The Oxford Dictionary defines art as “the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.” By that very definition, Sprint Car Racing is art. A performance art pairing ingenuity and the daring prowess of drivers wanting to show off to grandstands full of entertainment-starved fans. Anyone who has watched Sprint Cars fly by in packs through a corner knows this; it’s a mosh-pit ballet with fireproof slippers.
I can’t honestly remember the rabbit hole I had traveled down, but somehow I stumbled upon a picture of a Sprint Car in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, which is a part of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. Right there on the right side, black on a gleaming white gas tank, almost out of frame, was a logo I was familiar with. A 1980s era World of Outlaws logo.
I can understand a Sprint Car being in the Museum of American History. I don’t believe there is anything more inherently American than short-track dirt racing. But why on Earth would there be a fully assembled, seemingly race-ready Sprint Car, on the same grounds as Auguste Rodin and Henry Moore?
The cursory pieces I was able to put together told me that there was a guy called “Sal,” who — after leading some sort of fantastical life, complete with war, romance, fine art, and setting a world record for tree-sitting — decided to buy a Pennsylvania Sprint Car team. That team lived on, still racing on the Pennsylvania tracks years after the man had passed, and now run by the father and son team at Siegel Racing.
On a beautiful May day at Lincoln Speedway for a World of Outlaws NOS Energy Drink Sprint Car Series race, I saw it. Halfway down the narrow and dusty pit road, between the haulers of 10-time Series champion Donny Schatz and defending champion Brad Sweet, was a car bearing a #59 on its wing, written in a very unique gessetto font. A number I had now seen in gallery books and the online archives of Italian art collections. When I walked up to the car, its driver, Jim Siegel, was sitting on the left rear tire talking to a fan.
I was struck by how excited Jim was to talk about Sal; he recounted stories of him as an owner, and a picture he discovered of Salvatore standing next to Andy Warhol.
The horn signaling cars to stage for Hot Laps sounded, so we agreed to continue our conversation over the phone when we weren’t in the dusty confines of a race day.
Photo by: WayTru Productions
Did I just meet a Sprint Car driver that could recognize Andy Warhol in a picture?
Salvatore Scarpitta was born on March 23, 1919, in New York City to a Sicilian father and a Polish-Russian mother; both of whom were artists in their own right. His father was an accomplished sculptor and portraitist who was also an architect; his mother was a well-known ballerina and actress back in the days of silent films — that is until her husband appeared on set as an “extra” and caused a commotion during the shooting of a love scene.
In 1936, after spending his childhood in California — where he also picked up several small-time acting roles — Salvatore moved to Rome, Italy to attend the Academia di Belle Arti where he studied sculpting and painting.
As the fascist forces of Mussolini began to take power in Italy, and the governments of Europe began to clearly posture for war, Salvatore received a telegram from friend and former Vice-Consul to the US Embassy in Palermo, William Everett Scott, who had just transferred to Romania.
The message simply said, “Sal, get out. Come to me.”
At the time there was a law in place that stated the sons of Italians in foreign lands were to be considered Italians, and therefore eligible to be drafted into the war effort. In a 1975 interview with Paul Cummings, which has been transcribed and lives on in the Archives of American Art, Salvatore reflected, “I told them I would prefer the concentration camps [to joining the Italian Army].”
Taking a train from Rome, through Yugoslavia and Hungary, Salvatore arrived in Romania early in the summer of 1940. He spent time there painting and helping out in the Diplomatic Corps. But his time there was short-lived.
“I got into some trouble. We led a life in the Diplomatic Corp that I was completely unprepared for. Annoyed women, uncertain husbands, and a kid nineteen - twenty at the most. I found myself being introduced into situations of love that I could not sustain emotionally… And I found myself without protection in the middle of the Balkans, a young guy who just barely spoke Romanian. On my own. So I made my way back to Italy,” recalled Sal in the aforementioned transcript.
Upon returning to Rome he found the American Embassy in the process of burning papers and abandoning their post. This was 1941, and while the bombing of Pearl Harbor was still a few months in the future, it was clear that the United States was going to be involved in the brewing World War.
That night Sal went out to a party with the American Consul and other members of the American Embassy. Towards the end of the night, authorities showed up and arrested everyone in attendance. While the embassy and diplomatic party-goers were eventually returned to the US, Salvatore was placed into an internment center, where he would spend the next 18 months under police surveillance.
