Ice Racing Getaway Driver
1983 St. Louis County jailhouse interview with “Turbo” Ted Van Brunt
Interviewer: Tell me about your escape from Duluth.
Turbo Ted: Escaping Duluth is a coin flip. Half my friends tried and couldn’t reach the velocity, came back after two or three years of getting kicked around out there. I tried a couple times.
What you’re really asking about started a couple springs ago, when it rained then the temperature plunged. The city woke up with a coating of clear ice on every surface. Branches falling in the road. Whole city shut down, nothing could move.
Except my black, street stock, ice racing stud car, a 1976 Chevette with a roll cage and 500 spikes on each tire — sheet metal screws we screwed in ourselves. Fender all chewed up. Commonly called the worst car of all time but it did everything we asked. And Johnny said it was go time. He was the brains, had it all worked, how to disarm the system at the Superior Street jewelers there. He got that with a bribe. It was only a question of when, and this was our crisis of opportunity. “The cops won’t stand a chance,” he said, and they didn’t. They even had chains on but they still didn’t know how to drive. Anyway so Johnny robbed it, but he didn’t get all the alarms. And I was the getaway driver but I still get half. Which wasn’t much — a couple display cases worth of diamond jewelry. Pulled him behind the car on a tether as we blew down Superior through deserted intersections, cross-training for frozen lake ice races at the same time we’re robbing a jewelry store. Just on his feet — no skis, just boots. And of course the cop shop is right there. But their interceptors fell behind. It was beautiful.
But I can’t whip around corners or I’ll rip his arms off. And we’re going to hang a hard left up Lake. So I give him the signal — three short beeps — and we do our trick. We practiced this for years on Island Lake. I slow down just enough and throw the passenger door open. He lets go of the tether, slides up and hops right in, I take off again with a new freedom to really drive. Momentum slams the door shut on its own. We double back over the hill and stash the car in a West End garage. And no I’m not gonna tell you whose garage, I’m loyal when you treat me right.
They called us “bold” in the press. Pulled another trick nine months later, the wintertime bank job. This is when it got so hot we had to leave town. The midnight before, we built strategically placed snow ramps, our Hillside getaway plan. So we had options. Blocked off the ramps with orange road cones stenciled “City of Duluth.” Some streets have perfect gradients, that’s physics. We rob the downtown Wells Fargo just as it’s really starting to blizzard. The bank’s about to close early because the busses have just stopped running. We were weather nerds so we basically predicted it. Johnny walks in with a gun and runs out with cash, perfect timing. But he’s winged the guard so now it’s on. And we’re leading the cops through empty streets — most people are indoors, it’s treacherous to set foot out here.
We used two of our ramps and they worked as advertised. We had the cops thinking they were gaining on us going up 10th Avenue. But suddenly we’re jumping crosswise over their heads off a ramp in the alley. Then, when they really were gaining on us, we led them to Eighth Avenue and Seventh Street, one of the steepest hills in town. Hitting the ramp at precisely 80 miles per hour, we took flight as the cops bailed. Snapped through some telephone wires. Weightless for a second, we landed more than a full block down. The angle of the hillside rose up to meet us and we barely felt the landing. It was insane. Of course we caught air many more times by the time we got to Superior Street.
Interviewer: Why is that?
Turbo Ted: Because we’re bombing the hill then hit a flat intersection, go soaring down the next stretch. Not great for the suspension. But we headed for London Road out of town. At our buddy’s we swapped some panels and the fender which was barely hanging on, changed the tires, and drove away in what looked like a different car. The press called us “daredevils.”
We laid low on the Range, fugitives in our own backyard. The bank job enabled a certain ease because it was cash not diamonds. But it’s hard to give up your name living under a shadow. There’s a network of gearheads, grease monkeys, and dirt racers around Ely who bunked us for a couple days here and there, then we couch surfed a while somewhere else, then borrowed a dude’s cabin for a week. We lived like that ‘til we thought the heat was off. And we’re partying. But sitting with your back to the wall is a thing, wearing sunglasses inside. Any little thing happens and you think it’s about you and what you did. We were stuck just like we’d been in Duluth — hemmed in. We didn’t mean to stop life. So we set up identities, looking to re-join frozen lake ice racing in one of the new regional clubs.
