Kevin Cogan Setting a Winning Pace in Race With Life : Marriage, New Team Has Racing’s Lone Wolf Back on Track Toward New Assault on Indianapolis 500

Kevin Cogan snapped a seat belt over his chest and settled into a spot that is second nature to him--the driver’s seat of a high-performance automobile about to negotiate a challenging stretch of road.

This wasn’t Indy. It wasn’t even the streets of Long Beach, where a week ago, the 32-year old West Torrance High School grad with the bright blue eyes and youthful looks, finished third in that city’s Grand Prix auto race.

Cogan, 32, was at home, wearing a T-shirt, sweat pants and tennis shoes. He coaxed his Mercedes Benz 300E out of the garage of his cliff-side Palos Verdes Estates house and up a steep driveway. The radio, on softly, played music from an easy listening station.

Cogan drove along Palos Verdes Drive. The guy that the late actor Steve McQueen once called a “hot foot” seemed surprisingly sedate.

Had this been Indy, Cogan would have gunned the engine, swerved into the turns and pushed the car to its limits. But this was his home turf. He had guests in the car, including his bride of less than a month, Tracy. His mind was as far from the race track as it could be.

The perfect place for it, he said. After all, one can’t live for the job all the time.

He loves the solitude of Palos Verdes Estates, an edge of the earth far from the roaring engines and fanatical souvenir seekers of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, a race that has been a crossroads in his career time and time again.

Cogan begins practice runs in Indy in about a week, but for now, he said with a grin, the old Brickyard on May 29 seemed a long way off. He was hungry.

Peering through Ray-Ban sunglasses, he caught a glimpse of a threatening sky dodged by rain clouds. The radio played “Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head.”

“Lots of times it doesn’t pay to come home,” he said philosophically of the racing season as his car glided down the highway. “You don’t have enough time between races.”

All the more important to make the best of it, he thought out loud. With that he eased the 300E down a hill toward a favorite pub in Hollywood Riviera to splurge on a hot dog and French fries.

This isn’t the Kevin Cogan most people know, not the hard-charging young Turk of the early 1980s, the guy with second and fourth place finishes at Indy, who narrowly missed out on its rookie of the year honor in 1981; a man under contract as “a fashion spokesman” to Playboy magazine; until recently, one of the most eligible bachelors on the CART circuit.

There’s a secret about Kevin Cogan few people get to know: Away from the television lights, the focus of the media and Indy car racing, Cogan is a regular guy.

“He’s normal,” said Tracy. “My friends warned me to stay away from him, that he was a womanizer. But once I got to know him, I realized he was like anyone else.”

Much of what racing fans thinks of drivers is not true, the Cogans say. Race drivers do not speed around city streets like they do on the track.

“Kevin is more laid-back. More reserved,” Tracy said. “Not that (other drivers) have big egos. Most don’t.”

People would be surprised to learn that he considers himself a highly trained athlete, Cogan said. He is only 5 feet, 11 inches and 160 pounds, but lifts weights regularly. He does not smoke, as some of his racing opponents do. He seldom drinks.

“I’m one of those guys that can’t handle it too well,” he said.

And he doesn’t party much while on the road.

“I put on a tie once in a while, for the sponsors, when I have to.”

His biggest thrill of the Long Beach finish: a spontaneous back-yard barbecue with about 25 close friends at his place after the race.

Tracy says he is rather moody before a race. Kevin claims that most people don’t realize the amount of mental preparation he needs before a race. His concentration is pushed to the limit each year before Long Beach, he said, because he is home and many of his friends want to see him.

“Some good friends don’t understand,” he said. “They think you are out partying all the time. They don’t understand. You’re going to battle. You must mentally prepare.”

If he wasn’t already, his storybook marriage has made him even more the homebody.

Kevin met Tracy at the wedding of a mutual friend about three years ago. Tracy, blond with brilliant blue eyes that match those of Kevin’s, heeded the warnings of her friends at first. They said he was egotistical and self-centered. He risked his life every Sunday for a few bucks, didn’t he? He must be a free spirit.

She kept her distance, but that didn’t last long.

“I was living in Phoenix at the time,” said the former flight attendant. “He insisted that he fly over the next weekend to take me out to dinner.”

They have shared the house overlooking the Pacific Ocean they remodeled together since. When Kevin proposed, he gave Tracy his grandmother’s wedding ring. She had been the closest woman to his heart, until now.

They were married March 26 in a ceremony performed in the neatly kept back yard of their own home. They expect their first child sometime in September.

The relationship has already endured hardships. At the Quaker State 500 in Pocono, Pa., a helicopter carrying Tracy, Kevin and Michael Andretti from Andretti’s lakeside retreat to the course, crashed on race day. The chopper flipped over “three or four times,” according to Cogan, who is also a licensed pilot, but was not at the controls.

Andretti and Cogan complained of back pains, but both made the start. Cogan finished fourth.

Tracy escaped injury. It was only the second race she had attended in her life.

“It’s amazing all of us came out of that all right,” Kevin said.

Tracy felt awkward at her first race.

“It was scary,” she said. I knew absolutely nothing about racing.”

If there is a dark side to Kevin Cogan, it is that he is sometimes branded a loner, a driver of great promise who has yet to live up to his potential.

He likes the peace and quiet of his private life because it keeps him out of the spotlight. But it presents professional problems, as well.

He has worked for nine racing teams since he broke into Indy cars in 1981, yet he has won only one major race, the Checker 200 in Phoenix two seasons ago. He signed with his present team, Schaefer/Machinists Union, just five weeks before the 1988 season began.

