Motor Racing : Ivan Stewart Honored by His Peers

Ivan Stewart, who two years ago quit his construction job of 18 years to become a full-time off-road race driver, received the recognition of his peers when he was voted SCORE International’s person of the year. Stewart, 39, won only one desert race last year, at Johnson Valley, Calif., but on closed courses he and his Toyota truck were the best. The man the racers call the Ironman, because of his penchant for driving solo the length of Baja--and often winning--won SCORE’s world championship race in the mud at Riverside International Raceway. He also won Mickey Thompson’s Gran Prix series of five races at the Pomona Fairgrounds, Indiana and Michigan. Stewart and his Toyota teammate, Steve Millen, will be back for more short-course action at Pomona when Thompson opens the 1985 season Jan. 19 on a newly designed course inside the Fairgrounds horse racing oval. He and Millen finished one-two last year and won the Manufacturers Cup for Toyota. “Steve will have a new truck, quite a different one, this year, but I’ll be in the same one I drove last year,” said Stewart, who also plans to campaign the entire SCORE-High Desert series in quest of the overall championship. “I have two goals this year, to win another short-course championship for Toyota, and to be the overall points leader in the new desert series.” Rod Hall, driving a Dodge 4-wheel-drive pickup truck, won the overall championship in both SCORE and the High Desert Racing Assn. seasons. This year, the rival organizations will have a joint schedule and a single champion. “It’s a heck of a step forward for off-road racing,” said Stewart, a hobby racer for 12 years before quitting his job to race professionally. “It will eliminate a lot of confusion and argument about who really is the champion, now that SCORE and High Desert are working together. It also makes it easier to plan our schedule without worrying about date conflicts. “Between short course and desert races, we keep plenty busy, though. I’m going prerunning this weekend for the Parker desert race.” The Parker 250 is the opening event in the SCORE-High Desert season. Roger Mears, who won the final two Pomona races last year in a Nissan pickup, will be back Jan. 19, hoping to improve on his third-place overall finish. A new challenge will come from single-seater champion Glenn Harris in a Mazda pickup with a rotary engine. Harris campaigned a Mazda briefly last year, but the truck has been completely overhauled for this season. John Clark Gable, son of the late actor Clark Gable, was named SCORE Rookie of the Year. He drove a Ford pickup in his first full season of off-road racing. Stewart, who lives in Lakeside, Calif., finds it more difficult to drive on short courses than it is to run 500 miles or more in the desert. “If you want to win, at least if I want to win, I have to be very rough on my truck in a short course race,” he said. “I really have to jerk it around, actually abuse it. “I’ve been racing cars for so long that I don’t feel good doing it. I’ve always been a smooth, methodical driver who cared for my equipment. That’s why I’ve finished so many long-distance races. It goes against my grain to tear up a car, but I don’t think there’s any way around it if you want to win a short race.” Indianapolis veteran Tom Sneva, who drove one of Stewart’s trucks in an indoor race at Indianapolis, said that driving in a short-course off-road race was like “adult bumper cars.” Newsworthy Ross Olney, host of a radio talk-show in Ventura, racing book author and photographer, is the new president of the American Auto Racing Writers & Broadcasters Assn. He succeeds Dave Overpeck of the Indianapolis Star. . . . The Amerathon, a 39,000-mile rally circumnavigating both North and South America, has been rescheduled to start June 1 from Anaheim. It was originally scheduled for last summer but was postponed.