Returning to Indy, Driver Kevin Cogan Settles Down to a Winning Pace at Life

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 was not Indy. It was not even the streets of Long Beach, where last month the 32-year-old West Torrance High School graduate with the bright blue eyes and youthful looks finished third in that city’s Grand Prix.

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

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

Had this been Indy, where he will start in the fifth row Sunday , 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 Likes Solitude

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. At the moment, he said with a grin, the old Brickyard seemed a long way off. He was hungry.

Peering through Ray-Ban sunglasses, he caught a glimpse of a threatening sky. 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 road. “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 is not 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 is a secret about 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,” his wife said. “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 think 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 Cogan said. “Not that (other drivers) have big egos. Most don’t.”

Works Out Regularly

People would be surprised to learn that he considers himself a highly trained athlete, Cogan said. He is only 5-feet-11 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 does not party much while on the road.

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

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 do not 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 was not one 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, blonde with brilliant blue eyes that match 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 did not last long.

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

Since then, they have shared the house they remodeled. When Kevin proposed, he gave Tracy his grandmother’s wedding ring. Grandmother has been one of the women closest to his heart.

Kevin and Tracy were married March 26 in a ceremony performed in the neatly kept back yard of their home overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Malaga Cove. They expect their first child in September.

The relationship already has endured hardships. At the Quaker State 500 in Pocono, Pa., a helicopter carrying Kevin, Tracy 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.

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 would like the world to forget. History, however, with an assist from television, will probably never allow that.

Front Row Start

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, between 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.

Edged Out in 1981

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 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,” he said.