A TOMMY MORRISON-HAL NEEDHAM CORVETTE STORY

One of the events I managed was called: “The Chevy-Geo Braille Rally Series”.  It consisted of mystery route driving events that matched up a vision-impaired “navigator” with a sighted driver.  We did them in LA, San Diego, Portland, Reno, and Denver.

The rallies were two to three-hour road events that required each driver/navigator team to complete a secret course making a number of check stops at designated places along the way (we cleverly used Chevrolet dealer’s facilities for the check points). 

If you’ve ever been on a rally, you know that the person in the right seat is given a set of route sheets that lay out the course line by line with the idea that the navigator and the driver need to work together interpret, find the route to the check points and the finish line. Sounds pretty normal, right?

Okay, now what if those all-important route instructions were written in Braille?  That was the challenge.  We worked with local Braille Organizations who saw our events as a great way to promote learning to read Braille especially for the younger generation of the sight impaired.  

The premise: a sighted driver, who can see the road but not read the driving instructions, and a visually impaired navigator who can read the instructions but can’t see the road.  We did a number of these events over the course of three years, and I never ceased to be amazed at the sort of joy this simple little adventure brought to both navigator and driver.  There was a pride in the shared effort that seemed to go well beyond a fun jaunt in the county. 

At the lead off LA event, we invited movie director Hal Needham as a celebrity guest driver.  (And no, he didn’t crash his car through one end of a barn and out the other or barrel roll it while a fleet of cops chased with full lights and sirens.)  He was great, he had a good time, was wonderful with his blind navigator (who had never seen one of Needham’s movies*) and ended up thanking us for the opportunity to participate.  

Move the clock about six or seven months down the road to mid-year 1990 and one day, Eric Davidson, Vic Oleson’s second in charge, walked into my office and said, “… Hey Stokes, YOU know Hal Needham, don’t you?

My response was something like: “Er, yeah, I guess so, why do you ask?” “Well, Tommy Morrison wants to talk to him about an idea for a movie.”  I had never met Morrison but knew plenty about him, he was a down-south maverick who ran a team of all-winning Corvette which were as close to a factory platoon as possible.  

It might be informative here to relate that all American automobile manufacturers at the time had all (supposedly) backed off of fielding racing entries that came directly from the factory.  Instead, certain “privateers” got “certain” parts and pieces (both hardware and “technical advice”) and went like hell but without the manufacturer being seen as being in racing directly. The statement was: “...We only build ‘em, what people chose to do with them is their deal...”.  

I called Needham.

As it turned out Morrison and several of his “associates” had only a few months before shattered several international speed/distance records at the huge (7.7 miles around!) Firestone high speed test track out in Fort Stockton, Texas.  Morrison and his cohorts (including one of Chevy’s top racing engineers) had taken turns driving one of his racing Corvettes for 24 hours straight and piling up some 4,200 miles at an average speed of just over 175 miles per hour!  

Morrison thought that the story behind the ‘secret’ that was maybe not all that secret and how he and his henchmen got scads and scads of prototype, over the transom, factory un-numbered go fast parts and pieces, along with operational “suggestions”, tech papers, and (no names please) in person and  telephone consultations on how to use them, not to mention clandestine rendezvous’ sometimes taking place in some very dark settings very late at night … might well make a rollicking Hal Needham two-reeler.  

Morrison came West, we three went to dinner at a quiet, old as sin, dimly lit bar and grille in Culver City. We drank dinner.

The two men Morrison and Needham were separated at birth…stories flew…it was mesmerizing, and the movie started to appear in the smoky air of that tiny (right out of central casting) West Side watering hole. 

… Most likely it will come as no surprise that Mister Needham knew the barkeep and that the normal 2AM closing time was amended for us without even asking.  I forgot to look at my watch, but it was damn sure getting light out when we left with (what seemed then on the cool, damp morning streets near the studios) like pretty damn detailed plans to make a film about Tommy Morrison, his unrecognized/clandestine co-conspirators, and the Chevy factory folks (very secretly in this case) all fooling around to post an amazing 24 Hour world record speed run.  

… Well, right, and the damn movie never happened.  As with hundreds (thousands) of likely movie themes floated every day of the year out this way, this one, for reasons I was never privy to (but I think that I could easily guess), did not make the cut.  

But those two really were brothers from another mother (more often than not that night finishing each other’s sentences). Morrison and Needham are both long gone now and the feature film world and motor racing is just slightly the worst for it in terms of the sort of pure excitement and colorful characterization that I sat and saw conjured on that night long ago.  

The Complete Book of Corvette - Every Model Since 1953 only gave Morrison a couple of paragraphs, given a few more as he might say: that it really was; “...just for sh*t and giggles”.  Corvette people are like that.

And about that record run: The score? Three outright World Records: 5000-kilometers at 175.710 mph, 24-hours at 175.885 and 5000-miles at 173.791, plus four other FIA International marks in class A-G2-C10. 

"It didn't seem much of a deal until after we did it," one member of Morrison’s “band” Corvette Development Manager John Heinricy reflected. "I thought: 'Wow. This is a World's speed record–three speed records! And two of them had been standing for 50 years. Pretty incredible. What made me feel even better was that the car was so stock."

The ZR-1's Record stood for 11 1/2 years. It was reset at 183.45-mph in October 2001 by Volkswagen's exotic, 600-hp, "W12 Coupe" one-off, prototype. A further-developed version of the same (specially designed and constructed) concept car reset the mark in February of 2002 at 200.67-mph, where the record stands today.

Corvette remains the only production vehicle to ever hold the 24-hour speed record.

Fun Fact: The Fort Stockton track was (are most “secret” test tracks), way (way) out in the countryside and a small platoon (six or eight) of local young lads was hired to stand spaced about a mile apart armed with shotguns that they fired at random (for the full duration of the 24 hour record run) to scare off deer and other large creatures from running across the track at an inopportune time - true.

*Not ever having met Hal Needham or knowing who he “was” was not an issue. Needham was friendly and very encouraging for the 12-year-old lad who, as the well-known movie director told all at the awards picnic lunch: “…Rode shotgun and did a hell…er HECK of a job!”