The Thunder Bay Invader

Above photos by Brian Skedgel

By Marsh Muirhead
from Open Wheel Magazine April 1983

There are few real heroes. To be a hero,a man has to do exceptional things. He’s got to be an outstanding race car driver,or overcome a terrible disease,or shoot for the Olympics,or overcome a terrible injury from a crash or be absolutely fearless. Meet Lyn McIntosh. He’s done all that and more. If it seems that surviving a horrible crash and cancer and exploring a quest for Olympic Gold coupled with some great rides in the most unforgiving race cars on earth are too much for one man,perhaps its time to meet a true hero. Lyn McIntosh fits the head definition. He hails from Thunder Bay,Ontario on the northwest shore of Lake Superior. Thunder Bay,a place a racer ought to come from. There’s a catch though. Its a 700 mile tow from Thunder Bay to the nearest place Lyn can call a home track - Knoxville,Iowa. Things used to be closer to home. McIntosh raced the modifieds and the supers in Thunder Bay and at places like Superior and Rice Lake,Wisconsin. When fellow Canadian Barry Kettering moved to Minneapolis and got into sprinters,Lyn made the switch too and made regular forays into Minnesota for IMCA,MSA and other shows. He beat some of the best on the fast black banks at Fargo and took main event wins at Grand Forks and Princeton. He won an MSA championship in 1978 and took back to back victories in the Russ Laursen Classic in Superior,Wisconsin in 1978 & 79. In 1973 he ran second to Jerry Hansen’s SCCA formula car in the “Minnesota Golden 200”. When open-cockpit action practically dried up in the area in the late 70’s,Lyn went as far as he had to for the thrill of strapping himself into 600 horsepower of craziness-Knoxville. Round trip driving time to the weekly show: 28 hours! That terrifying oval repaid the loyal visitor by almost killing him at the 1980 Nationals. Lyn clipped a spinning Ronnie Daniels in Fridays Mystery Feature and went for the ride of his life-a hideous series of snap rolls that made his face turn black and swell like a balloon in the hours after the crash. He recollects it as a very bad deal. “I remember it (the crash) starting and then being in the Knoxville hospital. The people there told somebody to take me to Des Moines-there wasn’t anything they could do there. I guess I was semi-conscious and it scared the hell out of me. I didn’t know how bad I was hurt. They were afraid I had head injuries because my face and head had swollen so much. On the way to the Des Moines hospital it hurt so bad I couldn’t believe it. The guy in the ambulance kept trying to reassure me and then I guess I went out again. Then I don’t remember anything for a couple of days and it was February before I had my shit together.” Lyn spent two weeks recovering in the hospital and many more at home. Three vertebrae were fractured and his wrist and collarbone were broken.
In the spring after the Knoxville accident the bones had healed and The Thunder Bay Invader was ready again. Other men might have called it quits entirely or else hired another driver just to be near the action. Not this man. “I went to Knoxville in the spring. It was the first place I raced. We didn’t go too bad. I found it hard to get going fast there though. We went good at Hartford and Fargo-they’re fast and toward the end of the year I got going at Knoxville too. I think that out of the last five times we went there I won four heats. We usually broke in the feature. This year I went back too for the first race-when Gary Scott got killed. That took a lot of wind out of my sails. I don’t know why. I knew him fairly well but he wasn’t a friend-not like I knew Barry or Skari or Russ-they were good friends yet it bothered me more than they did-it just started to seem senseless.” Barry Kettering,Dave Skari and Russ Laursen were all good friends of Lyn McIntosh. They all drove sprinters and they were all killed in them. Lyn won the Russ Laursen Classic twice. He won the Skari Memorial in Fargo in 1978,and took the Barry Kettering Memorial in their hometown of Thunder Bay in 1981. The bizarre irony of all this requires no comment. It does ,however raise the frequent question posed to drivers as to whether they are either very brave or very stupid. “I think they’re a little of both. You can’t say driving isn’t dangerous-no way-but I don’t do it because its not safe. I’m not a martyr trying to kill myself but I’ve seen too many people killed or hurt bad to say its not dangerous. On a little track its not bad but when you stick em on Hartford or I-70 they’re going fast and they just come unglued when they tip over. But I’m a fatalist. I really believe that when my number is up its up. I’m not ready to go stick my head in the lion’s mouth but I’m actually more leery of being hurt than being killed because I’m going to get killed one way or another.” One way to die is of course in a race car. Another is disease-like cancer. Lyn beat that one too. “Four years ago I had cancer-in the fall of 1978 and winter of 1979. I had complications from it and I thought I was going to die. I really did. I had an operation for bladder cancer. They cut half of it out. But I had a bowel obstruction and it became a really serious deal. I was weighing 80 pounds and was so weak