The Riverside Jinx Snags Holbert Again
Another race at Riverside International Raceway, another bitter disappointment for Al Holbert.
During the short walk from his pit at the entrance to pit road to the trailer that will carry his turbo-charged Porsche 962 to the next race, Holbert was in no mood for being philosophical about jinxes or other such nonsense.
It is altogether possible that, with the track on the verge of extinction, Holbert will never win an International Motor Sports Assn. race at Riverside. But at least he broke his streak of annual second-place finishes.
He and Al Unser Jr. brought the Porsche in in 11th place in the Times/Nissan Grand Prix of Endurance Sunday afternoon They finished no better because something broke in the engine. Simple as that.
His qualifying speed of 126.680 m.p.h., fast enough to win the pole position, had shown that the car was good enough to win. And Holbert’s car held the lead for the first 66 laps of the 115-lap race.
Actually, it was on lap 65 that disaster struck and Unser brought the car coasting into the pit, but the Holbert team was leading by more than a lap at that point so it did not lose the lead until the Pete Halsmer/John Morton Porsche made another lap around the track.
Meanwhile, Unser was out of the car and stomping around the pit. He knew it was no little bug that had ended his ride.
It was 21 minutes--and 12 laps--later when Holbert took the car back out onto the track with a new turbocharger. They had dropped to 27th place.
Holbert said: “The engine broke. A cylinder head broke and we ended up with a piece of the engine up in the turbocharger, so we had to change the turbocharger.
“We might have used the wrong turbocharger then, I don’t know. I only had five cylinders when I went out, then I had four, then I had three when I brought it in just now.
“Those things happen. Something just broke. It wasn’t anything we had had trouble with before.”
The Porsche was running very well when the yellow flag came out on lap 56 because of a crash involving three cars that brought a couple of ambulances on the track and left a lot of debris. The pace car picked up No. 14, with Unser driving, and led the parade around the track for five laps--almost 20 minutes.
Several times Unser actually passed the pace car, roaring up alongside it and even edging past it as he tried to keep his engine healthy at those unhealthy speeds.
“He was trying to get the pace car to speed up,” Holbert said. “But I don’t think that was what caused our problems. We had had some trouble with spark plugs, and he was trying to save the spark plugs.”
Members of the crew monitoring the IMSA radio signals reported that the pace car was, finally, told to pick up the pace because No. 14 was having so much trouble.
“I just don’t think the slow speeds caused our trouble,” Holbert said. “We just broke.”
A fan called out to him, “That’s racing!” He responded with a very weak smile.
Asked how he was handling the disappointment, he said with a shrug, “It’s over.” And he climbed into the trailer.
Back at his pit, the good news was that he had moved up from 27th place to 11th place to collect enough points to keep the lead in the Camel GT Prototype standings.
Somehow, that wasn’t much consolation to the man in the trailer. He didn’t even mention it in his official comments. For the record, he said: “I’m very disappointed, and I hope this isn’t the last Riverside (race). I hope to win one at Riverside before my career is over.”