Serving mostly as a way for the Italian Government to keep track of the interned and ensure that they were not spies, prisoners were allowed to move about freely during the day, given a daily stipend, and the only requirement was to check in with authorities.
Even in his own words, Sal acknowledges that it wasn’t exactly Alcatraz, telling Cummings, “It was like being on vacation, except we didn’t have anything to eat. We were given five lira a day, but [inflation] was monstrous, so you couldn’t get enough food on the money that was passed around by the Swiss legation in charge of American affairs. I just had to report to the police every day, and then finally twice a week.”
As time moved on and confusion on the ground became the order of the day, Salvatore escaped. Walked off rather. Going up into the Apennines Mountains of central Italy, where he spent a large part of the war hiding amongst a ragtag conglomerate of British and American soldiers, as well as local freedom fighters.
Sometime in 1944 the group — by this time totaling more than 80 people of mixed ethnicities and languages — managed to cross German lines and was quickly picked up by the US Army. Salvatore was given several choices, all of which involved joining the war effort. He decided to join the US Navy and was inducted on the deck of a ship by its captain.
Because of his language skills and background in the arts, he was attached to what would become known as the Monument Men, a group of allied soldiers and experts who were tasked with tracking down and cataloging the thousands of pieces of art that had gone missing during the war.
A feature-length film of the same namesake, The Monument Men, was produced in 2014 with a diverse cast starring George Clooney and Bill Murray, amongst others. While Sal isn’t individually depicted in the film, it paints a romanticized but accurate picture of what their work involved.
The 1975, Paul Cummings interview referenced above is just the tip of the iceberg. Written a full decade before he owned his Sprint Car Team, the transcript is a wonderful 44 pages of wandering, tragic, romantic, and sometimes confusing tales. It is the closest thing I was able to find for a biography of a man who should have a movie based on his life. It’s also where I have extracted all of Sal’s direct quotes used in this story.
You can read the full transcript on the Archives of American Art website.
But let’s get back to Sprint Cars.
Sal had always loved racing. Growing up in depression-era Hollywood, he frequented Legion Ascot Speedway, among other now-missing race tracks around the City of Angels. Standing on fence posts and peering over railings, the young Scarpitta would watch in awe as the race cars of the day would battle it out in the Southern California sun.
“I had a very strong desire to even become a racing driver as a little kid. People want to be firemen. Little kids want to be policemen, aviators, whatever it may be. My desire was racing cars and even to drive. My father was totally against that so I used to sort of hang around the garages when I was a boy in California. A wonderful racing driver lived very near my house. Needless to say, I pestered him to death,” said Sal.
That wonderful racing driver was three-time Indianapolis 500 winner Wilbur Shaw (1937, 1939, and 1940). Shaw was responsible for convincing Terry Hulman to purchase the Indianapolis Motor Speedway from World War I Flying Ace Eddie Rickenbacker in 1945; the track had laid dormant during the Second World War. The International Motorsports Hall of Fame driver took a liking to Sal and let him help in the garage, eventually bringing him along to the track.
Upon returning to the US in the 1950s, Scarpitta resumed his art. Focusing on painting at first, Sal eventually moved into abstract sculptures that combine three-dimensional torn canvas held in place with plaster and paint, but his passion for racing was always present in his work.
“I was very much interested in racing cars in California as a boy and had even painted numbers on racing cars at fourteen years of age. So I still have this terrific desire to either possess a racing car or its skin or something of that same object that had really enchanted me as a young fellow. The sides of my canvases of those days are very definitely associated with dirt tracks, safety belts, exhaust pipes on racing cars, etc. So that went on as far as I could push it and then the desire for the thing itself came forth, namely a racing car itself,” said Sal about his pivot to sculpting full-scale race cars in 1964.
Set up in his upstairs studio on Park Avenue in New York City, Sal began to sculpt complete race cars that were equal parts facsimile and real-thing. He would use the wreckage of real racers and everyday objects to construct what, to the viewer, were replicas of very popular race cars of the 20s and 30s.
“So there's always been a fascination with cantando subversion or rebellion. Those cars were made with parts of the real car. He would go [to a team whose] driver was dead and ask for parts of the car or something that belonged to them and he would put them inside the art. He believed that there was some kind of energy in these things,” Filippo Fossati told me over the phone from his upstate New York home. Fossati was a lifelong friend of Sal’s and the stepson of Luciano Pistoi, a well-known Italian art critic who owned several of Sal’s pieces.