“It was the worst off-season I had,” he said of the search for a sponsor.

He has a good relationship with the younger drivers on the CART circuit, but he has come to learn that “this is a very complicated business.”

“Every professional driver is a cutthroat,” he said. “Some get along with others more than others.”

He got a taste of that early in his career, a moment he’d like the world to forget. History, however, with an assist from television, will probably never allow that.

Indianapolis, 1982: Coming off a fourth-place finish a year earlier, Cogan posted a qualifying time in the Penske racing team’s back-up car that was second only to pole-sitter Rick Mears. Cogan was placed in the middle of the front row on race day, alongside two of racing’s best known drivers, Mario Andretti and A. J. Foyt.

The cars charged to the start when suddenly Cogan’s PC-10 veered to the right and hit Foyt’s March, then careened left and collided with Andretti’s Wildcat. All were knocked from the race.

Andretti and Foyt were livid and later, on national TV, berated Cogan as an example of a new generation of drivers too green for the Indy circuit.

Later it was discovered that the car Cogan was driving had a broken right rear constant velocity joint that apparently caused the vehicle to veer. But the bad publicity was too much for the Penske team to handle. It refused to renew Cogan’s contract. The young race driver said it took him four years to rebuild his reputation.

Last year, Cogan told racing writer Shav Glick of The Times:

“I was in shock, and I guess I still am, at how Penske handled it and how the media jumped all over me as if I’d never driven a race car before. . . . Everything nice that had been written or said about me was forgotten when Mario started talking about how I shouldn’t have been in the car, that it was too fast for me. Writers started calling me a rookie and indicated that I’d never been to Indy before, when I’d finished fourth the year before. They molded their stories to fit their own ideas and Mario’s. And Penske didn’t speak up to give me any support.”

Seated in the pub with Tracy at his side, Cogan’s eyes grew steely when asked about that crash.

“It was a media thing,” was all he would say. He felt he had put it all behind him.

Cogan’s reputation suffered from other race incidents as well. In 1981, he was leading at Indy with six laps to go when the yellow flag came out. Sixteen seconds back in second place, Bobby Rahal crept up on Cogan’s tail under the rules of the yellow. When the race restarted, Rahal hit the accelerator first, out-gunned Cogan to steal the lead and held on to win. The next day Cogan was second-guessed in the media.

Another crash involving Foyt in 1982 drew headlines. Foyt berated Cogan again on TV after the pair collided in the 150-mile race at Michigan International Speedway. Foyt was photographed shaking Cogan by the helmet.

And then in 1986, after he “flipped off” a competitor during the Laguna Seca race and later slapped the opponent’s helmet in the pits because he was angry with his driving techniques, Cogan was fined $5,000 by CART. Chief Steward Wally Dallenbach said the fine, the largest in CART history, was for “collective situations.”

Cogan responded in The Times: “Wally (Dallenbach) told me he needed my respect and my attention. Well, he can’t buy my respect. That’s something he has to earn.”

Cogan finished just three races in all of 1987.

“A terrible year,” he admitted.

All this left him branded. “A public relations disaster,” said Schaefer/Machinists’ public relations spokesman Dave Overpeck.

In 1988, though, Cogan opened the season with an eighth-place finish in Phoenix in a car Overpeck said was barely driveable. The third-place finish at Long Beach in a 1987 car gives great promise for a shot at an old nemesis, Indy.

“Our guys are really pumped,” Cogan said. “They’re not used to being in front.”

Ironically, Schaefer/Machinists has never won a race. Cogan would like to change that.

“We’ll surprise a few people.”

Back in the house after lunch, Cogan excused himself to take a shower before a picture-taking session.

Tracy was in the oak and tile kitchen with Kevin’s mother, Grace, sorting vegetables. On the blue-tile counter is their wedding photo album, under that a sales counter-offer sheet from a real estate firm. The Cogans have bought a larger, older fixer-upper on a cliff overlooking Lunada Bay. They will be moving soon.

Tracy laments that they are leaving a house in which they put so much of their time.

“She was a little mad at me at first,” said Cogan about the sale.

But they need the space, both agreed. Boxes of wedding gifts are stacked unopened in a laundry room. And they will be parents soon.

It seems odd that a man who makes a living with his life on the line time and time again finds satisfaction in rebuilding old homes in his spare time, rather than buying new ones.

“That’s their style,” said Cogan’s close friend and workout partner, Mike Schriefer. “They will completely redo it their own way.”

Cogan says he gets a sense of satisfaction in construction work, something he has dabbled in for years. Grace says that would be a nice profession for him to take up when he quits auto racing, which Kevin says will be in about three years.

Kevin isn’t so sure about his future.

“I haven’t really dealt with that yet. I’ve built houses . . . but if that was a full-time job, it would drive me crazy. I try to figure what would be good for me to do, but I can’t think of it. I’ve got to get serious (about my future) pretty soon.”

Grace and her husband, Jack, never really wanted Kevin to go into racing. As a child, he raced motorcycles and got hurt a lot. An Indy car crash at Pocono in 1984 nearly cost him his right foot and laid him up for eight months. They still say they look forward to the day he leaves the sport.

“I can think of millions of other things he could be good at,” Grace said.

The threat of serious injury, possibly death, is “for real,” according to Tracy. “But you can’t think about it. If you do, it overwhelms you. You can’t be a race driver if you do that.”

Some years ago, Cogan set an arbitrary age of 35 for his retirement, but how he does on his next few spins at Indy may influence his direction more.

Said Tracy: “He won’t quit this business until he wins it.”