Local physician, race historian owns two Indy Car replicas
Physician Robert Dicks never wanted to be a race driver, but he sure knows a lot about local race cars and their drivers.
Dicks has seen every Indianapolis 500 since 1950, and all 14 Brickyard races here at the local track in Speedway.
He can tell you winners, highlights of their careers and where they are today.
“I took his (Davidson’s) class,” said the Covington native, who played linebacker in football for Indiana Central College (now University of Indianapolis) in the early 1960s.
Besides owning a lot of racing memorabilia at his White River Township home, he has two Indy 500 replica race cars. (A replica is not the actual race car, but one built nearly like it.)
It took Speedway former chief mechanic Tom McGriff about 18 months to assemble the replica that Dicks wanted.
Car builder A. J. Watson (a 500 car builder from 1956 to 1964) recently saw his creation, the No. 98 Agajanian Willard Battery Special, that Dicks owns. He signed the control panel, saying, “I never built a car as beautiful.”
Perhaps you saw Dicks driving the pearl white No. 98 Parnelli Jones (1963 winner) Special in the Miracle Mile Parade along Madison Ave. on Aug. 30.
Besides the 500, he also follows area midget and sprint car races. And, yes, he follows the NASCAR races, of which Tony Stewart and Jeff Gordon are his favorites.
Besides Parnelli, a champion dirt track racer from California who started on the pole and zoomed to the 1963 victory, his next biggest hero is four-time 500-winner A.J. Foyt.
Parnelli was the first Indy driver to break the 150-mph speed mark at the track in 1962. Now, the racers qualify in excess of 226 mph.
Remember 1967, when Parnelli Jones led most of the race in a soft-sounding gas turbine engine before conking out with a few laps to go? (The gas turbine never made a comeback because of engine regulation changes by race officials.)
Parnelli is now 73 and living in Torrance, Calif.
Bob’s father, Lawrence Dicks, owned a Ford dealership in Covington, a community at I-74 near the Illinois state border known for its Beef House restaurant atop a hill. Since he was 3 years old, Dicks was taken by his father to midget and sprint car races at such tracks as Salem, Melott, Terre Haute and Winchester, where they saw the likes of such drivers as Bobby Grim, Cliff Griffith, Joie Ray and Billy Earl.
Although he loves speed, Dicks has never had a desire to be a race car driver.
“Oh, I love to speed on my ATV and in my jet boat, but that’s about it for me,” he said.
He has great respect as to what racing machines can do, and the “intelligence, quick reflexes and intestinal fortitude” that drivers must have to succeed.
He once thought he would be either a sports coach or an attorney. A college professor, knowing how well Dicks did in biology, encouraged him to become a doctor – a professional choice Dicks never regretted.
