LONG BEACH GRAND PRIX : A Combination of Oval and Road Techniques Needed in Street Races

Indy cars, those sleek machines that run in the Indianapolis 500, are gradually slipping away from their oval track roots.

Round-de-round racing, as the Europeans love to call it, is peculiar to the United States. Unlike basketball, which started here and spread around the world, oval-track racing never made it in foreign lands.

In the last several years, in fact, just the opposite has occurred. Instead of visiting the nation’s oval tracks and holding an isolated race or two annually at a road course, Championship Auto Racing Teams (CART) has a schedule this year that is predominately road racing.

There are eight road races--Sunday’s Long Beach Grand Prix is one of them--and six oval-track events.

Bobby Rahal, one of the country’s best drivers at both, believes there should be three categories--oval, road racing and street racing.

“A street race, like Long Beach, is an art form all its own,” said Rahal, who raced sports cars for 10 years before joining the Indy car set in 1982 and becoming CART’s Rookie of the Year. “A street race has something of both road racing and oval racing. The shifting and turns are similar to a road course and having the walls reminds you of an oval.

“Obviously, you’ve got to be quick if you’re going to run competitively on a street circuit, but you have to be conservative, too. You have to be very precise because of the proximity of the walls.

“On most road courses, like Riverside, you have some run-off if you have trouble, but there is nothing but walls there on a street circuit.”

Johnny Rutherford, three-time Indy 500 winner who was in an NBC-TV booth at last year’s Long Beach race, will be back on the track this time in a March 85C.

“From what I saw last year, it’s going to be like running in a tunnel with the concrete barriers on either side of you,” Rutherford said. “You have to be precise, because one little slip and you’re into the cement and out of the race, but you can say the same time for Indianapolis.”

Sunday’s race, over an 11-turn, 1.67-mile course laid out along Shoreline Park and the downtown marina, will open the 14-race CART season.

National champion Mario Andretti won the pole and led every lap in a Lola T-800 in last year’s inaugural CART race.

Rahal, who was the fastest qualifier for the 1978 Formula Atlantic race at Long Beach, believes that one of the reasons for Andretti’s domination of last year’s Long Beach race was his experience between the walls. Andretti had driven seven Formula One races, winning in 1977, and one Formula 5000 race on the seaside Long Beach circuit.

“Preparing for a street race is much more difficult than at other races because there is no pre-race testing,” Rahal said. “You have to arrive with your car pretty much the way you hope it will work, and you don’t have much practice time to get it sorted out.

“That’s why Mario’s experience here in Formula One gave him the edge. Now the rest of us have an idea how to have our car prepared before practice starts Friday. It’s still going to be difficult because an hour and a half of practice isn’t enough time to get the car just the way you want it. But, if you know how you want your basic setup coming in, which is something we learned last year, you’re going to get a lot closer.”

Andretti agrees that he had an edge last year.

“That’s true, I feel we caught most of the other teams somewhat unprepared last year,” he said. “Most of them had never run a street race before. We had this experience, and benefited from it. Obviously, we won’t be able to enjoy the same kind of advantage this time around.”

If Rahal is to challenge Andretti, he will have to get off to a faster start than he did last season. Rahal failed to finish in four of the first eight races before becoming the hottest driver in the series over the final half, recording two wins, three seconds, a third, a fifth and a seventh in the final eight races.

Rahal spent Tuesday at the Recreation Park golf course in Long Beach, accepting congratulations for a recent hole-in-one on Jack Nicklaus’ Muirfield Village Country Club course at Columbus, Ohio. Rahal holed out on the 145-yard 16th hole with a pitching wedge.

“I had a heck of a tail wind,” he said in explaining his club selection. “I’d like to say I was going for the pin, but I was just trying to get on the green. It was divine intervention. Hopefully, it will be a good omen for the racing season.”

The only difficult thing about making the hole-in-one, Rahal said, is trying to convince his opponents that he is really a 16-handicap golfer. Tuesday at Recreation Park he played closer to his handicap, shooting an 89 in the PPG Grand Prix tournament.

Qualifying for positions in Sunday’s $648,000 race will start Friday at 2:15 p.m. with one of two 90-minute sessions. Final qualifying is set for 3:45 p.m. Saturday. The 150-mile race will start at 2 p.m. Sunday.

Drivers are almost unanimous in predicting a record. Andretti set the standard at 90.729 m.p.h. last year.

“There is so much improvement in the Marches this year than an ’84 model is virtually obsolete,” Rahal said. “I don’t know if the Lolas have improved as much, but I’m sure Mario has some tricks up his sleeve to make his go faster. And, as soon as he goes faster, so will the others.”