The night before the Tournament of Destruction championship, Elmer Fandrey didn’t plan to get loaded. There were windows to smash out in the ’76 Thunderbird he’d be racing, a gas tank to puncture, and the monstrous black body of the car to be sprayed a bright Smurfy shade of blue. But there was no way he was going to miss Sammy Hagar at Loopfest–he’d been holding skybox tickets at the Tweeter Center for months. So he told the other drivers on team Havoc that he’d come by the garage after the show.
In fact the only guy smiling that morning was Day, an ex-marine who’d been to the Persian Gulf and Somalia and who was the team’s rookie driver–though he was running on fumes like everyone else. The Newport was still gurgling like a throat wound, but he was gunning it back and forth across the lot. “Winning ugly!” he kept shouting.
The first demolition derbies in the Chicago area took place at the old 87th Street Speedway and at Blue Island’s Raceway Park, where promoters saw them as a profitable forum for the resolution of the brand rivalries nursed by gearheads–Ford versus Chevy and so on. Eventually a team version developed, in which groups of three cars would race while smashing into one another. But it was Howard Tiedt, owner of Hinsdale’s Santa Fe Speedway, who made team demo what it is today. Tiedt’s father, Frederick, had opened Santa Fe Park, as it was called in 1896, featuring horse and bicycle and later motorcycle and car racing in addition to a dance hall, a bowling alley, and a beer garden. A tornado took out the grandstands in the late 1920s, eliminating motor sports from the park until 1953, when Howard constructed a half-mile clay track suitable for stock car, midget, and spectator racing. He conceived the Tournament of Destruction late in the same decade, and the speedway hosted it every summer until the early 90s. At its height, in the 70s and 80s, it was the track’s biggest draw, packing the place eight nights a season.
The team warmed to the likable older Westenfeldt, who had a knack for spotting heavy iron in junkyards and driveways and for diagnosing tricky mechanical problems. Soon he was wrenching steadily for Elder and Hartung, and eventually he became the team’s crew chief.
The reign of Sudden Impact came to an end in 1989, after Elder went back to stock-car racing. Hartung–whose marriage was suffering from all the time he spent on the team–tried to walk away. It wasn’t easy: the following season Franklin talked him into driving for the Mean Green Machine, another legendary team that won eight championships between 1972 and ’99.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
In ’92 Dave Westenfeldt took part ownership of a team called Ram, which had a dismal season. In the midst of it he began prepping cars for the Quicksilver Destruction Company, and when the owner quit the next year, he inherited the team. Quicksilver wasn’t very competitive either, and team demolition itself fell on hard times, since it was becoming difficult to find big-bodied old cars that the drivers liked. In those days a winning purse was around $2,100, barely enough to cover locating and modifying 12 beaters for a night’s worth of racing, let alone gassing them up and throwing a couple bills to the drivers and crew. One year Henry raced two teams just to help keep the tournament alive.
Four years later Route 66’s director of merchandise sales–Larry Decker, now the Team Demo Association’s marketing director–persuaded his bosses to revive the tournament. No one had ever raced demos for the money, but the Westenfeldts, who’d held on to their inventory, liked what they were hearing from the new promoters. “We were kind of excited,” says Dave. “This was a big-time track and we were thinking this was gonna go places. They were talking about us being on television and good payouts, and they always talked about how sponsors would come to us and start doling out money.”
