ladder through Formula III, Formula II, Formula Atlantic and Can-Am, Sullivan was invited by Tyrrell to take a Formula One driver test in Rio de Janeiro. He was the quickest of four prospects and became the team’s No. 2 driver, behind Michele Alboreto.

“I want him back next year,” Tyrrell told Falkner after Sullivan drove in all 15 races, with a best finish of fifth at Monaco. “I’ve seen enough to know I want him on my team.”

But Sullivan, who impressed the American racing fraternity with his driving in the Can-Am for Paul Newman in 1981 and 1982, also had an offer from Doug Shierson to drive an Indy car in 1984.

“I was much against his leaving Formula One,” Falkner said. “But you know, Danny is a terribly persuasive young man.”

“A major factor in his decision was that Tyrrell’s cars were not too competitive at that time and Danny realized that there was a lot more money to be made here. He also felt that perhaps he could reach the top sooner in an Indy car than he could in the terribly competitive Formula One. Later, somewhat reluctantly, I agreed with his decision and told him so.”

Sullivan won three Indy car races driving Shierson’s Lola in 1984, including the Pocono 500, in which he edged Rick Mears in the year’s closest finish.

And then, once again, Falkner had a part in a career change by Sullivan.

“Roger Penske and I go back a long ways in sports cars and I was at Phoenix in October for the second race there when Roger asked me what ‘my protege’ was going to do the next year,” Falkner said. “Then he got real secretive and said, ‘I don’t want anyone to see us talking like this. Meet me out back in my car.’

“When I got there, he said he wanted Danny to drive for him. Well, there are no secrets in racing. In November, I was in London for a meeting of the British Racing Drivers Club and an old journalist friend of mine came up and asked me what about Sullivan switching to the Penske team.

“I told him I never heard of such a thing. He said, ‘Come on, Frank, what were you doing sitting in Roger Penske’s car for an hour or so at Phoenix?’ ”

After season’s end, Sullivan made the switch and in his first year with Penske won the Indianapolis 500, despite his famous 360-degree spin after passing Mario Andretti coming out of the first turn on Lap 120.

In 1987 and through the early races last year, Sullivan went through a drought. He failed to win or sit on the pole through the entire ’87 season and failed to finish the first three races of ’88. From Milwaukee on, however, he won four races, finished in the top five in 11 of 12 races and clinched his first CART championship by winning at Laguna Seca in the second-to-last race of the season.

Sullivan’s parents, Dan Jr. and Peggy, were there, as they have been at nearly all of their’s sons races in recent years.

“Once they saw that driving a race car wasn’t another of my funny ideas, but was something I finally took serious, the freeze was over,” Sullivan said. “They’re very supportive of me today.”

The Laguna Seca race served as an illustration of the affection and loyalty Sullivan has for Falkner, a slight, gray-haired man with twinkling eyes and a British accent.

Sullivan, who expected to clinch the championship on the hillside Monterey peninsula circuit, wanted his friend there. But Falkner was on the editorial board of the American Academy of Pediatrics and its annual meeting was scheduled in San Francisco on Sunday morning--the day of the Laguna Seca race.

“Sunday morning is such a stupid time to meet, but it’s a tradition so I had to comply,” Falkner said. “I drove to Monterey to be with Danny on Friday and Saturday and at dawn Sunday I drove to the hotel in San Francisco and arrived at 10 past 8, just in time. I spoke out in the meeting to make sure everyone knew I was there.

“Once the meeting ended, I drove to the San Francisco airport and by the skin of my teeth caught the flight to Monterey. I was petrified because I knew if I missed the flight, or if it was late, I’d miss the start of the race and I wanted to see Danny on the grid.”

Sullivan had a helicopter waiting at the Monterey airport to pick up Falkner and whisk him to the nearby track. Falkner made it, with 10 minutes to spare.

“That must be Dr. Frank,” Penske said as he looked up from giving final instructions to his drivers, Sullivan and Mears, as the chopper whirred over the start-finish line.

“I was so grateful that they helped me be there to see him win,” Falkner said. “It meant a lot to me.

“It’s been a long time since we sat down in New York and he startled me with his idea to be a race driver. Danny had worked very hard for that moment and to share it with him was something I’ll never forget.”