Off-Road World Championships at Riverside : Mears Wants His 20th Win in Worst Way

The Mears Gang from Bakersfield looks on Riverside International Raceway in much the same way the Unsers of Albuquerque look on Pikes Peak: It’s their own private domain.

Roger Mears has won 19 SCORE world championship off-road races here, taking at least one race a year for 10 years from 1974 to 1983. His 19 wins came in 41 starts, including one in a stadium buggy Saturday.

Rick Mears has won four off-road races, starting with the inaugural in 1973, and has also won two Indy car races on the road course.

All of which makes it surprising that Roger Mears, 39, the elder of the racing Bakersfield brothers, looks upon today’s race for desert racing mini-pickup trucks as the most important of his Riverside career.

“In all of those wins, I was just a hired driver,” Mears said Saturday. “I had my gloves and my helmet, and I drove. This time the truck I’m driving is my own. I helped design it, I’m the owner, the team manager and the driver. It’s my baby.

“I never needed a win like I need this one. I’ve had a dry spell here at Riverside and it had better end Sunday.”

Mears, whose last win here was in 1983, will drive his desert racing Nissan V-6 truck in today’s 10-lap main event over Riverside’s treacherous 1.5-mile, 14-turn course carved out of the dirt, rocks and mud adjacent to the famous road racing course.

“I’d like to have a little more time testing it, but we have to start sometime,” Mears said. This will be the new truck’s first race after extensive testing at Glen Helen Park in San Bernardino County and on an ATV track in Bakersfield.

“We need a win soooo bad,” he reiterated. “We need one for me, my morale, the sponsors, and especially the crew. We came so close and thought we’d won in our last race, and then found out the next morning that we’d lost it.”

That occured last month in the Fireworks 250 at Barstow.

“We had planned to debut it there, but the transmission broke in practice, so I drove my old desert truck.”

Mears had an eight-minute lead after three of the four 80-mile laps, but 10 minutes into the last lap the truck’s rear end began to give out and he was forced to slow down. This allowed Manny Esquerra, in a Ford, to catch him in the last few miles.

“Manny was right on my tail with no more than a mile to go when we came up behind another car and were blinded by a silt pocket,” Mears said. “Before I knew what happened, I crashed into a ditch and got upside down. I thought it was all over, but when the dust settled, I looked over and not 50 feet away was Manny’s truck, upside down.

“We looked like a couple of desert turtles on their backs.”

The first one to right his truck and finish the final half-mile or so would be the winner.

“It was my fault I didn’t know the rules, or all of them,” Mears said. “I knew just enough to get me in trouble. I knew that you can be towed 1% of the length of the course without being disqualified, so I pushed the truck over and had a four-wheel-drive pull us out of the ditch and up over a hill where I could restart.

“What I didn’t know was that you can’t have any kind of a tow within one mile of the finish line. So when I crossed the finish line, I thought we’d won and we really celebrated.”

Esquerra, who turned down a tow in order to repair his battered Ford where it was, managed to stagger across the line an hour after Mears.

“The next morning we learned that the officials took a lap away from us and Manny was the winner. It was really tough on the crew because they’d worked so hard to get the truck ready.

“That’s why Sunday’s race here means so extra much to me. We need to prove that Roger Mears Racing can do it.”

The new desert truck was designed by Trevor Harris, longtime sports car and Indy car designer, with help from Mears.

“It was the first time Trevor had done a truck from the ground up. We started with a Nissan frame and engine. Everything else was fabricated, piece by piece.

“Harris amazed me. He would draw it out on paper and give us blueprints to scale. I would take them to the fabricator, and he would build a piece to Trevor’s design. It was like building a model airplane.”

Mears estimated that because of the man hours involved in creating all the pieces, his truck will cost $135,000 before it turns a wheel in today’s race.

“It’s been a whole new game for me,” he said. “I had always loved to drive, to race, but now I enjoy the challenge of the technical end, putting all the combinations together.”

Mears will also drive another Nissan truck, the $180,000 Electramotive-built V-6 injected mini-pickup, in the Mini-Metal Challenge, but in it he will be a hired factory driver.

“This will be its first race, too,” Mears said. “We had hoped to debut it at Mickey Thompson’s race in the Coliseum, but I felt we ought to do more testing before showing it off.”

There was no racing or practice for the trucks on Saturday, but Mears gave both of his a workout Friday. In fact, he rolled them both, although neither he nor the trucks were hurt.

Mears’ elusive 20th win here escaped him again Saturday when he drove a Chenowth in the stadium car unlimited class. Typically, Mears broke in front, careening down the hill where the asphalt turns to dirt at the start, but before the first lap was over he slid out after a huge jump and dropped out of contention.

Defending champion Greg George of Ontario drove a five-year-old Funco to win in the stadium class race. George slipped past Bob Gordon on the roughest section of the course during the seventh lap of the 10-lap main event for his second straight win.

“The start was no contest with Roger Mears having a V-8 engine and the rest of us having VWs,” George said, “but when we got to the rough stuff, his car didn’t handle too good.”

Mears dropped out on the sixth lap.

Gordon, of Orange, finished second but was moved back five positions for jumping the start.