How Heroes Are Created

Our Editor, Rob Mullner, asked me to write about the Santa Barbara Airport Races, Kas Kastner, and the modern day Reno Air Races. All right, here goes. Kas Kastner walks into the bar at the Santa Barbara Airport Lounge during the races. He has a Pratt & Whitney R-4360 engine under his arm. He asks the bartender, “If I have 47 good spark plugs in this motor, how many bad ones do I need to change?”

Perhaps I should find another angle on this. My mom tells a story of the last time she ever rode a motor scooter. It was at the Santa Barbara Airport Races. She froze up on the throttle and crashed into the door of a Jag. It’s a true story, but may still not be quite what we need.

To make any sense of this premise, we have to connect some dots. Santa Barbara Airport was home to a Marine air station in WWII. If you watch the John Wayne movie, “Flying Leathernecks,” you’ll see a brief clip of an F4U Corsair landing at the Goleta Air Station (AKA Santa Barbara). The Sunkist building in the background still exists today. In the 1950 and 60s, Santa Barbara Airport became a popular venue for sports car racing.

Fast forward 45 odd years from the 1960s, and folks are racing WWII era aircraft, like F4U Corsairs, at the Reno Air Races. With speeds in the 450-500 mile per hour range, it doesn’t sound as if there’s much vintage in the racing, but in reality they are vintage racers in every respect. The aircraft, the engines, and the vast majority of airworthy parts in these racing machines are 50 years old or more.

Every year at Reno, you see plenty of famous people, like air show pilot Bob Hoover, or former NASA astronaut Robert “Hoot” Gibson, who flies a Hawker Sea Fury at those 450 mph speeds in the Unlimited class. There are other famous people wandering the pits as well. There’s Pete Law for example, who though not known to the general public, is revered among the racers for his decades of racing aircraft engineering knowledge. He started at Reno in 1964.

As with the Reno racers, vintage auto racing today attracts its fair share of famous people. Watching over the racers as he did when Competitions Manager for Triumph in the 1960s there is a very famous man, Robert “Kas” Kastner. After a track session, drivers bring spark plugs to be checked for tuning flaws by Kas. They ask him for advice on driving technique, or any other car related issue which by gaining a little knowledge can be made better or faster.

Kas Kastner is a hero of British motor sport. Learn more about Mr. Kastner in our Heroes feature on page 52. And lest any questions be left unanswered, that 28 cylinder, 4,360 cubic inch Pratt & Whitney monster under Kas’ arm when he entered the lounge, it needed nine more spark plugs to complete the set…and you think you have it tough timing your four banger.

By Robert Goldman