Man and Machine in a Mesh

There was an eerie sameness to the accidents. All month long, the world’s best drivers in the world’s best cars went slamming into a wall on a turn like a guy who has just stepped on a roller skate at the top of a stair or hits a sheet of ice he didn’t know was there.

There was this sickening thud and burst of flame--a sight and sound Indy is well used to--and the car would go careening down the track upside-down, like a looping plane, or, go scraping along the wall with the wheels and tires and front end coming off and flying through the air looking for something to decapitate. Meanwhile, ankles were being snapped, brains concussed, necks twisted, feet broken.

Business, as usual? Indy at it again? Ho-hum. Bring the crash wagon. Turn on the yellow. Get the brooms. Call the doctor. Man the stretcher. Light a candle. Say a prayer. Rev up the ambulances.

Twenty-three guys hit the wall in the month of May, broke legs, sprained necks or just plain spun themselves dizzy. Even for Indy, that’s a whole lot of debris--human and metallic. Even for the Battle of Jutland, in fact. That would be a good month for the U-boats.

What was happening? Couldn’t the world’s best chauffeurs keep a car between the white lines? Had the race finally outrun the human capacity to keep up?

Usually, the culprit is the one wearing the bubble helmet, flameproof suit and scarf over his nose and mouth. But this time it might be one that couldn’t talk.

Come with me to two years ago, on a pastureland in southern Michigan. The Michigan 500 is going to be contested on a race track built and owned there by Roger Penske.

It begins on a low note. A.J. Foyt, no less, crashes in practice. Now, A. J. Foyt doesn’t crash in practice. Rookies crash in practice. Not four-time Indy winners.

The track is uneasy. It gets more so when Bobby Rahal loses control on a turn and a tire blows. Rahal is not a reckless kid, either. The track looks for a reason.

It’s not hard to find one: The 500-mile race is being run on an oval track for the first time on radial tires.

Now, radial tires are state-of-the-art for highway driving. The family clunker gets along just fine on them. But Indy-type cars are not station wagons. They are finely tuned, super-sensitive, skittish automotive thoroughbreds. They can’t run in the rain, go right, back up, they can’t even go slow. You change one little pin-setting in their high-strung makeup, and the next thing you know you’re hanging on for dear life to a runaway tiger.

If they were human, they’d be movie stars, opera singers. They’re as temperamental as Bette Davis.

New tires throw them into a snit. So, at the Michigan 500, they did the sensible thing: They canceled the race. They put it off until such time as they could call in safer bias-belted tires, the ones the cars were used to.

But, you don’t cancel Indy. You don’t cancel Christmas. Indy is announced, Indy will be run. You got network time, you got hotel reservations, you got people coming from all over the world. No lousy little tire is going to stop this show. You delay Indy for rain, not rubber.

Kevin Cogan is a guy Indy owes a lot to. He came here first in 1981, an eager, cocky young refugee from a surfboard in the beach cities of California, and he startled the best racers in the world by driving to a fourth-place finish. He was, by anybody’s definition, rookie of the year, but the scribes unaccountably settled on the rich kid, Josele Garza, who finished not only 19 places behind Cogan but 59 laps.

The next year, Kevin pulled the major no-no of Indy racing--he turned right. Right into A.J. Foyt, as it turned out. Then, they hit Mario Andretti.

It happened at the start line. Now, putting Mario Andretti and A.J. Foyt out of the race at Indy at the start is like stoning the Vatican. At Easter. Kevin had qualified his car second, but this was forgotten. He came into focus as the guy in the black hat, the kid who had the lead head to go with the lead foot.

The next year, Cogan finished a charging fifth after taking off so far back in the pack (22nd) that he looked like a guy chasing a chicken till the last 10 miles.

But, it was last year Indy saved its best shot for the boy from the beaches. Starting sixth, Cogan had the race won with only six laps to go. He had just shot past Rahal and Rick Mears, and it was all downhill from there.

Except that, back in the caboose of the race, the Dutch driver, Arie Luyendyk, hit the wall. At Indy, this means you lose your lead.

As the field closed up, there was a call for Driver Cogan. TV was calling. They had a few questions. Maybe they thought it was “Let’s Make a Deal.” “I’m kind of busy,” Cogan apologized.

Not as busy as he was going to be. Usually at Indy, they take their time cleaning up debris.

This time, they hurried. They didn’t want the 500 to end under a yellow light. “They cleaned up a six-lap wreck in three laps,” the winner, Rahal, was later to recall.

When they did, he was ready. With two laps to go, he drove the fastest race lap in Indy history.

Cogan looked as if he had been tied to a post. He had a good view of Rahal slingshotting around him to take his checkered flag.

If ever the Speedway owed anybody, it would have to be Kevin Cogan. He came into Turn One in his Marlboro/Patrick racing team March-Chevy on the third day of practice this year. “The car wouldn’t turn,” he was to recall. It slid 100 feet to the right, smacked the wall, slid along it for 60 feet, then spun across the south turn and hit the wall again in Turn Two.

Kevin Cogan will be starting this year’s Indy in 25th place in a car that is two rows faster. Another victim of radial rubber? “It’s hard to know,” Kevin admits. “The line is so fine now, the speeds so high and the settings so precarious that everything has to be just exactly right, or the car won’t go where you want it to. You have to factor in tires, spring rate, temperature of the track, temperature of the air, humidity, wind direction, velocity.”

In other words, you have to be a computer. Which also have another advantage: They don’t bleed.