Racing Driver Legend: John Morton

One day as a teenager in 1957, John Morton's dad took him to see his first sports car race at Road America in Wisconsin. It was a life-changing event. He knew that he was going to be a racing driver.

"It made such an impression on me on that day I remember thinking this is what I'm doing," John told Hagerty Sidedrafts. "I didn't have a plan. I just decided that's what I was going to do."

After racing jalopies on dirt tracks in South Carolina, he dropped out of Clemson University to attend Carroll Shelby's racing school in Riverside, California. In an extraordinary driving career that lasted more than 50 years, John Morton raced for Shelby, the BRE Datsun team, Nissan, and BF Goodrich and was a nine-time veteran at Le Mans. He is a former movie stuntman, and now a private pilot and scooter collector.

In this episode, John talks about his life on the track, including the hair-raising details of a devastating crash in 1988 at Lime Rock Park in Connecticut. 

"The car just aerodynamically lifted, flipped over and landed upside down and then started tumbling and caught on fire," John told us. "I was lucky to survive it."