his only victory in the Indy 500 series

David Earl "Swede" Savage, Jr. (August 26, 1946 - July 2, 1973) was an American race car driver.
Born in San Bernardino, California, Savage began Soap Box Derby racing at the age of five. He moved up to racing quarter midget cars then at age twelve to Go-Kart racing. By his late teens he was racing competitively with motorcycles and by the late 1960s was driving a Lola in the Can-Am racing series. In 1968 and 1969 he also raced in NASCAR events. Competing in the 1969 Daytona 500, he was forced out after a wheel fell off on lap 124 and he crashed. In 1970, Savage and teammate Dan Gurney drove identical factory-sponsored Plymouth Barracudas in the Trans-Am Series.
Driving an Indycar, Savage won the 1970 "Phoenix Bobby Ball 150." He competed in the Indianapolis 500 twice, finishing 32nd in the 1972 race after dropping out on lap six with mechanical problems. The following year, Savage qualified fourth and had the lead for twelve laps until he was passed by Al Unser on lap 55. During lap 58, Savage brushed the outside wall at the exit of turn four. His car then slid sideways across the track and violently impacted the inside track wallat an obilque angle. The force of the impact caused the car to completely disintegrate in a plume of flame; the engine and transaxle tumbled end-over-end to the pit lane entrance while Savage, still strapped in his seat, was thrown back across the circuit, finally coming to rest adjacent to the outer retaining wall on his hands and knees, completely exposed. Tragically, a young crew member for Savage's Patrick Racing teammate Graham McRae, Armando Teran, ran out across the pit lane and was struck by a fire truck rushing up pit road (opposite the normal direction of travel) to the crash. Teran was fatally injured.
Swede Savage died in the hospital thirty-three days after the accident; the severity of his injuries having been aggravated by respiratory failure resulting from accidental inhalation of racing fuel vapors. He was interred in the Mt. View Cemetery in his hometown of San Bernardino, California. Married with a six-year-old daughter, his widow Sheryl was expecting their second child at the time of his passing.

Swede and his spouse Sheryl

1970 AAR 'Cuda - Swede Savage No. 42

Looking back: Tragedy of '73 burns in Indy history
By Dave Kallmann
of the Journal Sentinel staff

