COLUMNS: THE STEERING COLUMN - Columns

A death in the family.

By CSABA CSERE, May 2000

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On February 11, Car and Driver's senior technical editor, Don Schroeder, was measuring the top speed of a RENNTech Mercedes-Benz on a 7.7-mile oval track at Ft. Stockton, Texas. During the course of this test, something went terribly wrong and Don lost control of the car, which left the pavement and crashed. He did not survive.

All of us at Car and Driver can scarcely accept that we will never again see Don's cheerful face. No longer will we hear him defending GM styling for taking a risk on the whalelike 1991 Chevrolet Caprice, or recalling his escapades, before he came to the magazine, behind the wheel of his 1984 twin-stick Dodge Colt GTS Turbo. We'll never again hear him earnestly promoting the urban recovery of the city of Detroit, where he had purchased -- some said bravely -- a grand old home years ago. We'll never hear him spewing verbal fireworks in political arguments with one of the more conservative members of the staff -- such as myself. Although we all intellectually accept that he's gone, in our hearts many of us imagine that he's just off on a long trip somewhere and he'll come strolling through our front door any day now.

That is not to be, of course, leaving us to make some sense of his death at the age of 35. Stripped to the basics, Don died in pursuit of a number for our test-results sheet. It was for top speed, one of several numbers that describe the performance of a car. For 30 years, we at Car and Driver have done nearly everything possible to acquire those numbers, which we consider critical in evaluating a car, through the most thorough and accurate methods available to us.

We view the act of measuring a car's performance independently, and then comparing it with the manufacturer's claims, as critical to automotive journalism. It's the equivalent of a good political reporter thoroughly and relentlessly dissecting the health-care proposals of Al Gore, or George Bush's plan to cut taxes. The reporter examines the offerings, line by line, to see if the politician's proposals can in fact deliver their intended benefits, at their claimed costs.

We take testing so seriously that we only trust our own people to do it, with few exceptions. In this way, we not only ensure that our measurements are consistent but also position ourselves to gather firsthand impressions of performance at the limit and deliver them directly to our readers.

Finally, by driving a car to the limits of its performance, much faster perhaps than any owner ever might, we verify the integrity of a car's construction, the soundness of its engineering, and the thoroughness of its development.

I firmly believe that our record of methodically and accurately testing a wide variety of cars for the past 30 years has made Car and Driver the magazine of record in our industry. And although we have certainly cooked countless clutches, fractured numerous gearboxes, blown a bevy of engines, and shredded more than our share of tires over the years, this was the first actual crash -- let alone fatality -- during instrumented testing that any of us could recall. That said, neither our safety record, nor the genuine benefits of testing, seem to count for much in the aftermath of Don's death.

Such concerns were far away when Don Schroeder joined our staff in September 1990. As have been virtually all our testers, Don was an engineer, with degrees in mechanical engineering and applied science from Lehigh University. And like most of his testing predecessors, Don had worked in the auto industry; in his case, engineering top mechanisms for ASC in 1989 and '90.

Don had a lifelong fascination with cars. His father tells a story of Don's watching him redo the brakes on the family car and correctly noticing that Dad had installed one of the components backward. What's special about that? He was four years old. Don's high-school friends from his hometown of Syracuse, New York, relate tales of his daring driving antics that sound eerily similar to my own and those of many staffers. When Don came to Car and Driver, he was so brimming with enthusiasm that we had no choice but to hire him.

As the technical director back then, I trained Don in our arcane testing methods. He was a very quick study. He progressed rapidly as both a writer and a tester, and about five years ago was graduated to evaluating cars with the highest performance potential. During that time, Don really developed as a driver and became extraordinarily skilled at extracting the maximum performance from our test cars.

I suspect that our readers who pore over the numbers we generate every month give little thought to just how challenging some of those test sessions can be. Some require tremendous concentration and driving ability. Three examples from the past 12 months indicate why Don was our choice for the most demanding assignments.

Our cover story last August was a comparison test of the hot pony-car convertibles -- the highest-performance variants of the Chevy Camaro, the Ford Mustang, and the Pontiac Firebird. For a part of this report, we drove to GingerMan Raceway, a road-racing track in western Michigan. We arrived to a drenched track on a cool, drizzly day.

Also present that day was Paul Gentilozzi, the SCCA Trans-Am series champion who was on hand to test his latest race car. As the rain let up and the track dried, we started lapping the track and evaluating the pony cars -- in between short sessions of watching Gentilozzi blast around in his race car.

Don was assigned to generate the timed laps for this test, and he went about the task in his methodical way. He ran five laps in each car, with each lap invariably clean and usually quicker than the one before. After Don finished, we prevailed on Gentilozzi to run some laps in our pony cars and offer a pro driver's perspective. He was more than happy to oblige.

