Patrick George

When James W. Edge bought a white racing helmet at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, it wasn't for racing. His goal was to get it signed by every Indy Car driver he could find. Life made him abandon his project for 16 years, but he finally finished it on Friday thanks to the one big name he had been missing: Legendary Scottish driver Sir Jackie Stewart.

Edge bought the plain white Simpson racing helmet at Indy in 1989. It's identical to the one drivers were wearing at the time, and over the years he filled it with the signatures of some of the world's most famous drivers from Indy, primarily, as well as Formula One.

On his yearly pilgrimages to the Indy 500, he got signatures from Nigel Mansell, TonyStewart, who then as now wasn't the most congenial dude on the planet, who quickly scribbled something Edge can no longer find.

One of his more interesting gets was the signature of Pat Flaherty, who won the Indy 500 in 1956 and then faded into semi-obscurity after a car accident ended his career.

"This was back before the Internet, so I had to write letters to find him," Edge said. He found out that Flaherty, pictured above in 1956, was racing pigeons (the bird, not some kind of car you've never heard of) in Chicago, and went to see him.

"He was super nice," Edge said of Flaherty. "He said he never went back (to racing) because he thought no one cared about him. I said, 'If you went back, people