Here, he’s pictured during qualifying for the Rocky Mountain 150 race in Colorado in 1970. Simpson took the ball and ran with it and in his first year of manufacturing Simpson firesuits, 30 of the 33 starters in the Indianapolis 500 were wearing them.īill Simpson was a pretty fair racer in his own right. He had to: Until NASA astronaut Pete Conrad, an avid amateur racer, introduced Simpson to Nomex, in 1967 a then-new fire-resistant material invented by DuPont scientist Wilfred Sweeny, no one had found a genuinely effective, affordable substance that would work. More than once, Simpson set himself on fire to demonstrate the effectiveness of his firesuits. If somebody asks, I tell them my name is “Smith.”Ĭorrectly figuring I could use any advantage available, I went to Simpson for my firesuit, back when they actually called them “firesuits.” Go to the Simpson Racing Products website today, and they’re called “racing suits.” To Bill Simpson, though-a man who never spent much time worrying about political correctness, or calling a suit something that would not make a racer’s spouse see it hanging in the closet and automatically think of “fire”-it was a firesuit. Pursuant to that, no race car I’ve owned has had my name on it.
SIMPSON RACE GEAR DRIVER
I declined to tell him the real reason I didn’t want my name on the suit: Then as now, I’m such a crappy race driver that I discourage any means of expedited identification. Like ‘Bubba.’ How about Bubba?” I was living in Texas at the time and assumed that people in California figured half of Texas men must be nicknamed Bubba, when in reality, it is less than a third. “Everyone wants their name on the suit! It can even be a nickname. I told the salesman that I’d just as soon not have my name on the suit. “We stitch your name on it for free,” the man said, just one more service of Simpson Racing Products, founded by safety guru Bill Simpson, who died Monday at age 79, following a stroke.
Trim: Three yellow bands around the upper arms. The man with the tape measure wrote everything down carefully. I had been wearing off-the-rack stuff, and I was tired of it: There was a little room left on the American Express card, and I planned to max it out. Impossible, right? Could it really have been January 1993 when I walked into business just outside Los Angeles to buy my first-and, sad to say, apparently my last-tailored suit?
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