Local racing icon passes away
by Bob Young - Aug. 5, 2009 09:30 PM
The Arizona Republic
Every now and again, a true adventurer comes along, and we lost one over the weekend.
Chauvin Emmons, a local racing icon, passed away as a result of complications from a broken femur. He suffered the injury during a fall while working in his garage in Prescott. He was 69.
It's sadly ironic that a guy who once walked away - albeit with a broken back - from a crash at more than 300 mph on the Bonneville Salt Flats was felled by a busted leg.
"It was a very, very freak thing," his wife, Sharon, said.
She found him on the floor of the garage last week after he slipped on a wet spot.
"He was lying there with his cigar clamped in his jaw as usual," she said. "He said, 'It hurts like you know what. I've broken my leg.'
"When the paramedics got there, they wanted to make sure he hadn't hit his head and one of them asked, 'May I take that cigar out of your mouth?' He had chewed it over pretty good."
Over the weekend, complications set in and Emmons was taken off of life support on Saturday.
Emmons had been preparing for another run at Bonneville's Speed Week that begins Saturday near Salt Lake City. His son, who is also named Chauvin, was on his way there Wednesday to make preparations to run the car his father and partners had built.
"He's going to attempt it," said Emmons' son-in-law, Terence Murnin. "I think Chauvin would have wanted him to go ahead and do it. He was not one for sentimentality."
It was Emmons' hope that his son would join the "200 Miles Per Hour" club at Speed Week. The elder Chauvin had not only joined that club in the 1970s, but was the first to go more than 300 mph in a modified roadster with an unblown engine.
That was at Speed Week 10 years ago, when he officially achieved a speed of 302.892 mph in that car. However, near the finish he veered off the 5-mile course and flew over a trench.
Had he been able to keep the car under control a bit longer, his timing crew had him headed toward a 318-mph run.
According to the Southern California Timing Association, which maintains records for Bonneville, Emmons' speed in 1999 remains a record for that division. He has a record in a smaller engine classification of 269.865 mph that has stood since 1974.
After the crash, he told an Arizona Republic reporter from his Salt Lake City hospital bed, "You bet your pitooty it's worth it."
Emmons also said he figured the "Big Guy" might have been trying to tell him something with that crash.
"The problem he had in 1999 was that a fitting cracked, spraying fuel on his mask and windshield," Sharon Emmons said.
"He was taking his hand off the wheel to wipe it off so he could see, and he went over that trench that drains the brine away. He got off track and hit a big pile of salt and mush."
Recently, though, rear-engine roadster divisions were created for Speed Week, and when Emmons heard about it he told his wife, "I hate to tell you, but I'm going back to Bonneville."
"He always said he liked to have the engine behind him from his drag-racing days," she said. "He had it built in about a year."
During two earlier runs, the car caught fire, but Emmons believed he had the problem solved and was anticipating the new car also may be capable of exceeding 300 mph.
If it does, it will be his son who takes it there. For now, however, the goal is to get the younger Chauvin into the 200 mph club.
"We have a friend, Fred Dannenfelzer, who we've known for years," Sharon Emmons said. "He has gone over 300, too, and he's going to be our son's mentor. He won't have his daddy there, but he'll have Fred."
Plans for a memorial service are pending, but Sharon Emmons said when it happens, it will take place where her husband most loved to be: in that garage. |
