Why Worry First in Detroit Regatta
Cantrell Drives Ewald’s Gold Cup Entry to Easy Victory
— Hamlin in Crack-Up
By Clarence E. Lovejoy

Will She Take the Gold Cup This Month? (So-Long) War Crisis Keeps Rossi Abroad Speed Boats to Start in Labor Day Classic Pilot of Delphine IX Killed as Boat Sinks Why Worry First in Detroit Regatta [725's] Miss Canada III Choice to Beat Five Rivals Simmons Sets 90-Mile Speed Mark The Gold Cup Class Revisited - 1939

Detroit, Sept 2 [1939] — America’s greatest regatta of the speedboat racing year which will culminate on Labor Day in the thirty-sixth running of the Gold Cup began to work into its usual crescendo of excitement along the Detroit River this hot, sunny afternoon with curtain-raising events.

Although five of the seven expected Gold Cup entries let well enough alone and remained in the pits at Fisher’s and Kean’s boatworks two others took advantage of the perfect wind, weather and water conditions to whiz around the Belle Island course in the special race for the 725-cubic inch class.

Incidentally, it was a profitable undertaking for L.P. Ewald’s Why Worry, driven by Wild Bill Cantrell. This boat from Louisville, Ky., found it about as easy as rolling off a log to place first in the event, and this meant still another trophy as well as a winning cash purse.

Why Worry amply demonstrated to the race committee that it is capable of the minimum qualification for Monday’s classic of sixty-five miles an hour by a clocking of 66.325 in one of the heats.

Tomorrow morning at the Detroit Yacht Club, when the Gold Cup contest board of owners and drivers assembles, a decision will be made on two other 725’s, J.W. Anderson’s Warnie and M.J. Cooper’s Mercury which have entered.

In all likelihood the committee will welcome these Ohio River boats with open arms. But for the 725s there would be only four orthodox Gold cup craft Monday afternoon, when the ninety miles of America’s oldest speed racing fixture are run.

These will be Herb Mendelson’s Notre Dame, which won in 1937, Zalmon G. Simmons Jr.’s My Sin from Greenwich, Conn.; Louis J. Fageol’s So-Long from Pasadena, and the Dominion entry, E. A. Wilson’s Miss Canada III, from Ingersoll, Ont.

This year’s race will be without a defender, Count Theo Rossi having cabled last week that he was remaining in Italy because of the European situation. A sixth entry was to have been Horace E. Dodge’s Delphine IX, which cracked up on Monday with fatal injuries to its lessee and driver, Joe Schaeffer of Detroit, who died on Tuesday.

The seventh of the original Gold Cuppers entered, Dr. A.L. Harbarger’s newly designed Art-Eff from Akron, Ohio, could not be finished in time for this week-end.

The Detroit committees, comprising as they do of a good many automobile industry millionaires, flirted with the idea this week of providing a substitute driver for Count Rossi’s Alagi. Even Gar Wood Jr., the chip of the old block, who is a national outboard champion, offered to get behind the wheel.

But an exchange of cables with Rossi in Turin divulged that he had not sent either Alagi’s special propeller or the starting bottles of compressed air. These are so precious he carried them with his personal baggage, although his boat arrived last week.

This river course which has seen so many speedboat accidents had still another this noon when Chauncey J. Hamlin Jr. of Buffalo wrecked his record-holding Voodoo III in a trial spin and sent himself to Deaconess Hospital with compound fractures of his left arm.

This young broker, with his new creation that looks like a mammoth yellow tadpole, raised the 225 class record to 66.176 m.p.h. a fortnight ago at Red Bank, NJ. This was bettered later toady for distance competition when Jack Cooper, over this six-mile route, as contrasted with Red Bank’s five-mile course, was clocked at 66.639 in the second heat.

Incidentally, Cooper, the 63-year-old Kansas City grandfather, had a rival today much older than himself when Robert Jaite, a 79-year-young manufacturer of Jaite, Ohio, a town named for his family, drove his newly built 225, Apache II, but was penalized for inadvertently cutting a course buoy.

After losing the first heat in the 225 race for the Edenburn Trophy to the national champion, George Schrafft, the Harvard sophomore, Cooper ran off with the second and third heats to score a point victory by an eyelash, 927 points to Schrafft’s 925.

(Reprinted from the New York Times, September 3, 1939)

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