Fittipaldi a Rare Breed of Driver

Indy car racing is a low brutish form of the sport. It has this broad-shouldered, tough-guy image about it.

It’s a game for people who drink beer from the bottle, chew tobacco, talk out of the sides of their mouths, and have American flags and a girls’ names tattooed on their biceps.

The cars, like the men, tended, until the mid-60s, to be swaggering, muscular replicas of the men. They had their engines in front, were made out of iron and they muscled their way around a track, usually oval, with the belligerent ill temper of a hungry lion.

The drivers were human hubcaps, graduates of lube racks with carburetors for hearts and oil for blood and no fixed ambitions to live beyond 40.

European sporty car drivers, on the other hand, leaned more to guys in white scarfs and monocles, people who were in cars combating boredom, not making a living. If a guy was called Duke, it wasn’t his nickname.

They raced through trees in the Black Forest or villas on the Riviera. They drank champagne out of slippers. They considered oval racing about on a par with eating with your hat on, or drinking coffee with the spoon in the cup.

The twain almost never did meet. A.J. Foyt was not about to go over to race where he might have to kiss someone’s hand or have to eat sitting down even when he was in a hurry.

The Europeans, for their part, considered American circuits to be complicated muggings or 33-car suicide pacts. Russian roulette with all chambers loaded.

They tell the story of the time the great internationalist, Juan Manuel Fangio, went to Indianapolis and lasted only until he saw two Yank drivers go for the same corner in front of him at once. He decided then and there to leave town while he could still walk.

That’s why a lot of people don’t understand Emerson Fittipaldi at all.

Emerson Fittipaldi was the best of the sporty car drivers of the international circuit. He was so celebrated abroad you were surprised he didn’t go to dinner wearing a sword, and so good at the wheel you wondered why he wasn’t knighted. He won the world championship twice. He won so many races he was was signed to a $3 million contract.

When he walked away from that and retired to his orange plantation and Mercedes-Benz dealership in Sao Paolo, Brazil, the world of racing figured that if white-wine racing had gotten to be too much for him, he probably shouldn’t even watch the gorier macho American version.

Which is why the pit wall perchers almost dropped their lug wrenches and cans of Coors when this elegant Brazilian survivor of the carriage trade circuits showed up at Gasoline Alley behind the Indianapolis Motor Speedway two years ago. He announced that he was going to try his hand at racing where hardly anyone out of Burke’s Peerage showed up and the menu of the day was not salmon mousse but fried chicken and ketchup.

The first oval race Emerson Fittipaldi ever drove in was the Indianapolis 500. That’s like having your first 10-round fight with Jack Dempsey.

The freest prediction was that it would not only be his first Indy race, but his only. But Fittipaldi confounded the seers by throwing in his future with American racing.

That was nothing compared to the astonishment this year when, in his second Indy, he all but won it. Only an unlucky stop under a green light, half a lap away from a yellow light--when pit stops are, in effect, on the house--threw him out of the hunt at a time when he was a fast-closing second to the ultimate winner.

Fittipaldi, at 39, learning a new game, has fit right in with Foyt, the Unsers, Johnny Rutherford, Tom Sneva, Mario Andretti and Rick Mears, chauffeurs who have been seeking the short way around ovals since they were in high school.

“American racing is more honest. Formula One (European) racing is full of intrigue,” Fittipaldi said. “A race driver is more comfortable here, particularly now with the Grand Prix races through the streets. Driving is driving, but I find oval racing stimulating and more full of tricks than you would imagine. I am still learning, but I think I am hooked.”

In the Irish Hills of southern Michigan for Sunday’s Michigan 500 Indy car race, Fittipaldi was asked whether this bucolic racing through the cornfields was a comedown from the glamour of racing along the lidos of the Mediterranean before the crowned heads of Europe and whether it seemed strange driving in front of people named, not titled, Earl.

“The glamour of racing in Europe?” Fittipaldi scoffs. “When you race in Europe, you race with your luggage in one hand. You sleep in airports, not castles.”

Europeans have descended on Indy car racing before. Scotland’s Jim Clark and Jackie Stewart brought the rear-engine revolution to the Speedway two decades ago, and humbled the pride of American engineering, the front-engine roadster. But they also went back to the royal roads of motor sports.

Fittipaldi is practically one of the good old boys. He means to stay.

“America is a place where you can bring your family with you,” he said. “America is a place where you can honor yourself. You need big brass lungs to race in America. But I find it exciting, a test of yourself as well as your car.”

Already he’s forgotten how to heel-click. And, of course, you don’t have to curtsy to an audience in blue jeans. And if you run into a Duke, chances are he’s in the Hall of Fame, not the Almanach de Gotha.