80 AND CRUISING : Alex Morales Gets Around Almost as Fast as the Engines He Builds for His Race Cars

Alex Morales left his home in Anaheim about 4 p.m. last Saturday and drove with his son, Andy, to Ascot Park, where the two of them prepared their Tamale Wagon sprint car for Mike Sweeney to drive in the California Racing Assn. series.

Sweeney won the main event, worth around $2,000, and Morales loaded up the car and headed home at midnight. He arose at 4 a.m. to catch a 6 o’clock flight from Ontario to Phoenix, where he drove straight from the airport to Phoenix International Speedway, about 20 miles west of the city.

There, Morales watched another of his drivers, Howdy Holmes, in the Checker 200, opening race of the Indy car season. Holmes, making a comeback after a two-year absence from racing, finished 10th in a Cosworth-powered March.

After the race, Morales conferred with Johnny Capels, his Indy car team manager, then flew home to Anaheim for a night’s sleep before going to work as usual Monday morning at Alex Foods, Inc.

So what’s the big deal. A lot of racing people keep schedules like that.

Alex Morales is 80 years old.

He also is president and chairman of the board of Alex Foods, Inc., manufacturer of more than 200 kinds of food products, primarily Mexican, throughout the United States and Canada.

And he is the engine builder on the Tamale Wagon, one of the most popular racing machines in Southern California for more than three decades.

“Alex used to build all the engines himself but now he gets some help from Andy,” Sweeney said. “On race nights, though, Alex is down on his knees in the dirt, checking the oil pressure and the temperatures and whatever else he thinks ought to be checked. He stays right on top of everything.”

The race shop is in Anaheim, where Morales was born in February, 1908. It’s part of the Alex Foods complex, where his father began making tamales in 1896 that he sold from a pushcart--the original tamale wagon.

This weekend will be an easy one for the racing octogenarian.

He will be at Long Beach today and Saturday afternoon to watch Holmes qualify for the Toyota Grand Prix, then will head for Ascot to handle the wrenches on Sweeney’s car for the 30-lap Salute to the Long Beach Grand Prix main event, then will return to Long Beach for Sunday’s Indy car race.

“I won’t miss an Indy car race this year, and I never miss a sprint car race,” Morales said. “I can’t even remember the last time I missed a CRA race. I’ll even be with them when the CRA takes its swing through Kansas and Oklahoma in the spring.”

Morales’ sprint cars have won 124 races and 6 championships, but none since 1978, when Rick Goudy was his driver. The other Tamale Wagon champions were Chuck Hulse in 1959, Bob Hogle in 1963, Hogle and Bill Vukovich Jr. in 1968, and Bobby Olivero in 1975.

In a seemingly never-ending race for most CRA wins by an owner, Morales trails Bruce Bromme, 124 to 130. Bromme is 70.

“I raced against Bromme’s father, Louis,” Morales says, as if to dismiss his younger rival.

Whereas Morales has won his 124 races with a variety of drivers, 103 of Bromme’s 130 were won by three-time CRA champion Dean Thompson over a 14-year stretch. Bromme has won 5 owner championships.

Sweeney, runner-up in the series three years in a row, is in his first season with Morales although it is the 13th in CRA for the 30-year-old motion picture studio electrician from Carson. Eddie Wirth, the 1985 champion, drove for Morales last year.

“Eddie was too much of a charger,” Morales said of the change. “He had 14 accidents and went through four cars last year. This year I wanted to get someone who could keep the car off its top.”

For Sweeney, a third-generation driver, it was an opportunity a long time coming.

“I’ll bet I’d called Alex 15 times during my career, asking for a ride, but he always turned me down,” Sweeney said. “Then this year I called, and he said to come on over.”

Sweeney, who finished second to Wirth in 1985 and to Brad Noffsinger in 1986 and 1987, responded with two wins in the first six races and the series lead over preseason favorite Ron Shuman by 29 points, 510-481.

“There’s a long way to go yet (39 races), but our chances of winning the championship look very good,” Morales said. “Last Saturday night, Mike finished half a straightaway ahead of Shuman.”

As long as Morales keeps building those powerful 700-horsepower Donovan block engines, Sweeney believes his chances are good, too.

“He’s a great guy to drive for,” Sweeney said. “He is a real quiet type, hardly says anything, but if you win races, he smiles a lot.”

Morales’ Indy cars are garaged in a 4,400 square-foot shop in Indianapolis, so he rarely sees them except when he shows up at races. But that doesn’t mean he’s not involved.

Capels is a former sprint car driver from New Mexico who got into the mechanical side of the sport as chief mechanic for Joe Leonard’s car when Parnelli Jones and Vel Miletich formed their “super team” in 1970. Leonard won two United States Auto Club driving championships with Capels, in 1971 and 1972.

“In 1974, when I heard that Vel and Parnelli were going to cut back, I decided to form my own team and talked Alex into the idea,” Capels said. “I’ve had a number of opportunities to go with other teams, but as long as Alex is involved, I’ll stay with him. He’s a great guy to work with, sort of like a buddy.”

Morales and Capels have never won the Indianapolis 500, but they won the Michigan 500 twice, in 1981 with Pancho Carter and 1986 with Johnny Rutherford. Their only other win was at Montreal, a 150-miler, in 1985 with Rutherford.

“The closest we came at Indy was the year (1982) Pancho was running second but got penalized two laps for passing under the yellow (caution flag) and finished third,” Morales recalled. “He still claims he was waved past the pace car.”

When Morales formed his Indy car team, his plan was to give young Southern California drivers opportunities. He had the late Jimmy Caruthers in 1975, the same year he died in October of cancer; Vukovich in 1976, Olivero in 1977, the late Mike Mosley in 1978, and Carter from 1979 to 1984. But as the costs of running an Indy car team skyrocketed, Morales began to need drivers who could guarantee sponsorship money.

Rutherford put together a deal with Vermont American Tools and Morales and Capels ran the team for three seasons. Last year the sponsor pulled out after Indianapolis, leaving Rutherford without a ride and Morales without a driver.

Holmes, who had sat in the front row at Indianapolis in 1984, decided to become a race driver again after two years off and searched out Morales.

“He brought the money,” Morales said of Holmes, whose family controls the Jiffy Mix fortune. “But he’s also a good racer, a good finisher.”

Holmes had not raced since late in the 1985 season, when he suffered a concussion in a crash while practicing at Laguna Seca Raceway. In five Indy 500s, he finished every time and was in the top 10 four times.

How does Morales, who still takes an active role in his family-owned business, find time for all his racing activities?

“You make time, if you want to do it badly enough,” he said. “For years, I spent three hours in the morning, evenings and weekends working on my cars. Racing’s tough on home life, though. That’s the bad part of it.

“I’ve had three wives, the last one for 28 years, but she has no interest in racing. She tolerates it because her baby (Andy, 25) is in it. That’s the secret, get your sons involved with you.”

Unlike many race car owners, Morales is not a former driver.

“I tried it once, in an old roadster on the dirt track at Huntington Beach,” he said. “Once was enough. I rolled it, end over end, and when I got out with nothing more than a shower of dirt and mud, I walked away from it for good.

“There wasn’t any protection--no roll bars, safety belts or helmets--nothing. From that day on, I stuck with doing the mechanical work. Especially the engines. That’s what I enjoy the most.

“I’ve enjoyed it since I built my first bobtail roadster back in 1929.”

He smiled at the thought of that first engine. It probably was a winner.