A New Driving Force : Bobby Rahal Switches to Judd Engine in Bid for Third Straight Indy Car Title

In 1986, Bobby Rahal earned the Indy car driving championship by winning six races in a March chassis powered by a Cosworth engine.

Before the 1987 season started, Rahal and his TrueSports team surprised the Indy car fraternity by switching from March to a virtually untried Lola chassis. Rahal then won his second straight driving championship, in the process becoming the first Indy car driver to win more than $1 million a season for two consecutive years.

So what was the next move for Rahal and team manager Steve Horne?

Dropping the Cosworth engine they used for six seasons--winning 17 races--in favor of a Judd engine that has never won an Indy car race.

“The move last year, from March to Lola, was riskier than this year’s,” Rahal said. “We don’t look on it as a gamble at all. Geoff Brabham had some very good races with this engine last year. All things considered, I feel very strongly that we made a good move.”

When the Rick Galles team developed the Judd engine that was used in Brabham’s car, it was known as a Honda. Last year, however, Honda decided to discontinue its financial interest in the engine and turned it over to the man who developed it, John Judd of England.

“Judd is strictly a racing organization, so we figure to get more input from them than from Cosworth, where racing is a sidelight,” Rahal said.

If Rahal, 35, can win his third straight championship, he will become the first driver since Ted Horn to accomplish the feat. Horn won in 1946, 1947 and 1948.

“Our objective is to take one race at a time and devote all our energies to the next one,” Rahal said. “That’s the way we’re looking at Long Beach this week. When we get down toward the end of the season, we’ll tote up the points and see where we stand. If we win enough races, the championship will take care of itself.”

That would be quite an accomplishment. A. J. Foyt, Mario Andretti, Joe Leonard, Tom Sneva and Rick Mears have all won two in a row since Horn’s streak, but nobody has been able to conquer that third hurdle.

“I’m not into the numbers game, but there’s no denying what it means to a driver to win the championship,” Rahal said. “As a driver, it means more to win a championship than anything else. It means that day in and day out, your team did its job. It means your team had all the ingredients for the entire year, not just for one race.”

Rahal realizes, though, that the public is more attuned to individual wins, such as the Indianapolis 500, a race he won in 1986.

“Indy dwarfs everything else on a popular scale,” Rahal said. “Everywhere I go, I’m introduced as the Indianapolis 500 champion. It’s like winning the Masters or the Kentucky Derby or getting the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.

“When you win Indy, there’s almost an unreal aura to it. It’s like you don’t know how to feel. I think you feel relieved, first of all. Then obviously happy. But relief is probably the first emotion because you’ve cleared the hurdle, and in a sense, almost achieved immortality.

“I feel it took a lot of pressure off me. For many years I was considered one of the better drivers in the country, but I never thought I got the recognition I deserved. It’s like being off-Broadway and on Broadway. There are probably many good actors off-Broadway, but until you get to Broadway, you’re not recognized.”

Race drivers face risks whenever they pull on their helmets and climb into their tiny cockpits, but Rahal says the worst time is when a fellow driver is hurt.

“A particularly bad accident, like Roberto Guerrero’s (head injury last September), brings out the risk factor a little more because, over time, you tend to push that risk factor out of your mind,” he said. “So when something like that happens, you definitely go up and tell your wife you love her, and tell your kids that you love them, because you want to make sure they know how you feel.

“If anything, what it brings home to you is that you bloody well better enjoy what you’ve got going now because you sure as hell don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow.”

Rahal and his wife, Debi, have two children, a daughter, Michaela, 2, and a son, Jarrad, 5 months, both adopted.

“I could never describe the feeling we had the day we brought Michaela home for the first time,” Rahal said. “We’d faced every sort of obstacle to having children, first when Debi miscarried (she has endometriosis, which affects the organs in the pelvic cavity) and then when we had one natural mother after another change her mind just when we thought we had a baby.

“Winning Indy, a million bucks, driver of the year--nothing matched that feeling of having our own child. It sort of completes your life.”

Rahal, though grateful for the strength he derives from his family, remains mystified as to why anyone would take on the anxieties that go with being married to a race driver.

“There’s no way I’d be married to a guy going past me at 200 miles an hour,” he said. “Obviously, you’ve got to be a strong person, and obviously my wife is.

“This is a very selfish sport. When you’re racing, you have to have that tunnel vision, and it’s always hard on the people around you. Here you are, being given all this attention, and being written up all the time, and the wife is home with the kids asking herself, ‘Now wait a minute. Who am I?’ ”

The Rahals live alongside a fairway on Jack Nicklaus’ Muirfield Village golf course in Dublin, Ohio, and away from the race track, Rahal’s sporting passion is golf, a game he took up only four years ago.

“I love golf,” he said. “There’s just no other way to put it. There’s nothing else I find so relaxing as getting out there and chasing that little white ball.”

Rahal, the son of an English mother and a Lebanese father, graduated from Denison University in Granville, Ohio, with a degree in history. It is often said of him that with his wire-rimmed glasses and dark mustache, he looks more like a history professor than a race driver.

“What’s a race driver supposed to look like?” he asks. “I don’t know, maybe like James Garner or Steve McQueen, I guess.”

Whatever the answer, no driver has been more successful in the 1980s in an Indy car than Bobby Rahal. Maybe the truth is that what a race driver looks like is Bobby Rahal.