In Depression-era Illinois, Bob Nowicke scraped together $3 and bought his first car: a maroon 1926 Chevy coupe.
Nowicke hadn’t been around much longer than the car, which was 7 years old.
He turned his passion for cars into a Hall of Fame career as a builder of race cars and engines — and a strong safety advocate.
Nowicke, who has lived in Louisville for 57 years, will be inducted into the Kentucky MotorSports Hall of Fame in Elizabethtown on Sunday, along with eight others.
Two weeks later, he will be in Sun Prairie, Wisc., to join the National Midget Auto Racing Hall of Fame. He’ll have plenty of company there. One of his cars — which appeared in more than 500 races from 1946 to ‘69 — was driven by a dozen drivers who eventually joined the Midget Car Hall of Fame.
Sometimes, Bob said, “We raced eight times a week.”
For fun and profit — and lots of it.
The midget-car craze, like others, waned.
“What really killed it,” Nowicke’s son Jerry said, “was stock cars — jalopy stock cars — because midget racing was dangerous, inherently so, because of open wheels. Accidents were often fatal. In stock cars, you could have a hell of a wreck and get out with maybe one tooth missing.”
Ultimately, safety may be Nowicke’s contribution to racing.
Nowicke’s insistence on much stronger fasteners — bolts, rivets and such — made race cars, and racing, safer.
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