Let’s get right to the point. Here’s all you need to know about racing driver Neal Sceva:  If lung cancer hadn’t stolen him from us in 1985, Sceva would have been 85 years old this year.  And he would still be crawling behind the wheel of a race car.  Sonny Pencil, Neal’s longtime pal and a legendary race car owner, builder and driver in his own right, said what everyone knew.  “Neal lived to race.  I’m convinced that age alone would have never gotten him our of a race car.”

 

            Contrary to what many of his fans might suspect, Neal Francis Sceva was not born behind the wheel of a race car that May 30, 1923 day in Urbana, Ohio.  No, it took him all of nineteen years to find his way into the driver’s seat of a Model A Roaring Roadster, and he worked hard along the way.

            Neal’s parents divorced shortly after he was born and he grew up with his mother and her family in the small Ohio farming community of Mutual.  Farming has a way of instilling a work ethic that stays with you for your entire life.  Sceva had to quit school in the 11^th grade to work that farm, but the real life lessons Neal learned there about persistence, determination, and dedication may have proved more valuable than a high school diploma.

 

            When he wasn’t hard at work on the farm, Neal spent his free time working on his car and the cars of friends.  If there was anything that the self-taught mechanic didn’t know about automobiles, Uncle Sam soon filled in the blanks.  Sceva joined the Army during World War II and was trained as a mechanic.  He saw duty overseas and spent most of his tour in France.

 

            When he returned from the service, he turned again to his love affair with automobiles and auto racing.  He found work as a mechanic at various garages and auto dealerships in Dayton and Urbana and began racing Jalopies.  But he discovered love of a different sort when he met Ruth Longenecker of Springfield, Ohio.  It’s almost certain that young Ruth had no idea what was in store for her when she met Neal.  She certainly couldn’t have imagined the sheer number of race nights and race tracks that would occupy her life, or the number of race cars that would pass through Neal’s garage, or the hundreds of trophies and awards she would share with Neal over the next 33 years.  But even if she had known, it’s likely she would still have said “yes” when Neal asked her to be his wife.

            Neal Sceva and Ruth Longenecker were married in 1952 and on their wedding day, they rode through downtown Urbana in Neal’s race car.  Together they raised a family of four children: Roger Gillespie, Neal Jr., David, and Becky.

 

            In 1956, Sceva opened his own service station in Urbana and named it simply “Neal’s Sunoco,” a name that would appear on most of his race cars throughout his career.  Despite the demands of the service station, Neal found time to serve as a board member for the Dayton Pleasure Car Club, a small stock car sanctioning body.  The DPCC assigned Neal #51, and his cars wore that, too, for most of his career long after DPCC had ceased to exist.

            Over the years, besides Neal’s Sunoco, the business Neal operated until his death, he also owned and operated a garage specializing in engine and transmission repair and replacement, two car washes, and a towing service.  He was a part owner of Kil-Kare Speedway during the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s and served on the track’s Board of Directors for part of that time.

 

            For over 40 years Sceva drove almost every sort of race car -- Roadsters, Jalopies, Supermodifieds, Sprint cars, Midgets, Late Models -- on every sort of dirt and asphalt track.  Sometimes he hauled the race car to tracks as far away as Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Kentucky, but he raced primarily in central and southwest Ohio at speedways like Springfield Springs, Forest Park, Shady Bowl, Powell, Kil-Kare, Columbus and of course Dayton Speedway.  He was never much interested in going pro; he had his business and his family to think of, and he enjoyed competing on the local level too much to give that up.

 

            In the early ‘60s some of his racing buddies -- Jack Bowsher, Jim Cushman, Dick Freeman, Harold Smith, Jack Shanklin, and Paul Parks – joined the Midwest Association for Race Cars (MARC – later the Automobile Racing Club of America, ARCA) tour.  Neal might have thought about joining them, but late in 1963 he was diagnosed with bladder cancer.  The doctors who told Neal his chances of surviving were slim apparently had no idea who they were dealing with.  Sure, battling the Grim Reaper was tough work for Neal, but not as tough as working on the farm, or serving in the Army, or raising a family and running his own business, and certainly not as difficult as passing on the outside at some little Ohio bullring.

            Sceva missed the 1964 season, and half the 1965 season, before announcing that he was ready to return to racing.  Some of Neal’s friends and fans had doubts; Sceva had just survived a long, serious battle with cancer.  Could he really ever be competitive again?