For ice races on Lake Superior, conditions are only right every few years, so we could not resist entering. They said the whole lake had frozen front to back — no wind for two weeks at negative 20 turned it to a desert of glass. White on the car this time matched the light snow cover, and the sky. Lift Bridge right there. But we got recognized on race day. At our first pit stop we saw cop cars driving, creeping really, onto the ice. Shoulda known.
Interviewer: What do you mean?
Turbo Ted: It’s a small community of racers and we got made. So I loaded two big ol’ gas cans in the back. The extra weight makes the wheels dig in — mass times acceleration. There’s fewer spectators at the ends of the oval track because the turns sharpen and no one wants to be there for the spinouts. One of those gaps between the hay bales pointed to the horizon.
I flipped the script and ditched the race. Hay bales flying everywhere, I straightened the curve, headed for open ice. The cops don’t have chains on their tires. Adorable. They start drifting like they can drive sideways from here to Canada but then they fishtail, over-correct, and spin out. Meanwhile I am gone.
Johnny let go of the tether after a few miles. I never slowed or stopped, never signaled. He skied to a halt, disappeared in the rearview. Sorry Johnny. I didn’t shoot anybody. You got me into this mess, you can get yourself out.
I thought, if I speed northeast, I’ll reach Thunder Bay in like three hours. First I drove out of sight of land so I could not be tracked from shore. Then I kept true northeast by dead reckoning. Figured I was more or less parallel to the land and would find Isle Royale in a couple hours. Then Canada. The shorelines fell behind, but I never saw anything after that. They sent a chopper after me but all they found was fading snow tracks to the vanishing point.
After a couple hours I reached a zone of fog. The horizon had only been a line of smeared chalk anyway. Well it vanished. I took a few minutes to stretch my legs, top off the tank, even though I hated the idea of stopping — didn’t like concentrating the weight of the car on any one spot. I’d been driving for more than a couple hours. My car and I the only form out there. Ice they said was two or three feet thick? Over a mile deep black water. I’m suppressing terror every moment. Hated the ice noises. I hoped the lake was frozen solid.
Raced off. I thought I might have missed Isle Royale heading too far east, so I compensated by bending the line north. Slept at the wheel, woke up at a hundred miles per hour. Didn’t trust space or time at that point, but what I guessed was Day 2 began.
It was blue sky and full sun over a mirror of clear ice. Doubling heaven — one above and one below. I was the axis intersecting the razor sharp horizon line at a 90-degree angle. But the horizon was everywhere. Felt like a spinning sundial. Imagined myself outside the car following it like a camera on a rig, swooping around, emphasizing velocity. Not sure what to do once I get to Canada but maybe if I drive fast enough I can be still. Or am I driving in circles the size of Lake Superior, a series of zeros?
Slept again at the wheel. Woke up zooming on a white plain. Overcast. Might as well be a salt flat and I’m going for a land speed record in a jet car. Except the salt flats would have a sun instead of a gray cloud ceiling so low it’s claustrophobic. Saw a crescent of light on the ice along the curvature of the earth. Thought the planet froze over. Maybe I was driving on the ocean in the southern hemisphere, I had no way of knowing. Water bottle empty. No food except two meat sticks from the glove box two days ago, a succession of hours, engine drone in my body, fanny fatigue. One of the fans in the heater started making a noise. When I stopped to gas up again, I heard the ice sounds, real good. They were following me so I outraced them.
Day three? Week three? A cliff face of low red clouds erased the horizon, moved it into the sky. How many horizons are there? Heat’s konking out and there’s frost on the inside of the windshield. Canada’s got to be around here. Somewhere I can be no one. Running low on gas, the sun stood still. Shorelines converged on me as the horizon fell behind. A structure peaked above a veil of sea smoke venting from a slash of open water, a canal. Wait, does Canada have a lift bridge?
The lake turned on me because I’m back where I started. Flipped like a table. The cops waited with open arms, with chains on. Helicopter must have seen me, and I was too far out to know. Had no idea where I was, in fact, I’m nowhere.
An index of Jim Richardson’s essays may be found here.