From 1964 to 1969 Scarpitta produced nearly a dozen race cars. Odes to such famous drivers as Ernie Triplet and Rajo Jack, the pieces are a testament to both form and function while displaying their artistic qualities in static form. He had produced the first half-dozen cars as non-functional sculptures. He quickly realized that the same effort would go into building an actual fully-functioning race car. So, of course, he then built another eight cars that were complete replicas with running engines and actual suspension parts.
Of course, if you build a real race car you have to go try it out on a race track; and who better to test it than the artist himself?
“I tested two of the eight. You see, I wasn't too interested in the function of them, but just for fun, I tested the Midget car myself that I built for Leo's son, John Crestow, which was a Midget racing car, 1937, restructured totally with a Harley Davidson souped-up engine in it. I had it up to well over one hundred miles an hour on a dirt track. Needless to say, everybody was scared to death, including myself, but it was marvelous. Then it burnt up on the track because of a mistake that we made with a certain conduit that we were using for gasoline. It caught on fire between the manifold and the carburetor and the next thing I knew I was surrounded by flames. I was very lucky,” said Sal.
Photo: Sal Cragar, Photo by Lee Stalsworth.
In 1972, with the help of gallery owner and patron Leo Castelli, Sal exported several of his cars to be displayed in Italy for the 36th Venice Biennale, which is an international art exhibition.
Sal remembered it as one of his proudest moments — a triumphant return to Italy if you will — fondly saying, “I met [the cars] at the docks in Venice [they were in] a couple of big trailer trucks, saw an immense crane lower my racing cars to the ground along with a huge crate of paintings, put on a railroad barge right out in the open. It was a beautiful, sunny day. The orange and red car on the barge. Huge new wood crate. Me sitting beside it with my friend, with our 1928 tugboat which looked like a miniature of the Mississippi Queen. We went up the canals all the way to Piazza San Marco where friends were waiting and the big barge was brought right up next to the quay at Piazza San Marco and these crates were taken off and the two racing cars pushed off into the middle of the square.”
While Scarpitta's work was well appreciated in Italy, the work fell flat on American art connoisseurs. A story in the New York Times about the Biennale makes no mention of Scarpitta. While they refer to there being six American artists present, and they name and describe — even if briefly — the work of each artist, Sal’s name is noticeably missing. This could be because he was considered part of the Italian contingent, but it seems remarkable that — at a time where open-wheel racing was America’s most popular form of auto racing — there were these cars in the middle of the Piazza San Marco and not a peep about it from the New York Time art critic.
One person who did take interest in the cars was the Captain of a US Navy vessel moored nearby. Upon seeing the cars in the Piazza, and noticing that they were unguarded, he assigned a rotation of sailors to stand watch over the cars.
“You know Daddy was embraced by Europe. He wanted to be an American artist. He wanted to be embraced by American art, and they just didn't get him. This kind of unwillingness to cross the bridge to even meet the other people,” said Stella Scarpitta-Cartaino, Sal’s youngest daughter and the true champion of promoting his racing and art amalgamation.
It’s hard for me to write this and not become distracted by all of the peripheral stories I stumbled upon while exploring Scarpitta’s life. Every person I talked to, or story I encountered tried to distract me from the fact that this man eventually decided that the thing that brought him his most joy was Sprint Car racing. In so many ways his art speaks for itself while at the same time leaving you with questions. The locales and personas that he encountered along his 88 laps around the sun read as equal parts Indiana Jones, Ralph Steadman, and Forrest Gump.
So let us — for the sake of finishing this tale today — focus only on the time at which he purchased his Pennsylvania team till the present, and leave the highbrow art for those who can speak to such nuanced things.
“He had this idea, 'Well, why don't we bring the cars back, a new evolution of the cars and try and tell the story again.' So he called this man who would become one of my dearest friends in the world, Greg O'Neill, and said 'I'd like to buy this car,” Stella told me while on a phone call just two weeks after seeing that car at Lincoln Speedway. “He thought, 'Well, they didn't understand it last time. So, what I'm going to do is, I'm going to take these cars, and I'm going to race them, and then I'm going to bring them back to New York, and I'm going to put them back in the gallery, and now they have a history, and now they have a story to tell of their own…' Then maybe the New York elite snobs would get it. Some of them did, but very few.”
