This article first appeared in The Petrolicious Post 004
The pit lane was empty. It was October 1972, the United States Grand Prix at Watkins Glen, and a 19-year-old kid from Indiana was standing in the middle of it with a Nikon he had taught himself to use eight months earlier. He looked up the lane. He looked down. He could not believe what he was seeing, which was nothing. No ropes. No credential checks. No publicists. Just open concrete and race cars and the men who drove them.
"That was where the gold was," Kelley said. "That was where the diamonds were. I couldn't believe they weren't there. And I was going to keep on shooting because I wanted to get as much under my belt before they realized what was going on."
Richard Kelley did not waste the moment. He started shooting. He has not stopped.
He had arrived at his career the way no one plans to. A hot August afternoon in 1971, freshman year at Indiana University, a copy of Road and Track open on his lap to Rob Walker's account of the British Grand Prix. Some people find their way gradually. A flicker in the distance. Kelley was not one of them. "It was an atomic bomb blast that went off in front of my eyes," he said. "And I just knew. That's where I belong."
He was a journalism student. A writer. But he knew the way in was through a camera. Not because he understood cameras. He didn't. He understood what the pictures should look like. He had been studying cinema since he was seven years old. Black and white. The classics. The way light fell on faces in the old films. The way a close-up could tell you everything about a person without a word of dialogue. He knew what he wanted. He just had to learn the machine.
Professor Will Counts at Indiana had been nominated for the Pulitzer for his civil rights photography in the fifties. Kelley showed him his early work. Counts told him to go buy a camera. Not advice. Instruction. "It's what you're meant to do." Counts connected him with Chuck Robinson at the AP bureau in Indianapolis. Robinson let him string at the Indy 500. Robinson got him the credentials for Watkins Glen. By the time Kelley walked into that empty pit lane, he had a 180mm f/2.8, a 50mm f/1.4, and nine months of self-taught education. That was it.
His method was simple and, at the time, almost no one else was doing it. He shot wide open. Close. Natural light. Or what he calls available darkness. "You're trying to pull something bright out of dense darkness, especially with Tri-X," he said. "But once you knew how to do it, once you knew how to cross light, it was fun. It was like stealing."
He shot people talking. Not posed. Not stiff. He would tell the driver to keep talking to whoever they were talking to. Forget I'm here. And they did. He became invisible. A fly on the wall with a long lens and a feeling for when the mask dropped.
"Photography is not looking at the feeling," Kelley says. "You have to lock into emotion. And if what you're looking at is something you can't feel, there is absolutely no way that you'll ever be able to pass that on to somebody who looks at your images."
The two photographers he studied were Henri Cartier-Bresson and W. Eugene Smith. Both watched faces. Both watched eyes. Both understood that the story lives in the expression, not the setting. Kelley wanted that. He thought there were enough pictures of men standing next to cars. He wanted to get into their heads.
The fourth or fifth frame he ever shot in Formula One was Niki Lauda sitting on an armco barrier next to Ronnie Peterson. Watkins Glen. 1972. Both were March teammates. Both were having trouble with the car. Lauda might have had a thousand dollars to his name. He was 23 years old. He was nobody yet. But Kelley was watching him give orders, listening to him talk through problems, and something registered. He filed it away. Within two years Lauda would be at Ferrari. Within four he would be world champion. Kelley saw it early because he was close enough to see it, and quiet enough that they let him stay.
That closeness was the whole thing. Without it, none of the work exists.
Ermanno Cuoghi was Lauda's mechanic at Ferrari and one of Kelley's best friends in the paddock. He was a prankster. He was also a source. He would pull Kelley aside and say, come here, I'm going to tell you something. One afternoon at Watkins Glen in 1977, after second practice, Cuoghi found Kelley and told him to bring his prints of Lauda up to the motor home. Right now. Right now. Kelley hesitated. Cuoghi insisted. Cracked the door. Told Lauda that Richard was outside with something for him.
Kelley walked up the stairs and into the middle of a vicious argument between Lauda, Carlos Reutemann, Mauro Forghieri, and the rest of Ferrari's inner circle. Reutemann's face was dark gray. Kelley had walked into something that was not meant to be seen by anyone outside that room.
Lauda looked up. Calm. "Richard. You got some things, huh? How about we talk later. We're having a little discussion here."
Kelley backed out of the room. Literally backwards. Down the stairs. He grabbed Cuoghi. Why did you do that to me? Cuoghi smiled. "I just thought that you, among other people, needed to know what it was like to be a Ferrari driver those days."
After Kelley left Lauda's side, Cuoghi told him the rest. Lauda was finished with Ferrari. He would battle for the title, but the moment he crossed the finish line, he was done. No Canadian Grand Prix. His plane was ready for home. No one knew except Lauda, Cuoghi, his pilot, and Kelley.