Later on, I noticed that Don had run quicker in one of the cars than had Gentilozzi. Moreover, when I added up Gentilozzi's lap times in each car, his total was 5 minutes and 2.5 seconds. Don's total came to 5 minutes and 2.9 seconds. For Don to come within a split second of the Trans-Am champion's combined laps was simply astonishing -- especially since Gentilozzi had spent far more time at GingerMan than Don had.

Another day when Don was cookin' came last October during a magazine shootout between Ford's John Coletti and GM's Jon Moss and their Boss Mustang and Camaro ZL-1 for our January 2000 issue. The two cars had 1625 horsepower between them. But they were also as fragile as a pair of hand grenades.

We scheduled the acceleration testing at Milan dragway just south of Ann Arbor. By midmorning, both cars arrived with not only their patrons but also full crews of mechanics, public-relations aides, and even hot-shoe drivers. We plugged Don into the cars, and he quickly put down some quick times through the quarter-mile with the Camaro. But the Mustang broke its valvetrain after a handful of runs.

Coletti and his crew immediately overloaded the local cell-phone circuits, frantically seeking parts for the old-architecture monster motor in their car. They were on the phone all day before finally finding the right valvetrain bits in Mt. Clemens, clear on the other side of Detroit. Most of the parts arrived around 6:30 that evening. An hour and a half later, the 598-cubic-inch V-8 was running again. We quickly hustled it over to the drag strip.

But now it had turned cold and dark. The Boss Mustang's tires were stone cold and so was the pavement. In a warm-up run, the rear tires of the Mustang broke loose with every shift. Furthermore, we had to send cars to the far end of the strip to light it with their headlights.

The big V-8 had been thrown together quickly, and broken bits from the earlier incident were still circulating in the sump. It was clear that the engine did not have many quarter-mile passes left in it.

Adding to the pressure for Don, both crews--maybe 30 people in all--were watching. When Don belted himself into the Mustang, he was fully aware that he had only a couple of shots at a good run. And he knew any driving mistakes would be instantly apparent to the highly interested and expert observers.

Don did one warm-up run with the 855-hp beast that was itching to fry its cold tires. He refamiliarized himself with the unusual shifter that seemed designed to facilitate engine-blowing missed shifts.

Don's first timed run was terrific--10.76 seconds at 134 mph. The Mustang crew was ecstatic, but Don thought he could do better, so we sent him off to make one more pass. This time, with an absolutely perfect launch, he turned 10.55 seconds at 135 mph, faster than the Mustang ran with even its Ford-supplied professional driver in the saddle.

Under these lousy conditions, with the pressure on, and no second chance available, Don came through with an incredible clutch performance.

Concentrating for 11 seconds at a time is one thing, but what Don managed to pull off during the press launch of the Insight, Honda's super-high-fuel-economy, hybrid-powered car, was truly remarkable. The event included a competition in which drivers from a number of automotive magazines would compete in a fuel-economy test on the highway from Columbus, Ohio, to Detroit. The winner would be the one who achieved the best combination of fuel economy and average speed.

When we heard about this contest, we resolved to win it by employing a strategy to eliminate most of the Insight's aerodynamic drag through the technique of drafting. But unlike in stock-car racing, where drafting is performed by cars of approximately the same size, we borrowed a Ford Excursion, propped open its rear dutch doors, and grafted on a plywood-reinforced mud flap so that any vehicle following closely behind it would escape the slowing effect of wind.

By following right behind this Excursion -- the closer the better -- the Insight could cruise at 60 mph on only a whiff of throttle and achieve great mileage. Don Sherman, a contributor who has been both the editor and technical director of this magazine, prepared and drove the Expedition. Don Schroeder drove the Insight.

To avoid a collision or a run-in with the law, the two Dons maintained radio contact and worked out an elaborate system of hand signals to indicate when the Excursion would be slowing down or speeding up. For four nerve-racking hours, Don kept the nose of the Insight within six or so inches of the Excursion's rear bumper.

When the contest was over, the second-place finisher had managed 83 miles per gallon. Our result was almost 122 mpg at 58 mph. It was another fantastic performance by Don. Afterward, Sherman described Schroeder's driving as "the epitome of cool unflappability" and anointed him "one of the finest car testers I've ever encountered" during decades in the business. I couldn't agree with him more.

Don is survived by his parents, Drs. Ted and Lois Schroeder; his sister, Ann (Schroeder) Gross, of Syracuse; his brother, Glen Schroeder, of Washington, D.C.; and his partner, Michael Vaughn, of Detroit.

As we all struggle to come to grips with this tragedy, each in our own way, we should remember that Don was one of those lucky people who had a great passion in life--his love of automobiles. He also had a great natural gift--for high-performance driving. And he was able to combine this passion and this gift in a very satisfying career at Car and Driver. Few people are so fortunate.

Donations in Don's name may be made to either: Geared for Life, P.O. Box 21938 , Detroit, Michigan 48221; or Lehigh University Alumni Fund, The Alumni Memorial Building, 27 Memorial Drive West, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania 18015.

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