Here’s One Driver Who Doesn’t Have a Great Race Face

Ever wish people would look the way they’re supposed to look, do you?

I mean, Dempsey looked like Dempsey, right? And Babe Ruth looked like Babe Ruth. But, did he look like a ballplayer, honestly? Ask yourself.

I always thought Warren Harding looked like a President. He was a lousy one but you couldn’t get anybody that looked more like one from central casting.

I like judges to look like judges. I always thought Robert E. Lee was your idea of a general. John Wayne looked like a cowboy. Buffalo Bill looked like a scout.

I always figure they never caught Jack the Ripper because he didn’t look like Jack the Ripper but the Duke of Windsor. Murderers always look like choir boys.

Which brings me to Bobby Rahal. Bobby Rahal, for those of you who haven’t been paying attention, is probably the world’s best race driver at the moment. He’s the defending champion here at the 500. He captured the PPG Indy car world championship last year. Call him “Champ,” color him purple. When someone cuts in front of you or beats you to an off-ramp, you yell, “Who do you think you are--Rahal?”

Only, he doesn’t look like Bobby Rahal. I mean, the world champion driver should look like Clark Gable, right? Steve McQueen, maybe?

Bobby Rahal looks like a psychiatrist. You figured Sigmund Freud looked like this, not Barney Oldfield.

First of all, there are those glasses. They’re round and old-fashioned. And tinted. Bobby Rahal can’t see without them. You wonder if he can see too well with them. The correction, he says, is for something like 20/200 vision. That means you can tell night from day. But it doesn’t get you very far down an eye chart.

It’s hard to imagine a guy with glasses climbing into an Indy car. First of all, that cockpit climbs up to God-knows-what temperature in a 500-mile, three-hour run through the heat and humidity of Indiana in May. It has been estimated that a race driver climbs out of a race car after that race in about the mental and physical condition of a guy who has just gone through the battle of Tarawa. A guy died of heat prostration in this race one year (Carl Scarborough in 1953).

If you can imagine strapping on a bubble helmet over a ski mask and scarf, putting on an airtight, flameproof suit, gloves and high-cut shoes and rolling through 100- to 120-degree heat for three hours wearing glasses , you have some idea of what I think Hell must be like. I don’t even like wearing glasses to play golf. To play cards. They can fog up in a high wind in the family sedan. In the caldron that is Indy on race day, it’s surprising they don’t melt. And the guy wearing them.

Bobby Rahal doesn’t fit the profile of an Indy race driver anyway, no matter what psychological criteria you apply. Dad was a rich man. Bobby doesn’t have to drive a car for a living. Bobby could have made a living answering phones and having lunch.

He really wanted to become a fighter pilot. He’d rather be a Blue Angel than president. But the Air Force just laughed. Before they turn over control of an $18.7 million jet to you, they want you to be able to read the bottom line in an ophthalmology chart. Bobby has trouble with the big “E.”

The Indianapolis 500 has lots of guys who can see 20/20 and look like race drivers, all right. But none of them ever ran the fastest race lap in Indianapolis history, which Bobby did to take the checkered flag in the last lap in 1986. Not only are cars supposed to be spent by lap 200 and mile 500 but so are drivers. Rahal was running at qualifying speed, 209.15 m.p.h., when the rest of the field looked like a bunch of buckboards.

He has won more Indy car races, 14, over the past five years than anyone in the game. He has won nine times in the past two seasons. He has been on the pole 12 times and has led 1,621 laps, including the crucial last one at Indy last year.

None of this makes him look any more like James Garner or Gable or any other of the public’s idea of what a race driver should look like. With his owlish glasses and droopy mustache and heavy-lidded look, Rahal would play an atomic spy without makeup. Nobody ever mixed him up with A.J. Foyt. Or the Marquis de Portago, for all of that. He still faces the social situation where a mystified head waiter will come to the owner and say “There’s a guy here says he’s Bobby Rahal. Shall I call the cops?”

The guy who doesn’t look like Bobby Rahal is Bobby Rahal. It’s a perversity of nature. Some years ago, there were dugouts full of guys with bulging muscles and jaws full of tobacco who would scare you to look at them when they stepped into a batter’s box. Al Kaline came along looking as if he had a terminal case of mononucleosis. But the things he could do with a bat and a ball, even a curving one, made the rest of those guys look like head waiters on a picnic. When Bobby Rahal climbs into his car, he looks like the world’s greatest race driver. He may not look the part any more than Babe Ruth looked like the world’s greatest ballplayer. But the measure is the same. You don’t look at the man, you look at the numbers.