Auto Racing Made Simple . . . Sort Of

Sports used to be such a haven for simplicity in an otherwise complicated world.

Baseball’s world champions, love ‘em or lump ‘em, were the New York Yankees. The National Football League championship was decided with a one-game playoff between winners of two divisions, and a wild card was a way to get five aces in a poker game. There was, and always had been, one heavyweight champion.

I could go on and on.

Tennis did not seem to have a different circuit for every brand of cigarettes, nor more money to be made playing exhibitions than in winning Wimbledon. College football had not gone to its caste system with layers within layers. And National Basketball Assn. and National Hockey League championships were decided before taxes were due.

When it came to automobile racing, it began and ended with the Indianapolis 500. I never knew where those guys went for the remainder of the year, but I knew where to find them on Memorial Day . . . and that was when Memorial Day was a date rather than a gerrymandered three-day weekend.

This comes to mind because the Camel Grand Prix of Southern California is being run this weekend at the Del Mar Fairgrounds. Even the title seemed nebulous to me, sort of a motorized version of an Andy Williams Shearson Lehman Brothers Open.

Whatever happened to specific geographic identification? Where in heck are the Shearson Lehman Brothers located? On a cough drop box? Where? San Diego? Oh.

Now we have a Grand Prix in Del Mar, a most genteel haven by the sea, but for all the world knows, this event could be in Lompoc. Maybe Del Mar was excised from the name because the locals became so exercised by the potential for noise pollution that they managed to delay the event for a year.

But here it is. Now it’s happening.

What is it? Who are these cars?

The, hold your breath, Camel Grand Prix of Southern California is part of the International Motor Sports Assn. circuit. They call it IMSA for short. And that is pronounced rather than spelled. Hello, im-sa.

In trying to sort this out, I did some research and discovered that auto racing has become as alphabetized as so many other sports. The main events seem to be circuits called CART and NASCAR and IMSA, though I can’t be sure there is any particular order of importance. I don’t, for example, know which group sanctions destruction derbies or I-8 at rush hour, which may be one and the same.

I concluded you had to be there to understand. So I went.

I found myself at the west end of the race track, the real race track, in a line with massive trucks emblazoned with names like Jaguar, Toyota, Goodyear, Goodrich and AMF Racing. I was either approaching a greasy spoon with diesel fuel, bitter coffee and snarling waitresses or I had stumbled upon a mud-bog tractor pull.

The only things that seemed appropriate to their surroundings were the horses on the race track, the real race track. Except something was wrong there, too. They were all pulling sulkies, and Del Mar has no harness racing, at least to my knowledge.

Somehow, I was developing this otherworldly feeling. I was driving beside concrete barriers and dodging around grandstands faced away from the race track, the real race track. I parked in what normally would be the general admission area, an area filled with bronzed (or sunburned) bodies, coolers and folding chairs. I had to move my car twice to get it out of the way of the rumbling trucks.

Now it was time to meet the racing cars.

They were sports cars, I was told. One car on the list was a Buick March. A Buick? I bought a Buick a few months ago, and I didn’t remember seeing any sports cars on the lot. Mine has four doors and, of utmost importance, a tape deck. I expected to see one just like it in the pits, only with a number on the door and a bunch of those commercial endorsements such as John McEnroe wears.

I don’t think I’ve seen many, if any, of what I saw in the pits on any of the highways I drive. A couple of Grand Prix officials, Glenn Howell from the Del Mar race and Dick Van Der Feen from im-sa, gave me a tour in a golf cart. I’ve seen more golf carts on the freeway than any of the cars we visited.

Now we’re back into the alphabet.

There will be racing in four divisions: GTP, GTP Light, GTO and GTU. In each case, the GT stands for Grand Touring. You could take a grand (and rapid) tour of just about any place in these machines. They all looked as if they were going 100 miles per hour standing still.

The big ones, the heavyweights, are the GTP, or Grand Touring Prototype cars. Van Der Feen pointed out a Corvette. It was a good thing he told me it was a Corvette.

“It doesn’t look like any Corvette you’ve ever seen,” he said. “The tail lights are probably the only stock items on the car.”

I nodded my head, as if in understanding. I was wondering how anyone got close enough to see the tail lights. I was told the car probably cost about $500,000, and that was without a tape deck. Such a car can apparently be bought for considerably less, but that’s what it takes to get one with an engine.

I was curious about the Jaguars. I owned one a few years ago, but it eventually settled in place on four flat tires because I could never keep it running for more than a few days at a time. I considered it to be an expensive conversation piece.

Watchful as I was, I never saw a Jaguar in the pits. I saw a car labeled Jaguar, but I knew better. None of its tires were flat and the steering was on the left side, which was the wrong side, according to my recollection.

By now, my Grand Tour was nearing its end. I decided I would have to accept that IMSA is different from CART and NASCAR and WWF and AFC wild card. I had to accept that the Porsche in the pits and the Porsche down the street are somehow related, without really understanding what their genes could possibly have in common.

And I had to go away disappointed that I never saw my Buick’s brother. On the way back to the office, I set the speedometer on kilometers . . . just so my Buick might feel like that other Buick, wherever it was, might have felt. After all, I was driving at a steady 100.