An Interview with Ted Robertson

Excerpted from

“A Gentleman’s Club: The Growth and Transition of American Sports Car Racing”

By Pete Hylton

(To be released Fall, ‘08)

On the occasion of SCCA’s 50th Anniversary in 1994, I had the opportunity to have a brief conversation with the late Ted Robertson, one of the founding members of SCCA and its first president. I raised the fact that he had previously been quoted in SportsCar as saying “On looking back to that faithful gathering of seven enthusiastic owners of early Americana on that Saturday evening on 26 February 1944, one fact stands out quite clearly,……we didn’t know what we were doing.” Robertson confirmed that their original intent had been to preserve early American sports cars. In fact, most of the cars owned by the founding members in 1944 were over 20 years old. Their objective was to keep interesting old cars like the Mercer Raceabout and Stutz Bearcat popular. They had no idea that SCCA would end up where it did.

Ted was a Mercer owner, and was very fond of his 1918 Raceabout. However, he saw similar cars going to the scrap heap. He knew that parts were getting tougher to find, and fewer and fewer people knew anything about the machines. So his focus when he wrote the draft of the club constitution and called together some of his similar minded friends for that first meeting was to create a club of “owners of elderly sports cars to insure their preservation.” The constitution was adopted and Robertson was elected president. They had no idea that SCCA would become involved in racing, in fact, they expected the pre-war ARCA organization to start back up, supplying the organization of American road racing. When ARCA did not reactivate, SCCA unexpectedly began to move in to fill the void.

Within five years, none of the original seven members was involved in SCCA any more, as the focus had already changed. By then the interest was in newer cars like the MGs and Jaguars that were being imported from England. The vintage machines that the original members had been interested in were no longer the focal point of the organization. Also, by 1949 the focus had changed from preservation to competition. Clearly Robertson was right, they really did not know what their club was going to evolve into.

I was able to confirm the story that the long-standing SCCA wire-wheel emblem was modeled after the rear wheel of Robertson’s Mercer. He verified that Chapin Wallour sketched the familiar logo from the 80 mm Rudge-Whitworth, 20 inch diameter wheel with a 6.00 by 20 tire. He also confirmed that the original newsletter name, SportWagen, had been chosen because Sports Car had already been taken by a British MG club. However, it wasn’t long before the switch to the current name was made anyway. Believe it or not, there were no magazines in the US at that time that gave significant attention to sports cars. Robertson and his compatriots had to get their news from the excellent English monthly publication Motor Sport, and the news was frequently old by the time it reached them.

Ted was posthumously inducted into the SCCA Hall of Fame, but he always downplayed his role in creating the SCCA of today. Although he acknowledged his responsibility in founding the club, he also knew that it had gone way beyond his original vision. SCCA might not have preserved the cars that he loved. And it might not have maintained the objectives that he wrote into its first constitution. Nonetheless, without that vision, it would not be here for us today.

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