A Man and his Dog

A Man and his Dog…

(With Special Thanks to Ernie Miller of the London Free Press)

Article written by Doug Haney in 1966

Our Compadre Ernie Miller of the London Free Press came up with a story so interesting that we just had to pass it along to you. The story concerns a man and his dog. This man, Harvey Lennox, has what is perhaps the world’s fastest dog, and Daschunds are certainly not reputed to be extraordinarily fast. This particular dog answers to the handle of Tammy Ten and is owned by Jerry Kernohan of London but when you get right down to it, Lennox is its only master. What a master he is. Man and dog have chalked up over 100 feature race victories all over North America in seven years of competition.

Whether you like Lennox or not, he is a fabulous driver. The car is always under control and very seldom in anyone else’s way. We can recall nights that the car has not been handling that Lennox has slowed down and allowed other better handling cars to go by. We remember in particular an International Race here at Flamboro Speedway a couple of years ago when Harvey seemed to have the victory all wrapped up but ran into handling or brake problems close to the end. Rather than taking a chance on lousing up the other driver and himself, Harvey waved the other car by and settled for a safe second spot.

We have never been able to understand the lack of support that Harvey gets from the fans. We’ve talked to many fans and asked them why they don’t like Lennox. The answers are always different but the most frequent seems to be that he wins too often. This has certainly not been true in the past two seasons as Lennox only won four feature races in all of ’65 and has only picked up tw0 checkered flags in features so far this season. Another thing that people seem to resent is the large amount of money that is behind Tammy Ten. You’ve got to remember that money alone does not make a winner. Sure, lots of money for expensive racing parts help, and there’s no shortage of loot for Tammy Ten but it still takes a lot of knowhow and skill to build and drive a winning machine. As we said before, Lennox has not been to successful in the last two years and we believe that this is mainly due to the fact that chief mechanic quit about two years ago. This definitely slowed Lennox down considerably but he has now either recruited a new crew or the old crew is getting smarter because the car is starting to move as in days of old. Believe it or not, Lennox is unlike many drivers in that he does a lot of the work on the car himself.

We wouldn’t call Harvey overly humble but he is a long way from being vein. He realizes that there are a lot of other fine drivers on the track and winning is becoming more and more difficult each year. We would say that probably Lennox’s greatest fault is his temper. He won’t deliberately bump anyone else off the track unless they provoke him and make him lose his temper. At different times, Harvey has had feuds going with several different drivers, particularly, Jim Howard and Bill Rowse. With Jimmy Howard’s temporary retirement, that battle has died down but the battle with Rowse is still being waged and it threatened to break out into fistacuffs at Nilestown Speedway on opening day . This battle goes back some time to when Rowse was a very wild rookie. Bill had a habit of taking up a little more than his fair share of the track and more than once, loused up Mr. Lennox. Even though Rowse’s driving has improved greatly as he has gained experience the animosity still exists between him and Lennox.

Lennox has made this remark about the fans, “Whether they like it or not, I go home with part of their dollar every night I race, and I am laughing all the way to the bank”. A few years ago when he tried to be a bad guy and we might add, failed rather miserably at it, he said, “After all, the fans pay their buck and if they ever stop coming to the tracks then there’s going to be a lot of us out of business”. You’ve got to admire him for courage because he made that remark during a season when he won 28 feature races and when he was bombarded with apple cores and stones after every win. After all this abuse, Lennox still couldn’t really be a bad guy, so he gave up on it and returned to his normal role of a clean-driving, big-winning driver.

In case you don’t believe us, here is the list of the first 101 feature race wins for Lennox. Whether you boo him or cheer him, let’s hope that he is around long enough for another 101 because racing can’t afford to be without men like Lennox who have contributed so much towards making this the greatest sport in the world.

Harvey Lennox’s First 101 Feature Wins List

1960

1961

1962

1963

1964

1965

1966