Speed Kings Read Free Page A

before. The supercharger came in with a shrill whine at about 80, generally at the beginning of the long straight where the Cambridge road goes eventually uphill through the beechwood to join the London road short of the racecourse at Newmarket. Soon the needle would creep up into the red, staying for a while between 110 and 120 mph, till at precisely the same spot just short of the slope, Fiske would change down to third at exactly 86, and every time the gear would go through like butter.”
    The brothers Bobby and Charles Sweeny rode shotgun with Billy when he was making all those runs around the south of France, breaking records that weren’t set down in books but were swapped back and forth between members of the set—the fifty-eight-minute run from Cannes to Monte Carlo, the seventeen-minute run from Nice to Cannes. “As far as I know,” Charles Sweeny said much later, “that second record still stands.” There were no prizes to be won for these races, no cups or trophies, only bragging rights. Billy drove quick for the hell of it. Speed was his drug.
    Billy was too fast too young to have spent much time learning to drive that quick. His was a natural talent. He was blessed with an intuitive understanding of how to handle vehicles at speed. It didn’t matter whether he was in a car, a motorboat, a bobsled, or an airplane. He just relished racing, and always had, right from the first time he got behind a wheel. When he was fifteen, he pinched his father’s red Bugatti and took his sister, Peggy, out to race in a hill climb. It was a time trial, up a short, steep slope. He won, with plenty of time to spare. Peggy remembered how he had turned to her and said, “Don’t you dare tell Father about this.” Billy’s dad always hated the idea of his young son competing in track races. He thought they were just too dangerous. When he was still eighteen, Billy was asked to race a Stutz Bearcat in the Le Mans 24-Hour endurance race. But as Bobby Sweeny recalled, “his father soon put a stop to that.” Years later, the facts were forgotten, and the story of his race at Le Mans became one of many myths about him, passed on from one newspaper or magazine article to another, mentioned time and again in the various TV documentaries made about his life. He was someone people loved to tell stories about, whether they were true or not.
    Racing wasn’t in Billy’s blood, but he inherited plenty of other things from his father. His name, for one. In full, it was William Meade Lindsley Fiske III, following on from his father, W.M.L. Fiske II, and his grandfather, W.M.L.Fiske I. But everyone called him Billy, and those who knew him best of all often stuck at plain Bill. The Fiskes were an old American family. They could trace the tree right back to Phineas Fiske, who came over to the United States from England in 1636, just sixteen years after the arrival of the
Mayflower
, and settled in Wenham, Massachusetts. The “William Meade Lindsley” part was picked out by Billy’s great-grandfather, who gave the name to his son as a tribute to a close friend.
    Billy’s father was a banker. He studied at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn and then at Columbia. After he graduated in 1900, he took a trip around Europe for the kind of education you can’t get in a lecture hall. While he was there, he fell in love with France and developed a fluency in the language that would serve him well later in life. When Fiske Sr. returned to the United States, he started work at the small Wall Street firm Vermilye & Co., which sent him out to its new branch in Chicago. “By then the passport to Wall Street’s investment banking elite was attendance at fashionable preparatory schools and Ivy League colleges,” notes the authorized history of the firm. “More often than not individuals with the proper social cachet would call upon a fellow fraternity member who