Grand Opening

Mexico opened its new 2,178-mile Texas-to-Guatemala highway last week with a thrill-packed six-day auto race for passenger stock models. Mexicans by the millions took the curves and cliffs vicariously, via press and radio. In the capital, people carried portable radios in buses and streetcars to get the blowout-by-blowout reports.

Competing for the 300,000-peso ($34,000) top prizes were 132 two-man teams including such hot drivers as Indianapolis Speedway veteran Johnny Mantz, Italy's Piero Taruffi, winner of the 1948 Grand Prix de Berne auto race, and President Miguel Aleman's chauffeur, whose handsome new Cadillac, fresh from the palace garage, bore the name Coche Mexico. There was a Los Angeles war veteran driving a 13-year-old Cord, a red-haired torch singer from Mexico City, a Texas grandmother sponsored by a brassiere manufacturer, and a 70-year-old Arizona widow with her 72-year-old ranch foreman.

Less than half an hour after the start a Guatemalan, burning up the road in a new Lincoln, missed a turn and was hauled out, fatally injured, from the smoking wreck. The Cadillac Coche Mexico, hightailing southward from Ciudad Juarez at better than 100 m.p.h., screeched off a hairpin curve, rolled over three times into a rocky ditch. The drivers, unhurt, crawled back, started the engine, and somehow finished the day's lap--in 69th place. In his 1950 Cadillac, ex-Pilot William Sterling of El Paso paced the pack over the first 228 miles at an average 107 m.p.h.

Farther south the going grew tougher. After flashing across the baking desert flats, the racers began fading like dead comets in the 10,000-ft. mountain passes around Mexico City. Sterling burned out his brakes, Mantz blew all his tires and developed engine trouble.

The last 115-mile leg from Tuxtla Gutierrez to the border was unpaved. The temperature hit 105DEG. In the end, the race got down to two dogged U.S. drivers: 22-year-old Hershel McGriff, part owner of an auto-repair shop in Portland, Ore., driving a 1950 Oldsmobile, and Tommy Deal of El Paso, driving a Cadillac. But McGriff's six-day time was better than Deal's by one minute, 16 seconds. Victory was worth 150,000 pesos ($17,000) to him, Co-Driver Pay Elliott and their backers.

Though no Mexican finished above eighth, the country was well pleased. The race furnished convincing proof to U.S. tourists that the border-to-border highway is ready for use: Winner McGriff's average driving speed down the full length of Mexico was 79 m.p.h.

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