While Sal had great expectations for his new purchase, the reality was that this machine he was purchasing was not up to snuff to compete at that time.
“I was actually selling out of my racing endeavor and [Sal] was the buyer and he asked me if I would consider driving the car. I declined because the car was — while it was once a championship race car — the bottom line was, it was old,” recalled Greg O'Neill.
That first Sprint Car would become the “Trevis Race Car (Sal Gambler Special)” which was emblazoned with the number 10. As a nod to the pop-art of the time, and in line with the practice of fitting as many sponsors on one’s car as they could, Sal had his student Larry Poncho Brown paint the sculpture with fictitious brands designed to honor family and those who had helped, as well as some very popular candy bars.
Larry Poncho Brown would go on to an illustrious career in art, designing - among other things - the artwork for the popular television sitcoms “The Cosby Show” and “A Different World.”
Back to Sprint Cars…
Photo: Trevis Race Car (Sal Gambler Special), 1985. Photo by Lee Stalsworth
“So, Sal worked on that as a piece of artwork that was, I guess what you would call describing a number of the challenges that he had endured. You know, he had an intent with everything to do with the race car. He looked at the dirt track that these cars raced on as a work of art too. It was in a very different context that he looked at this Sprint Car world. I just happened to be a willing participant when he then bought a year old car and had a local guy that had been maintaining our cars build a motor,” said O’Neill, who would be Sal’s first driver.
Sal relished the new role of Car Owner. He loved the sport and he loved his drivers. Here’s this guy with an amazing back story that shows up on the Pennsylvania Sprint Car scene with a car sponsored by an art gallery and a guy from Baltimore driving it. To competitors, he must have seemed like an alien invader.
The deal between Greg and Sal didn’t last long for a few reasons, but they remained friends throughout both of their careers. Sal would go on to have several drivers take the seat in his cars. Among the dozen or so drivers to take the wheel of the Castillo Galleries #59 were Rick Schemlyun, Jr., Joey Allen, and National Sprint Car Hall of Fame Inductee Keith Kauffman.
Running mostly in weekly shows at Lincoln Speedway, Sal would also venture to Hagerstown and Bridgeport Speedways on occasion. His team won races and had a reasonably successful record — especially considering this was a car owned by an internationally renowned artist, and not someone who had been steeped in the motorsports industry his entire career.
In 1996, he hired Steve Siegel to fill the seat, a relationship that would carry Sal and his racing endeavour to the end, and then some.
“My dad [Steve Siegel] really wasn’t driving anything at the time and he worked at Don Ott's shop as an engine assembler. Don had been helping Sal; he was kind of running Sal's program. And he was just looking for a driver and he asked my dad to do it towards the end of the year. I think they had just run a race or two at Bridgeport. After running that race Sal just said ‘Hey, do you want to keep driving it?’ and it kind of just grew from there,” explained Jim Siegel, who was ten years old at the time, and already hanging around the track helping where he could.
For Steve Siegel, it was an unexpected but timely opportunity. The elder Siegel had been driving for Ben Cook and when Ben’s father passed away they shuttered their racing operation.
“He didn't have anybody. He had a couple of cars, and he had drivers that were in and out so fast all the time; he never had a steady driver,” said Steve Siegel. “He asked me if I wanted to run it the next year. I told him yeah, but under one condition; most of what he had was old and we sold everything and just bought one of everything new and started racing.”
The pairing lasted for a decade, with Jim Siegel eventually taking over the seat from his father. Through all the years, Sal was a dedicated owner and truly loved being at the track. On race days, he’d show up with his folding chair and sit in the pits — basking in the dusty sun while taking in the sights, sounds, and smells of a race day.
While Sal was teaching at the Maryland Institute College of Art, he would occasionally bring his classes to the tracks. On one occasion, Filippo Fossati made a trek out to the track. For the art dealer and writer, the race track was not as comfortable as it was for his friend Sal, but he saw beauty in his passion.
“I went only once, unfortunately. To me it was just a lot of noise. And Sal was a different man there because nobody knew him there as an artist. And you know he would spend every penny on his car. So he would sell his work to Castelli just to pay for the racing. He was obsessed, even when he was old and he was living in the building in front of NYU. I remember when I was a kid in Rome, he always had the best cars, even for himself. He would not have a penny to pay for his life but he always had a fantastic car,” said Fossati with a chuckle.
