John Cooper Fitch was born in Indianapolis on Aug. 4, 1917. His parents divorced when he was 6, and his mother married George Spindler, president of the Stutz Motor Car Company. An amateur racecar driver, Mr. Spindler took young John for spins on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

He attended military school and studied civil engineering at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania for a year. Answering the call of the open road, he bought an Indian motorcycle and rode it to New Orleans, where he traded it for a Fiat 500 automobile and drove it to New York, stopping only for gas.

In 1939, he used a small inheritance to hop a freighter for Europe and found his way to London, where he fell in love with a ballet dancer and lived with Communist intellectuals in grain barges on the Thames.

Enlisting in the Army Air Forces in 1941, he went on to fly a P-51 Mustang and shot down a German Messerschmitt Me 262, the first operational jet fighter, as it was taking off. He was later shot down himself and spent three months in P.O.W. camps.

After the war, as a member of Palm Beach society, he started racing yachts. He liked to tell the story of how he met the Duke of Windsor at one soiree: they were relieving themselves on a bush at the time. The duke became a friend.

Mr. Fitch had fallen in love with sports cars when he saw a race in England, and after briefly selling them at a Mercedes-Benz dealership he opened in White Plains, he began racing an MG roadster on Long Island. In 1951 he won the Argentina race in an Allard sports car powered by a Cadillac V-8 engine and went on to win 12 of 13 races in the United States. The Sports Car Club of America anointed him its first national champion.