Indianapolis -- Twenty-five years later, some of the memories return like yesterday, many have faded like dusty photographs and still others evoke unimaginable pain.
The 1973 Indianapolis 500 remains one of the lowest points in American motor sports history.
"It was just a race that everybody wanted to get over with and go home and forget about it," winner Gordon Johncock said.
It was as if a message were being sent with the relentless rain that delayed, interrupted and shortened the race. The message was stressed in the costliest of terms with crashes that killed drivers Art Pollard and Swede Savage and crewman Armando Teran while injuring a dozen spectators.
Were it not for the lessons taught by tragedy, the race would be better forgotten.
May 1973 arrived at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway with even more hype than usual, because the 200 mph barrier was within the sights of drivers and on the minds of trackside observers.
Reality set in quickly when, in a windy practice before pole qualifying, Pollard crashed in the first turn. His car rolled over and was engulfed in a fireball. Pollard was pronounced dead an hour later.
The death drew notice, but the loss of one more driver wasn't all that unexpected.
"We used to average a death a year out here," recalled track announcer Tom Carnegie, who will call his 53rd Indy 500 today.
Johnny Rutherford, who had been one of the first drivers on the scene of Pollard's crash, ended up on the pole at 198.413 mph, including one lap in the 199s. Rutherford admitted that seeing an old friend's accident kept him on the safe side of 200.
With Memorial Day came gloomy skies and intermittent showers that interrupted preparations four times. Finally the green flag waved at 3 p.m.
Antsy drivers made for a haphazard field, with four cars across the narrow track in what should have been the sixth row. Only a couple of hundred yards past the flag stand, the blue McLaren-Offy of rookie David "Salt" Walther drifted to the right, squeezing Jerry Grant against the wall.
Walther clipped Grant's left front tire, and the car jumped violently into the fence, catching its nose and twirling like a propeller a half-dozen times while also overturning.
More than 70 gallons of burning fuel sprayed into the grandstand and puddled on the track as cars scattered down the front stretch.
"I was down by the pit wall, steering left, and . . . remember very vividly driving through a river of flaming methanol," recalled David Hobbs, now a Milwaukee-area auto dealer.
"I pulled up right at the end of pit road and remember telling the radio announcer, 'We're supposed to have 33 of the best drivers in the world and they can't even get down the bloody straightaway.' "
Walther's fate might have been worse; had the tank stayed with the car he surely would have been incinerated. Instead, he survived with multiple burns, particularly to his hands.
Wally Dallenbach, who started behind Walther in the middle of the seventh row, was momentarily blinded by the fuel spray and ended up in the infield grass.
Walther's overturned, flaming car came to rest right in front of Dallenbach, who helped firefighters rescue Walther.
"I had the gloves on, so I grabbed the hottest thing, the turbocharger, which was one of the corners that was grabable," said Dallenbach, who is now the chief steward for Championship Auto Racing Teams.
"We flipped it over and I didn't want to see him because I knew I had to race. So I just walked away."
Reports on the number of spectators injured ranged from 11 to 13. As they were being placed in ambulances, driving rain hit again.
Not a single lap was complete when the race was halted.
Tuesday was wet, as well, and the drivers saw the red flag while on their parade lap.
Meanwhile, the infield continued its metamorphosis into a bog of mud and stinking garbage, and half the 350,000 fans went home.
Again on Wednesday, after another rain delay, the teams tried again. The start was clean this time, with Bobby Unser getting a jump on Rutherford, who missed a gear change.
Early attrition knocked out Mario Andretti, stock-car regular Bobby Allison and A.J. Foyt, although Foyt then took to teammate George Snider's car.
By Lap 42, Savage, the 26-year-old charger from California, had taken the lead, a position he would hold until pitting.
Savage was moving toward the front again on Lap 59 when he lost control of his STP red Eagle-Offy.
The rear of the car slipped out in Turn 4, and when Savage caught the car it was pointed for the inside wall. He hit it head-on with enough force to rip the machine in two and trigger another explosion of fuel and car parts.
"They had everybody stopped there in Turn 4," Johncock said. "I think Foyt had already went up that way and had walked back and grabbed a hold of me and said, 'You don't want to go up there.' "
Meanwhile in the pits, Teran, an STP crewman, headed toward the accident scene. [Armando Moreno Teran was a 22 y/o from Culver City Ca. He was a truck driver who was elated when asked to become an STP crewman.]
A safety truck, speeding up pit road in the opposite direction of normal traffic, hit Teran from behind at 60 mph and killed him.
After the delay, Johncock moved into the lead and dominated until the race was interrupted again by rain, which, mercifully, caused it to be stopped at Lap 133 of the scheduled 200 laps.
"Seldom have so many things that potentially could go wrong actually gone wrong," said Dan Gurney, himself a driver until 1970 and later an owner and car builder who was credited with discovering Savage.
Johncock's celebration wasn't much of a party. The traditional post-race banquet was canceled and he and many others on the team went instead to Methodist Hospital to check on the condition of Savage.
A month later, after Savage's kidneys had failed, he died of pneumonia.
Dallenbach also talked to Savage in the hospital, because he was hired to replace him.
"He was kind of cheering me on and was happy I was in a car, because we were friends . . . as good of friends as you can be when you race against each other," Dallenbach said.
"I tried to keep an upbeat conversation: 'The seat's here for you, Swede, I'm just keeping it warm.' Just didn't go that way."
Johncock's victory gave owner Pat Patrick the first of his three triumphs at Indy, and he also had the rookie of the year, Graham McRae, who finished 16th.
But Patrick also lost a crewman, Teran, and a driver, Savage. To this day, he respectfully declines requests to talk about the race.
"It's probably the lowest point in my life," said Patrick, who continues as a car owner in Champ car.
"I think it was because of things like that that I really never got that close to another driver," Johncock said. "I would do my racing, get in an airplane and go home."
If there is anything good that came about from the 1973 Indianapolis, it was a new emphasis on safety.
Before the next race, significant changes were made to the cars to keep speeds in check and reduce the possibility of fire.
On-board fuel capacity was cut from 75 gallons to 40, turbocharger boost pressure limits were instituted and the rear wings were clipped from 64 inches in width to 55.
At Indy, the closest grandstand seats were moved back from the fence, and the wall Savage hit was moved.
(Just last week, the wall was fitted with an innovative series of plastic cylinders and covering plates designed to minimize the force of impact.)
"If you really stop and think about it and you follow racing, it seems like before they take serious or drastic measures, somebody always has to get hurt or killed," Johncock said. "It's a sad thing to say, but it is."
Over the course of time, speeds have continued to increase but safety measures have improved even more.
Now engineers design and redesign cars and seats and helmets to minimize the effect on a driver's body of accidents, some of which have a force of 70 or 100 times that of gravity.
Drivers who survived an earlier era now openly wonder how they did.
"Back then, it was like me sitting on this stool with a seat belt," Foyt said. "Well, you were running 150 mph, you're not running 250. But, hell, that 150 was a hell of a lot harder than that 250, you know what I mean?
"Probably after me and you are dead and gone, that stuff they'll be racing will be that much more safe."
Since 1973, three competitors have been killed at Indy -- Gordon Smiley in '82, Jovy Marcelo in '92 and Scott Brayton in '96 -- along with two spectators and a trespasser driving on the track.
Although the tragic '73 race left the whole sport in a sour mood, nobody recalls having doubts about going back in '74.
Qualifying speeds were down nearly 10 mph, with Foyt winning the pole and Rutherford collecting the first of his three victories.
"I thought, my goodness, we're never going to recover from this," said the speedway's Carnegie.
"It was amazing to come back the next year and it was as if people had not forgotten about it, but cleansed it from their minds and were ready for another 500-mile race."