Phil Remington was the Paul Bunyan – the US superhuman lumberjack folk hero – of American motor sports. During a career that stretched from pre-war hotrods to the carbon-fibre DeltaWing, he generated enough lore to fill several volumes of epic poetry. Did he really bend a 40ft-long piece of tubing by using the roof of his house as a fulcrum? Maybe not. But there are witnesses who saw him straighten a crooked swing arm without ever touching it with his hands by deftly heating it with the oxygenacetylene welding rig he wielded like a magic wand and letting the metal settle into the correct shape. And there are photos of him in the wind tunnel at Ford, where, working purely by intuition, he transformed the unloved Ford J-Car into the unbeatable Mark IV. And then there was the time that everybody in the Shelby American shop stopped to gawk while he power-hammered a roll bar into existence because he was working at such a furious John Henry-esque clip to get the GT40 X-1 in the transporter en route to Sebring, where it would win the 12 Hours a week later.
Fellow All American Racers crewman Mike Lang still laughs as he thinks back to the day that Boy Hayje crashed an AAR Toyota Celica GTU during practice at Mid-Ohio. The instant the car arrived back in the pits, Remington starting cutting away the wreckage. He found that somebody had forgotten to fill the tank for the TIG welder with argon. No problem.
But when Remington dragged out an oldschool acetylene torch, he discovered that there were no
