Photo by Mark Booth |
So what's all this stuff about Voodoo? Well, it was 1988 and the racing was good. At that time, the best team in Formula One racing was McLaren, largely because it had the two best drivers - Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna. The world of F1 fans, especially in a CompuServe forum in which I was involved at the time, the Racing Forum, quickly divided into two camps - the Sennites and the Prost-itutes. As the racing season progressed, we were increasingly at each other's throats. I was a Prost-itute. The Prost-itutes' chief antagonist was Carl Galeana, a Detroit car dealer otherwise known as the "King of the Sennites." About midway in the 1988 season, I made a rather startling discovery. One of my hats (I'm a big fan of hats) appeared to have the power to influence the outcome of the races. Every time I wore this particular hat while watching a race, Prost won. If I forgot to wear the hat, Senna won. Ah-HAH! At last I and my man Prost had the "unfair advantage." The people on the forum, once told about this strange phenomenon, started calling it my "Voodoo hat." And as there are always too many Bobs in any single location, as there were on the forum, they started calling me "Voodoo Bob" to distinguish me from all the other Bobs. Since the best nickname my high school classmates were ever able to come up with for me was "Kruegs," which is obviously and completely dorky, I was, needless to say, thrilled to have accidentally found a decent nickname courtesy of the Racing Forum, and I've been using it ever since. When I started the shift knob company, I had to name it something, so since the knobs were based on elemental racing designs, racing is done in teams, and I already had this fine nickname, Team Voodoo seemed all too obvious, and the knobs themselves became Voodoo Knobs. When I got involved in motorsports photography again after a hiatus of some 15 years, Voodoo Images was born, and the rest is, as they say, history. Except for my wife, almost nobody calls me Bob anymore. These days I get about an equal share of VBobs, Voodoo Bobs, or Voodoos (totally omitting my real name, which is fine with me), but not too many just plain Bobs. Oh, I almost forgot. To finish the story of the hat, as the season progressed, I found that it seemed to lose its power and Senna started winning whether I wore it or not. Puzzled, I inspected the hat and found that one of the seams had broken. No wonder! I told the forum folk this and Carl said I should send the hat to him for archival storage in the west wing of the Sennite mansion (his house in Detroit), where it would be properly enshrined with other Senna-related artifacts. I did indeed send it to him, and as soon as he received it Prost started winning again. Obviously, the hat had not lost all of its power. After several Senna losses, Carl got frustrated and took the hat and some lighter fluid out to his wife's garden and torched it. He even took a picture of this exercise, which I kept in case his wife ever needed evidence for a "non compos mentis" suit to get control of his millions (just kidding, Carl). Regrettably, Senna started winning as soon as the hat was flamed and, since I was unable to find another totem in time to stop his winning ways, he went on to take the 1988 world driver's championship. I got another hat and Prost got even in 1989. Have you ever wondered how Michael Schumacher managed to win an astounding seven championships? I'm a big Schumacher fan too. Remember all those Deutsche Vermögensberatung hats they sold? I have them all.
Voodoo Bob Krueger |