            Sceva racing pals Sonny Pencil and Marion Brooks never wavered.  Brooks agreed to put Neal into a sprint car for his first race since his illness.  They towed to Findley, Ohio, and the race fans there at Millstream Speedway that night watched Neal Sceva wheel the Brooks-owned entry to the feature win just as if he’d never been away.

 

            Neal’s 1967 season was the stuff of legend.  He won over 60 features that season alone, including every race he entered at Kil-Kare, Shady Bowl and Columbus Motor Speedway. 

And race fans still talk about the 1974 ASA Midwest 300 at Salem Speedway in Indiana.  There Neal came from back in the pack and battled Joe Ruttman, a future NASCAR Sprint Cup driver, wheel to wheel over the last five laps of the race.  When Sceva made his move under Ruttman in the last turn of the last lap, Joe turned hard left, smashing both cars into the inside wall and sending them sliding across the finish line, backwards, in a cloud of blue smoke.  When the smoke cleared, the officials determined that 51-year-old Neal Sceva’s Mustang, or what was left of it, had reached the finish line first, leaving the 29-year-old Ruttman the runner-up.

            In the same season the versatile Sceva finished third in the World 100 at the world famous Eldora Speedway.

 

            Nine years later, he was still at it. In 1983, at age 60, Sceva enjoyed one of his best seasons in racing.  He won multiple features at Kil-Kare, Shady Bowl and Columbus Motor Speedway.  In a remarkable struggle at Shady Bowl, Sceva battled tooth and nail with the famous Ed Howe for the entire race distance and came home the winner in the Raymond Scherer Memorial event.

 

            Neal drove his own cars for most of his career, but also wheeled cars owned by others.  Besides Pencil and Brooks, Neal also drove for Melvin Clay, Ed Kindler, Joe Kirkoff, Doug Wilson, Bob Morgan and Jack Bowsher.  In fact, the 1970 Mustang that Neal used to win the ASA Midwest 300 was built by Sceva and Dave Gentis on a Jack Bowsher-built chassis.

And though no one could match Sceva’s superb mechanical abilities, he gladly accepted help over the years from his kids and mechanics like Gentis, Bob Kiser, Rocky Myers, Albert Thompson, Dick Engle, Jerry Stickley, Greg Wilson and Bruce Derr.

  

            In hindsight it seems only fair, given Neal’s difficult battles with cancer, that he would go through his entire racing career relatively unscathed.  There were accidents, of course, and some looked serious, if not fatal, but in every case Neal emerged unharmed.

            In 1959, Neal was at Kil-Kare Speedway behind the wheel of a supermodified that had been purchased by Brooks.  During the racing action, Neal flipped the car upside down, only to have the roll cage completely collapse, pinning Sceva underneath.  The fuel tank split, dumping fuel, and the car skidded that way down the frontstretch in a shower of sparks.  Remarkably, the car did not catch fire.  Jack Bowsher was reportedly the first on the scene and heard Neal shouting for someone to get the car off of him.  Sceva was pulled from the wreckage and walked away.  Later it was discovered that the car’s builder had used very thin wall pipe for the roll bars!

 

            Neal survived a far worse accident at Indianapolis Raceway Park (now O’Reilly Raceway Park) in Indianapolis, Indiana in 1978.  Neal and Bruce Gould were battling for position when the cars got together.  Sceva, in Joe Kirkoff’s ASA Camaro, veered sharply left and hit the concrete wall head-on at full speed, breaking the wall.  The car leaped into the air, spun around, and came to rest against the wall in turn one.  Every one of his belts, except for the left lap belt and the crotch belt, broke on impact.  His helmet was cracked from contact with the roll bars.  And yet, Neal Sceva climbed out on his own and again walked away.

 

            Lung cancer eventually slowed Neal Sceva, though he won three features in 1984 after he’d been diagnosed and endured an operation.  Death caught up to Neal, finally, but had to work hard to take him, on June 6, 1985, just a week after his 62^nd birthday.  His family and many friends laid Neal to rest in his familiar driver’s uniform in Oakdale Cemetery in Urbana, the city where he’d lived most of his life.  Properly attired, Neal was let go to wherever it is that racing drivers spend eternity, and on that day, at that moment, at speedways across the Afterlife, drivers swallowed hard and passed the word: Racing here is about to get tougher, #51 is on his way.          

