Tortoise-Like Pace Suits Winner Fine; the Hare Didn’t Stand a Chance

INDIANAPOLIS —  The wall, which should have been the favorite going in, won the 72nd Indianapolis 500 Sunday.

The last time this much scrap metal was collected in one place this quickly was when the Titanic sank. They broke the one-day record for crashes set one New Year’s Eve on the Santa Monica Freeway.

They barely got the cars out of the garage before they began to pile up. Three of them couldn’t even turn the first corner.

The race was so slow you kept looking around for Ray Harroun’s Wasp. One writer suggested they retitle it America’s Cup.

Color it yellow. There was so much debris on the track, the caution light was on for over one-third of the race. Sometimes, the debris was A.J. Foyt. For 168 of the 500 miles, the field wasn’t racing, it was lined up behind the pace-car driver, America’s last hero, Chuck Yeager.

It wasn’t a race, it was a cortege. A hearse could have paced it.

Yeager ran so many laps he was running fifth by the time the field finally got straightened out. If the field is going to go this slow, they may permit pedestrians in this thing next year.

It was a great race if you’re crazy about tow trucks. They had more of them on the track than the Baja 1000.

Still, the only fatality was a rabbit. That should give you an idea how tame this thing was. Rabbits were playing in the straights. Al Unser Sr. hit this one. He was just thankful it wasn’t a cow. Or a wall.

A.J. Foyt hit the wall. Johnny Rutherford hit the wall. Danny Sullivan hit the wall. When Tom Sneva did, you had five ex-winners here involved in crashes.

There were nine accidents, not counting the rabbit.

It was a little like the course winning an Open. Except that drivers are always overmatched at Indy. Racing a car here is like fighting a leopard in a tree or a shark in a swimming pool.

You had a better chance driving on snow.

It’s tempting to say Rick Mears didn’t win the race, he survived it. Except that Rick Mears always wins these things. To him, it’s easy--like getting in a card game with a guy who can’t add.

Indianapolis is a hall of horrors to most guys in this business. To Rick, it’s just a guy in a gorilla suit. Eleven times, he’s climbed in a car here. Three times, he’s won. Once he got beat by .16 of a second. Another time, he lost by 1.8 seconds.

He is like a hitter who “owns” a pitcher. Indy blows everybody else away, but Rick Mears steps up and knocks it off the wall.

Only a handful of people have won three Indys. Only a handful have won one. It took Johnny Rutherford 11 tries to win his first of three. It took Al Unser and Foyt four and five tries to win their first of four.

Mears won on his second turn around this track. He raced in the first Indy car he ever saw. Rick has won three, been second twice and third twice and never been worse than fifth when the car keeps running. He is like a guy coming into the game with his own deck.

He is a thinking man’s driver. As a young boy, his father Bill Mears recalls, he preferred to let his older brother, Roger, test a racing machine. Rick thus learned what not to do. He was like a guy who lets someone else find out what the noise in the cellar was before he went down.

He drove Indy that way on Sunday. Indy cars are as temperamental as operatic sopranos, and Mears’ car started out as hard to handle as Carmen.

Mears lived with it. He took the car back, lost an entire lap, and let her have her temper tantrum. The car was “loose,” he said.

English translation: It wants to hit a wall, kick a cat, catch fire--anything but do what the guy with the wheel wants it to do. Rick humored the shrew, then tamed her. All month long, she had showed her better side, let him qualify with a 220 lap and a 219.198 average.

When the green flag dropped, she turned into Bette Davis in “Jezebel.” Mears got on the radio to the pit and diagnosed the problem as trouble in the front wing. When it was corrected, the race was over. Mears was turning 206 m.p.h. laps, his pit crew recorded, while the rest of the field was in the high 190s.

“We were gaining seconds a lap,” owner Roger Penske reported. The only trouble Rick Mears had thereafter was that Al Unser’s rabbit hit his windshield.

Mears won because Roger Penske picks his drivers as carefully as he picks his cars. “I told this young driver to come see me at the farmhouse at the Michigan speedway,” Penske said. “When he showed up at 6 o’clock in the morning, I knew I had myself a driver.”

Only 13 drivers in history have won Indy from the pole position. Mears has now done it twice. They don’t make the race car he can’t run in front with. He may win 10 of these things before he’s through. With a little help from the wall.