Uppity: The Willy T. Ribbs Story

My grandfather

told me,

you must be better.

You must be,

not good, not average...

You must be better than the best.

He made it clear. It wasn't a matter of

whether you want to succeed or not.

You're going to.

There was no black driver at that time.

There was death threats.

If this nigger races in this race,

he not might not leave alive.

They called me Uppity. Uppity nigger.

And I loved it.

My grandfather,

he was the only black plumbing contractor in the city of San Jose.

His business was pretty much all white,

and he knew he had to be better than his competitors,

and he drilled that in us.

That was, to me, very important.

He started in 1927.

By 1960s he was doing so well that he bought a ranch

and left the plumbing business to my dad and my uncle.

Because of the family business, my dad had motorcycles,

and he had go-karts, and he had sports cars.

And that was my introduction.

My dad was racing as a hobby.

He competed in amateur racing.

We were always exposed to

racecars, and racing car drivers.

He was maybe about five or six and he met Dan Gurney

and oh, God, he just followed him all over the track.

If a race driver is ever elected president of the United States,

it probably will be Dan Gurney.

Dan Gurney, he was such a nice person.

He says "Okay, let's take our picture."

Dan was smiling all over the place.

He thought he was a real crack up.

The Dan Gurneys of the world.

The Jim Clarks of the world.

They were the reason I wanted to be a race driver.

And I knew that at nine years old.

From then on, he spent his time

with the automobiles rather than brothers and sisters.

I had a Lotus Cortina, which is a little two-door sedan.

Every opportunity he would have when he came home from school,

first thing he did was go jump in the car.

I knew where the key was...

...and I went up to a windy road, called Mount Hamilton Road.

At 12 years old.

The sheriff called me and said,

"You know we got Willy T. out in your car."

I said "Huh?"

My mother didn't spank me,

and my Dad didn't spank me.

But they said you're going to the ranch.

If you got in trouble, my grandfather, who was

the person you worried about. It wasn't the law.

He was only five foot four, but he was as big as Shaquille O' Neal.

I said you need to stay out here for a while,

where you can run a car without it running over somebody.

My grandfather hated auto racing.

It was not to be mentioned at the ranch.

So you didn't talk about it around him.

He thought that being involved in auto racing was

spending money recklessly.

You had to have a goal.

And it better pass the smell test with him.

He wanted to know what I was going to do.

I told him, I wanted to be a formula one driver,

or an Indy 500 driver.

There was no black driver at that time.

He said to me, you're a goddamn fool.

Told him, "No, you can't do that."

Willy T. said, "Grandpa, but that's what I want to do."

And he says, "Well, I don't care what you want to do. You can't drive a car."

"I built this business to hand over to you,

so you wouldn't have to work for somebody else.

So you could be your own boss." And with him, being your own boss

meant everything. You had to be your own boss.

I wanted to be my own boss. Behind the steering wheel.

I wanted to be a race driver.

Young drivers from all over the world would all go to Britain,

and run the Formula 4 championship.

This is Formula 4,

a late outgrowth to the Formula B division.

Formula 4 is a place where

if you have a desire to be a professional motor racing driver,

that was where you went.

That's the place where you find out if you're real.

And if you're good enough, you come out and people pay attention.

I let my parents know,

that I'm not going to go to college.

Look at me going to England to race Formula 4,

is like sending me to college.

My dad knew the dangers of racing. He would never admit that

he was worried about me getting hurt or killed.

But he knew it was there. He lost

quite a few friends right in front of his eyes.

Killed right in front of his eyes.

He was reluctant. Especially as a career.

When you do it as a career, you're all in.

You're all in.

When I got to England, I knew from reading Autosport Magazine.

There was a team that was very successful. It was called

Scorpion Racing. And the owner was Mike Eastick.

So I drove out to his farm and knocked on the door.

He thought I was there to get a job on his farm.

I said, "No, I'm here to talk to you about driving one of your racecars."

If you brought money. Whether it was personal money or sponsored dollars,

he'd put you in a racecar. I paid him

with my college money.

We shook hands on a deal.

Two weeks later, he had me testing his racecar at Mallory Park.

If you want to be an IndyCar driver

or a Formula One driver, you start at that level.

The older model racecar, which is what he put me in,

costs 200 pounds per race.

I finished third in my first race

and right then, he said, "Okay, I want you to go to the newer model."

Coming to get the green flag...

The second race I won.

When I called home from England, I said,

"I won." And there was a pause.

"You're kidding," and I said, "No, I won."

I was racing against Nigel Mansell and Michael Rowe.

And those guys were really tough.

Mansell went on to be Formula One world champion.

It was my fourth or fifth race.

The head of Formula One was there, Bernie Ecclestone.

Bernie Ecclestone took over Formula One.

Turned it into the world's number two sport behind soccer.

Made it a commercial success, billions upon billions.

And a beautiful start!

You can't even quantify how big Bernie Ecclestone

is in Formula One.

If somebody was doing well in any of the lower series,

they would probably come into GP3 or GP2

and then get recognized and go into Formula One.

And that's why I was there.

I wanted to catch your eye

so I could be a Formula One driver or an Indy 500 driver.

I won six out of eleven races. I had such a large points lead,

I couldn't be beat.

Willy was so dominant with the Scorpion Racing Team.

He didn't even need to finish the season.

He'd earned so many points, championship was already his.

Once I won my championship in Formula 4,

I was out of money.

You do need some support financially,

in order that you can get recognized.

Because you can't just say,

"I think what I'm going to do is be a Formula One driver,"

and pop into a car.

Once you start coming out of Formula 4, getting into Formula Three,

that's when things start getting a little bit expensive. Family support?

That comes to an end after Formula 4.

You really do need sponsors.

Wanting to be a racecar driver. It costs.

It costs a lot of money.

A lot of the drivers were being sponsored by their own country.

I didn't get that, and so...

I could not go to Formula Three, and I had to come home.

When I came back to the United States, I was 22 years old.

The next step from Formula 4 to the United States was Formula Atlantic.

And I got a phone call from the Long Beach Grand Prix Association.

They had a sponsor that put me in my first race in the United States.

I didn't have a car that I could win with,

but the objective was to get my feet wet in the United States.

Before every race, there's a drivers meeting.

You could feel the tension.

In England there was no animosity about the color of my skin.

It was about, "Hey, let's go out and race."

And when I walked into that drivers meeting

in Long Beach. Not one driver spoke to me.

Not one.

They didn't even look at me.

After that, there was nothing. Despite what I accomplished in England.

He came back knowing that, "I just did something,

accomplished something that very few Americans have.

Let alone African-Americans."

And no one would give him a shot, no one.

I came to speedway back in 1975,

and I was always looking for an angle.

We would do crazy things like Robosaurus.

He ate six cars.

Then we had high wire acts.

When Geoff Bodine came down here

from Chemung, New York, and I used to say,

Earnhardt's Robert E. Lee and Geoff Bodine is Grant.

For a while there, they sold a lot of tickets

'cause there was a civil war kind of aspect about it.

I get a phone call from a promoter in Charlotte, North Carolina.

If 30% of the population is Black,

you want to get some of those people in it.

He said, "I could put you in a car."

I did not know

he was The Blonde Don King.

Humpy Wheeler was smart enough to say, "This would be great for our series."