Late last summer, when SPEED Channel announced its 2006 broadcasting lineup, one of the new programs was Back in the Day , a look at bygone racing starring NASCAR superstar Dale Earnhardt Jr. Essentially, the show's premise is based on his voice-over commentary as he views race footage shot in the late 1960s and early 1970s for a syndicated TV program called Car & Track . SPEED is gracious enough to mention that Car & Track was created and produced by a broadcaster from western Michigan named Bud Lindemann.
That's just about the only recognition that Lindemann, the indisputable pioneer of car-related television programming, receives today.
To put Lindemann's groundbreaking work in its proper perspective, you've got to think back to what car-related programming existed when Car & Track first appeared in around 1968. New-car programming consisted almost exclusively of manufacturer commercials, in the form, for example, of a mini-clad chorus line wearing Anne Marie bouffant hair la That Girl , warbling, "Ford...It's the going thing...It's what's happening...it's the going thing!"
From the standpoint of motorsports, it was even worse. You'd thumb through TV Guide's pages to the Saturday listings, and hope that ABC's Wide World of Sports had some kind of racing or car-related event jammed in among segments on figure skating, track and field or lumberjack competitions. In the listings, you'd know you just hit the big one when you saw a smudgy "Daytona 500 highlights" set off in commas between curling and championship slow-pitch softball. Tune in, and the race would be divided into at least two segments among the other sports, reduced to endless pan shots that showed no position changes and crashes captured by an isolated camera. You got, at best, 15 minutes of race coverage, three months after the actual event. You didn't complain, either. Other than attending the race in person, your options were zero.
For our younger readers, this was far, far before anyone had ever dreamed of 24/7 NASCAR coverage or staggering out of bed at 3:30 a.m. on a Sunday morning to watch Formula 1 live from the Continent. How Lindemann got the idea for his car-oriented program is lost to history today, but a look at his biography can give us a few indications. Gordon Lindemann was born in Chicago in 1925, and enlisted in the U.S. Coast Guard following high school, and was assigned to the USCGC Eastwind protecting merchantman convoys from U-boat attacks. He began his broadcasting career in Boston after the war, before moving to Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1946.
We know today that, from there, Lindemann developed a cult of personality around himself when he fell in with the local short-track stock car scene during the 1950s and announced races as "Big Bud" Lindemann, melting the mike at the long-since-defunct Grand Rapids Speedrome, along with Berlin Raceway and Kalamazoo Speedway, both still active today. His taut, dramatic delivery got him a D.J.'s slot at WZZM in Grand Rapids. While working at WZZM, he developed an in-house program called Autoscope that featured local races. Lindemann clearly realized he was on to something, and formed his own production company in 1967, which aired the first episode of Car & Track .
Half-hour segments of Car & ; Track were eventually syndicated to more than 160 stations across the United States; their content a blend of new-car tests and taped-delay race coverage. The tests, which covered a gamut of American and imported cars, were conducted at Grattan Raceway Park outside Grand Rapids, where the Michigan State Police still holds its annual performance tests of law-enforcement vehicles. For the test, Lindemann would be the epitome of late-Sixties Rust Belt cool, wearing boots, shades, string-back driving gloves and a windbreaker overlaid with a racing stripe. His voiceover during the tests reflected the jivey delivery of the racing announcer, addressing a Lincoln as "Big Daddy Connie" and waxing breathless over the "mills" beneath the hoods of muscle cars, which appeared on seemingly every episode. One test showed a 1969 Chrysler Newport getting reefed into a 90-degree right-hander at impossible speed, the camera capturing the left-front wheel howling at full lock and nearly peeling off the rim, while Lindemann breathily intoned something along the lines of, "The hides are screaming, they just can't take any more."
More significant was Car & Track's coverage of more than 250 racing events during its existence, everything from NASCAR and Indy cars to USAC sprint and open-competition supermodifieds. The networks were impressed enough to hire Lindemann in 1976 to produce race coverage for both Wide World and the CBS Sports Spectacular . That, effectively, was the end of Car & Track as a syndicated series. Lindemann later produced a vehicle starring literary figure George Plimpton called The Ultimate High , in which Plimpton took viewers on Walter Mittyesque romps including hang gliding, skydiving and even learning to drive an Indy car.
Lindemann died of cancer in 1983 and, by all indications, has no survivors. He was posthumously inducted into the Michigan Motorsports Hall of Fame in 1991. He unquestionably deserves more recognition than he has received to date. Programs like MotorWeek , Car Crazy , American Muscle Car and Trackside are today following the trail he marked so long ago. We hope Junior's got enough class to give Big Bud his props on the air to a new generation of viewers.
This article originally appeared in the June, 2006 issue of Hemmings Classic Car.
http://www.hemmings.com/hcc/stories/2006/06/01/hmn_feature19.html