Just before he passed away in 2007, Scarpitta transferred possession of the team over to the Siegels. In a particular corner of motorsports that is widely known for its family feel and sense of community, the gesture speaks volumes about the man and the artist.
“He called me up to his place in New Chester and I went up there and he had everything laid out on the table and he signed everything over to me. He [gave us] all the racing stuff; trailer, truck, checkbook, the bank account, everything,” said Steve Siegel with quite a bit of emotion in his voice. You can tell that this gesture meant the world to him. “I raced with him for quite a while, and then Jim took over right before Sal passed away. He was just a good guy. He was an artist, and I knew nothing about art, but we got along great. He was really easy to talk to and actually had a lot of really interesting stories throughout his life. His life was amazing.”
“They did all these weird things in New York and Europe, I said ‘Well, I'm going back to Lincoln Speedway, and we're going to have a race at Lincoln,’ and we did. Greg Hodnett won that race and was so gracious and intelligent and kind,” Stella told me fighting back emotion. “Now I’ve come to find out that [Greg] passed away, that broke my heart because what a nice, beautiful, gracious human being he was.”
As with any artist’s passing, the story turns from the evolution of their art to just what exactly their legacy will be. In Scarpitta’s case the debate was fueled by the same debate he encountered at the height of his career; were the race cars art or just obsession?
As far as Fossati is concerned, “I think [his legacy] is the entire thing. I mean, there is a lot of Sal in the cars. That was part of his work, you know, and so I think his legacy [as an artist] is not only the art, or paintings, or sculpture itself, the cars are part of the entirety of his work. There is always a part of cars in every work that he made.”
For Stella, it was obvious that the cars were at the core of Salvatore’s legacy and passion. Working with Greg O’neil and an art curator named Melissa Ho, the group was able to secure a spot in the venerable Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C.
“There was a lot of turmoil — as with most artists — but this was particularly tumultuous. I had come along too late in my father's life, but I grew up, basically, at Lincoln Speedway. This is when he had taken this next stage of the 60s race cars into his next artistic evolution. I knew in my heart to my father, the cars were paramount. The story of the cars, the trajectory of the cars for him as an artist, this was his body of work that meant the most to him, I believe,” said Stella.
The art galleries in New York wanted to sell the cars and be done with them. But Stella had another vision. Reaching out to old friend Greg O’Neill for logistical help, she worked out a deal with the Hirshhorn to put Sal’s work on display, and on a summer night in 2014 the show was unveiled.
“Maybe the study of race cars at the sculpture garden by young people will bridge the gap. And the story could continue to gain an understanding of racing, and the car itself. Not only as an immobile mobile thing, but as a storyteller...and the Hirshhorn got it. Boy did they get it. That night at the Hirshhorn was full of pride and love for him. Greg [O’neill] said ‘I can't believe it. When I was 25 years old, I could have never imagined that my car would be sitting in the Smithsonian Museum,” Stella said, this time the emotion coming through clearly in her voice.
And that is how a Sprint Car ended up in the Smithsonian.
As for the Siegels, they continue to race at Lincoln Speedway displaying the gessetto #59 on the wing in remembrance of a great man who should be remembered as a true racer, even if his expertise lies in canvas and plaster.
In typical racer fashion, when asked about the show at the Hirshhorn, Jim Siegel told me, “they actually invited both of us to the Grand Opening. They wanted us to speak on his behalf. But it was the first Outlaw race back at Lincoln that day. So we stayed and raced with the World of Outlaws instead of going to the unveiling.”
Just as Salvatore Scarpitta would have wanted it.
This story would not have been possible without the help of Sal's family, friends, the Archives of American Art, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Without their help, I may have never found the answer to my question.
Historical photos of Salvatore Scarpitta and select works were provided by Filippo Fossati.
Pictures of the Trevis Traveler (Sal Gambler Special) and Sal Cragar were provided courtesy of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. The photographer is Lee Stalsworth
Pictures of Jim and Steve Siegel were provided courtesy of WayTru Productions.
All quotes from Salvatore Scarpitta are courtesy of the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian's Oral History Interview with Salvatore Scarpitta, 1975 January 31.-February 3.
