Attorney cruises with vintage racer

Oakland Tribune, Nov 8, 2006 by Tim Simmers

IT'S NOT that plaintiff's attorney Terry O'Reilly lives for putting the pedal to the metal on his two-ton 1949 Lincoln and cruising at 100 mph.

But it's one of his big thrills outside the courtroom. This weekend he will fire up the vintage racing machine and drive it in Mexico's historic 2,000-mile Carrera Panamericana.

O'Reilly's week-long journey steering this heavy metal monster over thousands of miles of desert on a Mexican highway will be a break from his usual routine. Normally, he's a San Mateo trial lawyer, arguing cases like the one against a Chinese candy maker whose sweets caused several children to choke to death, or American Airlines after Flight 587 crashed in New York, killing 260 passengers.

O'Reilly, 61, grew up in England, a fan of early racing legend Mike Hawthorn, and he frequently races in these long-distance rallies of vintage cars.

O'Reilly's firm, O'Reilly & Danko, specializes in representing accident victims, so it's ironic that he puts himself in danger driving in fast cars. He races with his friend, real estate investor Pat McDowell, on a team called Two Boars Racing.

"There's something about speed and old cars, and it's probably a romantic silliness," said the quick-to-laugh O'Reilly. "But it's like touchinghistory, and it keeps me in touch with my childhood."

O'Reilly's Lincoln actually raced in the first Carrera Panamericana in 1950, which was a celebration of the opening of the Pan-American Highway. The race attracts veteran drivers of vintage cars from across the globe. This race starts in Veracruz and winds around the mountains of Mexico, ending in Monterrey.

It goes for a week, with cars running about 300 to 450 miles a day.

"It's exhausting," said O'Reilly, who will share the driving with his teammate. "It's tiring driving them, because they throw off a lot of heat." He will be fighting the big steel beast physically, riding on old steel springs, much like he fights with aviation industry lawyers in the courtroom.

Some 93 cars are starting the race along what is the main freight highway into Central and South America.

The car, which was found a few years ago in a San Jose wrecking yard before O'Reilly bought it, failed to start on the fourth day of the original race and didn't finish. The Carrera, stopped because of safety concerns in the wake of the deadly crash in the 1955 Le Mans race, resumed in the 1980s as a rally for vintage cars.

"The car is ready," said Rene Wiegand, manager of Burlingame Motors, who restored the car and tweaked it for the race to make it more reliable. "Terry's a hell of a lawyer and a good driver. You have to have guts to drive that car."

O'Reilly will cruise at times between 90 and 100 mph on the dusty Mexican highway. He will "open up" the Lincoln on closed-down sections of the road. A significant number of the cars will not make it to the finish line, most likely failing for mechanical reasons, he said.

O'Reilly aims to get his Lincoln across the finish line this time. It's souped up and fitted with roll bars for the Mexico race.

O'Reilly has been a car racing fan since he was a kid, and still collects and races cars. He has a 1949 Jaguar 120 and has driven his Ferrari in races. He drove the Lincoln competitively for the first time in April in the California Mille. That rally/race rolled down a big chunk of Highway 1, starting in San Francisco and going south often weaving on inland roads off Pacific Coast Highway.

In his day job, O'Reilly frequently argues auto product defect cases. In fact, he's often telling car companies how to build SUVs that don't roll over so easily. He has represented more than 20 families whose children have been killed or injured in SUVs using faulty seat belts.

"When you represent people who have been hurt or died in accidents, you realize how fragile life is," said O'Reilly, who has done formula racing at Infineon Raceway in Sonoma and other California tracks. "You know you have to get something out of life that makes you happy, so I try to have fun with these old cars."

He admits the races aren't as dangerous as racing around an oval with professional race car drivers, "because if you're not comfortable, you can just back off."

But he gets a thrill out of taking a corner. "Every corner has a perfect speed," he noted. "If you take a 100-mile corner at 102, and notch it just perfectly, you get a great feeling even if nobody saw it."

He tries to avoid disaster. He gets enough of that on the job, like that Alaska Airlines disaster in 2000 when Flight 261 went down off the coast of Santa Barbara, killing 88 people who were returning from vacation in Mexico.

O'Reilly represented plaintiffs in that case, helping get a settlement that reached into the hundreds of millions of dollars. A part of the tail wasn't replaced and caused pilots to lose control of the aircraft, O'Reilly said.

O'Reilly is also director of The Candy Store, a private motor car museum in Burlingame. He doesn't expect the Lincoln to be sitting there too soon. It has a lot more races in it, he added.