they couldn’t operate. Well I pulled that one off but I figure somebody’s got the numbers and when the cards run out they run out-whether you’re driving a sprint car or happen to get sick or you’re riding an airplane that crashes.” Lyn’s wife,Lenore and the kids-AJ,Trish and Doug-thought they’d lost him more than once during the whole ordeal. When he came through it Lenore felt it had been one of the best things that ever happened to them. She says,”It was really a positive experience-you wouldn’t believe all the love and support we got. Lyn got calls from all over the world when people heard he was sick. Our whole philosophy changed-you see that life’s too short-you really have to try what you have to try.” Since then Lyn has had a clearer vision-a mellow sort of boldness he didn’t have before. Lenore enjoys the racing more now too. She used to be quite nervous but now she takes it all in stride-laid back,one day at a time. McIntosh is a warrior with class. He knows about the excellence of the noble quest. He was assistant program director for the Canadian Ski Team in 1973 and 1974 and in the 1975-76 season he was the women’s coach. He guided the team in training and competition in South America,Japan and in Europe and he shared in the glow of Olympic Gold when Kathy Kreiner won the giant slalom at Innsbruck. The quest now is 100 %,foot to the floor.”I’ll tow anywhere” sprint car racing. Lyn makes no mention of USAC or champ cars on the Brickyard but he would really like to put in a big swing with the World of Outlaws. “I’d like a chance to do it right once. I think when you’ve raced as long as I have you like to be with the best guys and try that. Given proper financing I’d like to do it for one year. If I didn’t make any money I could say I tried and I’m not as good as they are. And if I made money I’d stay with them.” Lyn says his performance picks up just running with the Outlaws a few times a year. His coaching experience is evident when he talks about concentration,hand-eye coordination and going to the limit in competition. He has nothing but praise for the WoO bunch. “Guys like Doug Howells,Karl Kinser and Gary Stanton can stand in the infield and tell you more about a car than the driver can-they’re excellent people.” He feels that the drivers too are men of unusual talent backed by the most sophisticated machinery in the history of the sport. The dominant names are of course,Steve Kinser,Doug Wolfgang and Sammy Swindell. “Those guys have run together since the outlaws started and they race almost constantly. When one of them wins the others run a little bit harder. The next time they all push a bit harder yet. They move their limit up a little each time. They’ve really brought a high level of professionalism to sprint car racing. Whether that’s good or not I’m not sure. They have really put a lot of guys out to lunch. There’s no room for the weekend racer anymore.” Co-owners of the Invader,Murray Robinson and Pat Slivinski in addition to McIntosh are ready and willing to follow the outlaw dream. A group of Thunder Bay businessmen each kick in a few hundred dollars every year and they represent the Invader name. for an all-out run in 1983,however McIntosh is putting together a formal presentation for major sponsorship. It is necessary for a serious effort. “You have to remember the Canadian dollar is worth only $ .75 down here-you cross the line and you’ve got three-quarters of what you thought you had. And living way up where we do it costs us three hundred bucks just for gas to Iowa. We have one motor. We might go down to Knoxville or an NSCA race and if we break the motor we don’t have another to put in. The $500 or so it takes just to get us down there is out the window and we still have to replace the motor.” Lyn McIntosh is forty years old. This man with a dream -this special man among special men -has to consider that someday that helmet comes off for good. “Its a high when you do well. You can never explain it to anybody for all the frustration there is to it,but the highs make it a worthwhile deal. “ “ I couldn’t be a race fan or just stand around and haunt everybody. I went to the Nationals this year just to watch and I ended up helping Tim Gee-he’s another Canadian. It made me feel a part of it rather than standin’around with my hands in my pocket going for coffee. Watching just doesn’t turn me on. Neither does fishing or anything else for that matter. Maybe that’s my problem. I don’t have anything else to turn to. I’ve been hooked on racing so long its hard for me to think that sometime it will be enough. I don’t know when enough will be.” Lyn’s last race of the 1982 season was at the Proctor Speedway near Duluth in late August. Lyn had his heart and foot in it but the Invader was tired and ill-handling and rode just behind the leaders, inconspicuously, working hard at what was possible. In the feature somebody spun in the first turn and Lyn couldn’t avoid him and his car vaulted onto its side after the impact. The motionless driver was not hurt. He yelled something about “getting this damn thing back on its wheels” to his crew and they waved the safety people away.He was pushed off to a sixth place finish-with a battered wing and a fresh determination for the 1983 season. Heroes are like that.