Lloyd Ruby was best known as an excellent Indy car driver who nearly won two Indianapolis 500s, but in truth, he was a classic all-rounder from the same mold as contemporaries Mario Andretti, Parnelli Jones, Dan Gurney, and A.J. Foyt. He started out driving midgets and sprint cars in his native Texas, before branching out into sports cars and subsequently landing a regular Indy car ride.
He won seven USAC National Championship races during his career, with victories coming in both Watson front-engined roadsters and Halibrand and Mongoose rear-engined machines, but he’s probably best remembered for late-race disappointments that denied him victory at Indy in 1966 and 1969. In the former year, his Eagle was leading handily when a cam cover bolt broke and his engine lost all its oil, while confusion during a pit stop led him to pull away before a fuel hose had been disconnected from his Mongoose and ruined his chances in the latter.
Beyond Indy cars he also contested the 1961 U.S. Grand Prix in a privately fielded Lotus, and won races in the old USAC Road Racing championship with cars entered by John Mecom and J. Frank Harrison.
Those successes, combined with his technical acumen, led Carroll Shelby to tap him for a role in the Ford Le Mans effort where he was teamed with Ken Miles because the two shared similar preferences in car setup. The fact that Ruby was a shrewd tactician who looked after his equipment made him ideal for endurance racing, and together he and Miles won the 24 Hours of Daytona in both 1965 and 1966, and the 12 Hours of Sebring in ’66.
He would have been part of the effort to claim an unprecedented Triple Crown of endurance racing with victory at Le Mans that latter year, but a back injury suffered in a light-plane crash just after Indy kept him from going to France. Had he gone, one can only imagine how he would have reacted had he been part of the debacle that denied Miles that same honor.
After he’d established himself in Indy cars he would occasionally take other drives, and so he won a NASCAR Grand Touring race at Daytona in one of Bud Moore’s Mercury Cougars and started a couple of Trans-Ams in Smokey Yunick Camaros. In 1974 he even drove an Eagle-Offy Indy car in a Formula 5000 race at Ontario.
Hugely respected by his peers and loved by legions of fans, the soft-spoken son of Wichita Falls, Texas, was a man to be reckoned with both on the track and off, where his pranks and practical jokes took some of the edge off the dangerous game he and his fellows were playing. We would be fortunate to have more racers like Lloyd Ruby.
by John Zimmermann
