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Racing Heroes – Jerry Titus

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Jerry Titus

Titus at the 1968 24 Hours of Daytona. Photos by Dave Friedman, courtesy The Henry Ford, unless otherwise noted.

[Editor’s note: This article comes to us from David Conwill. A longtime reader of the Hemmings Daily, he drives a 1961 Ford Falcon year round and has ambitions to build a ’40s-period hot rod from a Dodge Brothers roadster. He supports his auto addiction and beloved family as a lawyer in Bay City, Michigan.]

He was smart, honest, determined, talented and hard-working. It’s clear that the virtues Jerry Titus displayed throughout his life could have led him to renown in jazz, auto mechanics, journalism, or any other career he applied himself to. Jerry Titus was a self-made man several times over, and it is the good fortune of the auto-racing community that he chose to lend himself to the sport.

Titus was born in the shoemaking town of Johnson City, New York, on October 24, 1928—exactly one year before the “Black Thursday” stock market crash that set off the Great Depression. Like many families during the Depression, Titus’s did what was necessary to get by, including a stint running a dairy farm near Sebring, Florida.

Ultimately, the Titus family returned to New York and settled on Long Island, where his mother was employed by Grumman Aircraft, and his father ran a Sinclair gas station, and worked as a heating and cooling contractor.

Titus himself was a talented musician. His skill on the trumpet led him to study at the Juilliard School of Music in New York City, and by the early 1950s, he was writing, arranging and performing with the band of famed trombonist Jack Teagarden.

So, what leads a talented, Juilliard-educated jazz musician to swap the trumpet for the torque wrench? In an interesting contrast to many auto enthusiasts, it was the arrival of Titus’s first-born son, Rick, that led him to get involved with cars.

Like many young men in the 1950s, Titus was enthralled by the lure of the performance automobile. He left behind the late nights in smoky clubs to work as an auto mechanic, wrenching on Volkswagens and Mercedes, and ultimately entering the employ of Bill Frick, father of the “Fordillac,” “Studillac,” and “Vignale” performance cars.

Frick’s operation, Frick-Tappet Motors, was a crossroads of performance car and motorsport culture during the period. Passing through were such luminaries as Phil Walters (the “Tappet” of Frick-Tappet after his prewar racing nom de guerre), Briggs Cunningham, and Carroll Shelby.

While Titus lacked any formal training as an engineer, he became quite competent during the time he was with Frick. Jerry Titus’s son Rick shared with us a beloved, but possibly apocryphal story to illustrate this. According to Rick, his father made an early impression on Carroll Shelby by personally rebuilding Shelby’s wrecked Maserati when all others had said it was irreparable.

It was while working for Frick that Titus discovered he also had a natural talent for driving race cars, which he went on to perfect with his characteristic hard work and determination. What likely began as an outgrowth of testing modifications and repairs to customer cars grew into a club-racing habit. As the Fifties wore on to the Sixties, Titus took up racing Formula Junior cars.

Jerry Titus

Titus driving a Formula Junior at Bridgehampton in 1959. Photo courtesy Rick Titus.

Frick was also indirectly responsible for another facet of Titus’s evolving career. Because Frick was more comfortable building cars than dealing with the public, the articulate Titus became the public face of Frick’s racing efforts. With that combination of public-relations talent and automotive enthusiasm, it was natural that Titus would turn to journalism as well. His first of many articles was published in Speed Age in 1954, and Titus ghost-wrote for Sports Car Illustrated in the second half of the decade.

After a brief stint as a Pontiac service manager, Titus’s writing skill drew him to California, where he joined the editorial staff of Sports Car Graphic. In the early Sixties, Titus was seemingly everywhere in the SCCA scene, either behind the wheel or documenting the people, equipment and events for SCG.

“My father was impeccably honest,” says Rick, then laughs, “maybe brutally so.” But this honesty was appreciated by the readership. Part of this truth in journalism involved Titus actually driving the cars he reviewed, and it did not take long for his driving abilities to be discovered on the West Coast.

Jerry Titus

Titus driving a Corvette-powered Cheetah at a 1964 USRRC race in Kent, Washington.

Titus became an in-demand driver for testing and racing such projects as the Bill Thomas / EMPI Genie Corvair; the Bill Thomas Cheetah; Marvin Webster’s Two Liter and Oldsmobile aluminum V-8 sports cars; and the Elva Porsche. Even SCG got in the act, sponsoring Titus in a factory-backed Sunbeam Alpine for 1962 and ’63. It was during a test drive for SCG of the 1965 Shelby G.T. 350 that he came once again to Carroll Shelby’s attention.

With Shelby-American driver Ken Miles already overworked with the Cobra program, Shelby invited Titus to take the wheel of a Class B Production G.T. 350. In that car, Titus captured the 1965 Pacific Coast national championship, starting his transition from traditional, small-displacement, European-style sports cars into the American GT scene for which he is today known.

For 1966, SCCA introduced a new racing class that was perfectly suited for the Ford Mustang and the pony cars it would inspire: the Trans-American Sedan Championship—”Trans-Am.” Already familiar with the capabilities of the G.T. 350 fastback, it was a natural for Titus to make the jump. He entered the last race of the 1966 Trans-Am season in a five-day-old Shelby notchback. Driving for what was to become the Terlingua Racing Team, he captured first place at Riverside.