 

 

[ADDITIONAL PHOTOS FOLLOW BELOW] 

 

 

 

Driven to the Past

 

     All the uproar over the Talledega finish got me to thinking about the past again.

     As for the uproar and the finish itself, we’ve been all over that in back-and-forth e-mails between Frontstretch.com contributors and I don’t think this is the place for my personal opinion since it isn’t supposed to be editorial commentary. The idea is to be entertaining and informing.

    However...

The “past” it made me think of came in the 1970s at Salem, Indiana.

   I’ve already told the story about the first Midwest 300 at Salem in 1972, won by Darrell Waltrip, and the fact that Steve Stubbs called it “...the damnedest race I’ve ever seen.”

   It was a later Midwest 300 I remembered after that Talladega finish.

As I said before, we ran that race in three 100-lap sections, the first two in Daytona qualifying format – qualifiers 1-3-5-7 etc. in the first, and 2-4-6-8 etc. in the second. The top twelve from each went into the final 100.

 

   The one I’m thinking about right now took place in October of 1974.

   Joe Ruttman was leading the final 100, but an Ohio driver named Neal Sceva was giving him all kinds of reasons to worry in the final laps.

   Sceva was trying inside, outside, any way he could think of, but Ruttman was driving the world’s widest Chevelle.

   Finally, after the white flag things really got interesting.

   Sceva made a dive to the inside coming off the second turn of that high-banked half mile, and this time got all the way alongside Ruttman. Neal suddenly found himself running on the grass inside the backstretch and there was no doubt he was “forced” down there.

   Either because he couldn’t get any traction on the lawn or decided discretion was the better part of valor, Sceva backed off and fell in behind Ruttman again.

 

   Going through the third and fourth turns, he tried again, this time getting up as far as Ruttman’s driver-side window by the time they went under the old overhead bridge at the head of the straightaway.

   At that point, Joe appeared to again try to force him down again – but this time there was a guard rail in the way.

   Discretion be damned, I suppose, Neal kept coming and the result was Ruttman’s car going across the start-finish line sideways with the front end of Sceva’s Mustang planted firmly in the left side.

   Cars were diving in all directions to miss the melee, and that was one of my first experiences with waving two flags at once. Not two checkers this time, checker and yellow. Somehow I even found a way to flip on the yellow light.

 

   When it was all over, there was a huddle of ASA officials in the tower to decide what kind of call to make.

   Somebody asked my opinion, and I suggested we award the win to Ruttman and then fine him the amount it paid for first place. That wasn’t taken too seriously, but I had a feeling that John Marcum or Big Bill France might have done just that.

   As it turned out, they decided to declare Sceva the winner and penalize Ruttman for rough driving.

   When ASA Competition Director Milt Hartlauf tried to explain to Ruttman why the ruling was made, Joe said, “Hell, what else was I supposed to do? I gave him the whole outside!”

   The fact that he waited until Sceva was all the way on the inside to give him the outside somehow didn’t enter into Joe’s thinking.

 

   This eventually ended up with Joe Ruttman filing a lawsuit, but I never heard anymore about that. Could be that the lawyer involved knew me from my days as a newspaper editor in Salem and realized I wasn’t going to be much help even though Joe and I were good friends.

   Years later, I ran into Joe when he was heading up hospitality for Dan Gurney’s teams during an IMSA race at Atlanta, and he recalled the day and asked me what I thought.

   “Joe, I thought you were wrong.”

   “I had a feeling you’d say that,” he said.

 

   Actually this isn’t the first time an on-track incident has brought that day at Salem back to the front of my alleged mind.

   For instance, what would have happened if the Cale-Yarborough-Donnie Allison incident in the 1979 Daytona 500 had occurred in the tri-oval instead of on the backstretch?

 

 

 

     Neal Sceva was one of the featured drivers on this flyer for the 100 lap feature at Dayton Speedway on October 12, 1952.  The other featured drivers were Jack Farris, Richmond, IN; Ed Benedict, Miamisburg, OH; Briar Johnson, Richmond, IN; Sonny Beck, Dayton, OH; Jack Edwards, Fairborn, OH; and Carl Kaiser, Cincinnati, OH.