That same weekend, Lauda clinched his second world championship. James Hunt won the race. And what happened next became one of Kelley's favorite photographs. Hunt reached the victory circle first and refused to start without Lauda. Where's Nicky? We can't start this without Nicky. Then he took off running. Kelley was right behind him. When Lauda got there, they grabbed each other. Hunt was laughing. Lauda was laughing. They had shared a flat in Formula Three. They drank together constantly. The rivalry everyone remembers from the film was, in Kelley's experience, a friendship. That photograph is Hunt handing Lauda back a championship that Hunt thought should have been his. And being genuinely happy about it. Hunt knew it too. This was Lauda's chance to be happy someplace else.
"The movie really bothered me," Kelley said, "because I knew, and everybody knew, how much Nicky and James got along. They were buds."
Hunt was underrated, Kelley thinks. Most of the races he won were in the wet. He was nervous constantly. His crew learned to use it. They would hold him in the garage and tell him something was wrong with the car when nothing was wrong with the car. The longer they held him, the faster his first lap in qualifying. It was a manipulation that Hunt probably understood and didn't care about because it worked.
Off the track he was exactly what the photographs suggest. Beer in one hand. Cigarette in the other. A girl somewhere nearby. But underneath that, Kelley said, "he was just genuine. Talking to him was like talking to my older brother." Kelley knows Hunt's son Freddy now. "Talking to Freddy is like hearing James back in the flesh," he says. "It's the most amazing feeling I've ever had."
"I miss him. A lot. A whole lot."
Montreal. 1981. The Canadian Grand Prix. It was raining and Gilles Villeneuve was in the Ferrari and he had just run into the back of another car. The nose snapped upward like a cross mounted to the front of the chassis. It was directly in front of his face. He could not see forward.
He did not slow down. He was a snowmobiler from Berthierville, Quebec. He was used to looking out the side. He began tossing the car through corners by memory. He knew where they were.
Kelley knew where Villeneuve would go. He had been around these men long enough that he could read them. The longest braking zone, the bumpiest patch of pavement, the hairpin at the end of the old front straight. Villeneuve would slam it down under braking and snap the wing off there. So Kelley ran through the rain. Nobody else was there. He pre-focused on a patch of tarmac 25 or 30 feet away and waited.
Villeneuve came. The wing broke free. The car slithered past the railing. Missed Kelley. Continued. Two or three laps later he finished the race. Jackie Stewart was commentating and suggested they would black-flag him. Kelley's response was instinctive: no, Jackie. He's French Canadian. This is Montreal. That is never going to happen.
"You hang around these guys long enough," Kelley says, "and you know what they're going to do. You know why. And you know where to stand."
Not every moment ended that way. Kelley's time in Formula One included things that broke him. The loss of François Cevert at Watkins Glen in October 1973, during what should have been a routine qualifying session, cost Kelley an entire year. He did not shoot a single race in 1974. He has written about that morning in detail in his "In Frame" column, and the weight of it has not diminished. "It hurts just as much now as it did then," he says.
He went on. Twenty years at Car and Driver. Long-haul road trips to the edges of pavement in Newfoundland, 13 hours to cover a hundred miles, drawing straws to see who would walk. Thirteen years of SCCA racing because the itch got him and he couldn't not do it. When he had trouble with his car, he would sit down and ask himself what Jackie Stewart would say. He would hear the voice. High-pitched. Specific. And it would work.
"It's something that gets in you," Kelley says, "and then it never leaves. And you don't want it to leave."
He came back to Formula One in 2017. Three races. Spain, Montreal, the US Grand Prix. Digital now. A 200-500mm lens that sucks light. He can shoot eyeballs inside a helmet visor. The method is the same. Listen. Anticipate. Stand where something is going to happen. But the pit lane is not empty anymore. You don't get close unless you work it out ahead of time. The gold is behind a door now.
He had followed Max Verstappen since Max was 15. Talked to Christian Horner before anyone knew the name. "Who are you looking at?" Horner said Max. Kelley watched him drive, sat down with him, and knew. "This guy is going to be a monster." Same instinct. Same quiet listening. Fifty years apart.
The question Kelley asked himself for decades was whether anyone else had what he had. He kept his images close. Not because he was afraid they weren't good. Because he wanted to see what might surface from other photographers who were there. Paul-Henri Cahier, who grew up with the drivers at his father Bernard's house. Rainer Schlegelmilch, who had been there from the very beginning. Both were masters. But the specific thing Kelley had, the interior portraits, the unguarded faces, the available darkness rendered into something permanent on film, did not appear from anywhere else.
He waited. Years. Decades. And then he understood that he was the last man standing. Anything that would have surfaced already had. So he let the images out.
If you’re interested in more from Richard, His book is called Waiting. The title is not just about the moment before the shutter opens. It is about all of it. The whole arc.
Photography by: Richard Kelley
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