In 1967, Titus showed his commitment to racing by leaving SCG (by this time he had reached the Editor-in-Chief’s chair) and becoming a full-time driver. While Trans-Am was his mainstay, Titus was like many SoCal hot shoes in that he was still available to drive in any format, and did so. Throughout the balance of his career, Titus was a presence in Can-Am, NASCAR and even Indy.

Jerry Titus 1968 Indy 500

Titus attempting to qualify, without success, for the 1968 Indianapolis 500.

History does not record Titus’s reaction to the trippant jackrabbit logo sported by his Terlingua ride in ’67, but one can assume that the same character who sent photos of himself guzzling beer for use on his driver’s license renewal, or who coined “Titus’s Law” (“The directional stability of a racing car is directly proportional to the force exerted on it by another racing car.”), must have appreciated the humor.

For ’67, Terlingua fielded cars painted bright yellow (jocularly called “Godawful Yella” by the team), which were easy to spot in a race field. And indeed they were worth watching: Titus dominated the Trans-Am season and went on to capture the Manufacturer’s Championship for Ford. Although no Driver’s Championships were awarded until 1972, those retroactively applying the points system used to calculate the award have crowned Titus as the champion driver for 1967.

Jerry Titus

Titus’s first win in the legendary Terlingua Racing Team cars was at Sebring in 1967.

For 1968, Shelby’s team swapped its Godawful Yella paint for red, and its in-house-prepped 289 V-8s for Ford-prepped, tunnel-port 302s. The transfer of engineering from the racers to the factory proved troublesome, and the team was plagued with engine failures and less-than-optimal performance. The result was four DNFs out of 12 starts for the Shelby team. Perhaps dissatisfied with this, Titus made the decision to leave the Mustang behind for Pontiac’s Firebird.

Jerry Titus Daytona 1968

At the 24 Hours of Daytona in 1968.

When Carroll Shelby learned of the impending change, he elected not to let Titus drive the last race of the 1968 Trans-Am season at Kent, Washington. Titus, not one to sit out a race if he could help it, worked quickly and purchased a used 1968 Camaro Z/28 Trans Am car with the help of a new partner—Canadian businessman Terry Godsall.

The Camaro was soon reskinned as its corporate cousin the Firebird. Pontiac did not offer any V-8 smaller than 350 cubic inches across its line, so the 302-cu.in. Chevrolet engine was retained under the guise of the car being a Canadian-market vehicle, which at the time used Chevrolet mechanical components.

Titus and Godsall’s new T-G Racing team did not complete the Kent Trans-Am event with the new car, but after it was sold to Jon Ward, he and Titus drove it to a spectacular Touring Class win at the 1969 24 Hours of Daytona, also capturing third place overall. Daytona would be Titus’s last outing in the Z/28-based Firebird, as T-G Racing had an all-Pontiac Firebird in the works for 1969.

The 1969 Trans-Am Firebirds, as built for the track, sported Pontiac’s well-regarded 400-cu.in. V-8, but destroked to conform to the 5-liter displacement mandated by Trans-Am rules. The team spent the season working through the teething troubles of the new engine configuration, and suffered three DNFs in 12 starts, but averaged a respectable fifth place in the other nine races, including a second-place finish at Sainte Jovite, Quebec.

Jerry Titus St Jovite 1969

Titus on his way to a second place at St. Jovite, Quebec, in 1969.

Dissatisfaction with SCCA leadership led Godsall to depart T-G Racing, leaving Titus alone to shoulder administration, engineering and driving for 1970. Titus’s unmatched work ethic was up to the task, however. He was dedicated and tireless, and often averaged only three or four hours of sleep each night. He led by example, and expected the same level of commitment from those who worked with him. “What’s the job?” says Rick of his father’s attitude, “And how can we get it done?”

Titus’s team discontinued building cars for third parties to focus on perfecting the second-generation F-body platform for the track. Unfortunately, as SCG would phrase it in his obituary, “outrageous fortune conspired to prevent Jerry from equaling the record he set in the Mustangs.” Titus finished only one race out of seven in 1970, taking seventh at Laguna Seca.

Jerry Titus Laguna Seca 1970

The last finish of Titus’s Trans-Am career was at Laguna Seca in 1970.

Perhaps the experiences gleaned from the balance of the 1970 season would have led the way to success in 1971, but it was not to be. While practicing for the Trans-Am race at Road America, near Plymouth, Wisconsin, a steering-gear failure caused Titus’s car to slam into a bridge abutment. He was badly injured and died 17 days later, on August 5, 1970. He was roundly mourned by his family and the racing community alike.

He’s remembered as “Mr. Trans-Am.” His name is mentioned in the same breath as Mark Donohue and Dan Gurney. But Jerry Titus was much more than the Trans-Am series. The Titus legacy is not only in the vintage racing community—which continues to revere his legendary driving ability and the cars he built—but also in the efforts of his son Rick, who has made his own noteworthy career in driving and journalism. One can only imagine how Jerry Titus might still impact the sport today, had fate allowed him more than four brief seasons of Trans-Am racing.


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