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Winning: The Racing Life of Paul Newman

By Gunnar Heinrich | IMG MotorBooks

HAD Steve McQueen lived long enough, perhaps he, and not Paul Newman, would be Hollywood’s face to race car driving. They were both hardened race car fanatics and both enjoyed racing victories off-screen. Or perhaps they would both have been Hollywood’s greatest race car rivals. Who knows?

Not that Mr. Newman donned the Hollywood mantle with any outward hint of pride, mind, it was, nonetheless, his entrée into the automotive world.

Here in the Constitution State, Mr. Newman always enjoyed a bit of lore that seemed more intimate than the blue eyed spectacle that world vaguely knew.

A resident of Westport,  he was “our neighbor”; living what seemed like an ordinary, if privileged life. A patron of the Westport Country Playhouse. A Volvo dealer. A dutiful philanthropist; helping his daughter forge profits into charity via Newman’s Own.

However, behind this disarmingly low key façade was a deeply, fiercely competitive man. In Winning: The Racing Life of Paul Newman, authors Matt Stone and Preston Lerner retell the stories from colleagues and rivals who knew Mr. Newman in the pits, on the track, and from the stands.

What is most striking in their well researched account is how readily the racing community accepted an actor. Following his leading role in the 1968 drama Winning, a story about an amateur who dreams of winning the Indianapolis 500, Mr. Newman set off headlong into racing which seemed at first to be reality imitating art.

Sometime rival racer Sam Posey brings insight to the story:

“One way to look at is that [Newman] acted his way into being a racing driver. He used his powers of concentration and his image of himself succeeding, and he played it like a role. Or maybe he was just a guy who was able to build on each lap incrementally [...] He’s often been quoted as saying that [racing] was the only thing that gave him a sense of physical grace. I can really identify with that[.]“

What’s clear is that no matter how Mr. Newman was able to glean victories in the IMSA and Trans-Am series or establish himself as a racing authority (as he did in playing part of the 2008 effort to reignite Indy fans), Paul Newman won his way into the folklore of automotive racing by his own skill.

A year after his death, his legacy is the respect of his peers in what is a hugely egocentric arena.

Mario Andretti caps the tributes to Hollywood’s leading race car driver: “What I saw in him was the wisdom of someone in love with life. A man who stayed with his dream [...] how lucky I felt to walk pit lane with him.”

Winning: The Racing Life of Paul Newman by Matt Stone and Preston Lerner. Published by MotorBooks. Retails for $30 / $37.50 CDN.