BRABHAM TAKES TURNS FOR THE BETTER : On the Road Course Again

The hottest race driver in the country today is Geoff Brabham, a transplanted Australian who left the ocean breezes of Orange County a couple of years ago to live in pastoral Noblesville, Ind.

Brabham drives a red, white and blue Nissan prototype ZX-Turbo in the International Motor Sports Assn.’s top-of-the-line GTP class and has won a record-equaling four straight races. He will try for No. 5 today at Watkins Glen, N.Y.

Brabham has driven to victory this season at Road Atlanta in Gainesville, Ga.; through the streets of West Palm Beach, Fla.; at Paul Newman’s home track in Lime Rock, Conn., and at the Mid-Ohio sports car track in Lexington, Ohio.

Even though the Nissan team did not enter the 24 Hours of Daytona or the 12 Hours of Sebring, Brabham is second in the standings behind Jaguar driver John Nielsen, 96 points to 83, at the mid-point of the season.

“The way we’ve been running surprised even us,” Brabham said. “Lime Rock wasn’t on our original schedule but after we won two straight, we decided we’d better get up there.”

Brabham drove solo at Lime Rock, but shared the driving with John Morton at Road Atlanta and West Palm Beach, and Tom Gloy at Mid-Ohio after Morton was injured while testing at Lime Rock. Morton will return today to share the ride with Brabham at Watkins Glen in a three-hour race.

Brabham’s four straight wins tie him with John Fitzpatrick, who did it in 1980, and the late Peter Gregg, in 1973, as drivers who have won four straight IMSA races in a single season. John Paul Jr. won five in a row over two seasons, the last two races in 1981 and the first three in 1982.

“Five in a row isn’t what’s on our minds,” Brabham said. “Our objective is to win the race at hand, and that’s Watkins Glen. Right now, the way I look at it, we’re 0-0 with the Jags and the Porsches. If you start thinking about records, you can lose sight of what you’re there for.”

Brabham tuned up for today’s race by bettering Davy Jones’ track record, set in a BMW in 1986, by three seconds during mid-week tire tests.

In the only race the Nissan entered and didn’t win, at Miami, Brabham sat on the pole and led the first hour of a three-hour event before braking problems dropped him back to eighth at the finish.

Astonishingly, the Nissans have completed 674 of 676 laps, or 99.7%, in the five races.

“The car has been so reliable it’s incredible,” Brabham said. “I don’t think I’ve ever driven a car that performed so consistently at its top range. The guys on the crew have just done a tremendous job to have it so well prepared.”

In previous years, the big GTP--it stands for grand touring prototypes--machines made an annual appearance in the spring at Riverside International Raceway. But this year, IMSA chose to skip the soon to be closed facility, so Southern Californians will have no chance to see Brabham and his car until the Del Mar race Oct. 23.

The 750-horsepower ZX, however, is a local product. It was conceived, built, prepared and is maintained at Don Devendorf’s Electromotive Engineering shop in El Segundo.

“The GTP program began as an offshoot from the success we had in the GTO and GTU programs,” Devendorf said. As a driver, Devendorf won 31 IMSA races and 2 championships in production cars before limiting his energies to creating the new Nissan.

The idea for a developmental program was suggested in 1984 by Dick Roberts, then Nissan’s director of racing. The car made its debut in April, 1985, at Riverside, but was a disappointment.

“It was the first time the car turned a wheel,” Devendorf recalled. “It was no time to try and make a race, but we were faced with deadlines imposed by sponsors, so we had to do it. There was no time to sit down and study our problems. We just showed up.”

The Nissan showed signs of progress at Portland in 1986 when Brabham, taking time off from his Indy car schedule, put it on the pole and finished third. Then, when it won the 1987 opening race at Miami, the car seemed ready to compete with the championship Porsche 962. But it didn’t work out that way.

A series of problems, ranging from tire failures to a monocoque that split in two, kept the car from winning again.

“Every time we failed, the media and the other teams talked about our ‘unreliability,’ but what they didn’t take into consideration was that we were a one-car team,” Devendorf said. “Having only one car exaggerated the Nissan situation when we had a problem. When a Porsche failed to finish, there was always another one ready to take over, so no one talked about Porsche unreliability.”

This year the Nissan’s reliability caught the world champion Jaguar team of Tom Walkinshaw Racing, which was making its debut in the American IMSA series, and the perennial IMSA championship Porsche team of Al Holbert and Chip Robinson by surprise.

“Everybody talked (before the season started) about Jaguar vs. Porsche,” said Jaguar driver Nielsen after the last race. “Now I think it’s Nissan against the rest of us. They clearly have the superior car.”

THE CAR

The first Nissan GTP machine was really a Lola, designed by Trevor Harris and ordered from Eric Broadley in England in late July, 1984. The Lola factory was selected because it seemed the closest in design to what Harris wanted in a GTP car.

“Basically, we created a car in the image we desired, and Lola built it,” Devendorf said. “It was a lot more work than we expected because the time restrictions placed on us did not allow enough time for proper aerodynamic studies.

“Aerodynamics today is as important as the engine or the driver to a car’s performance.”

When he could find no adequate wind tunnel to measure the performance of his car, Devendorf built one of his own in his El Segundo shop.

“Use of a wind tunnel is very much an art, more than a scientific study,” he said. “We found that there are so many variables that you can get completely erroneous results from using a wind tunnel without a moving ground plane, so we built one that would give us what we wanted. It took us four months to build it, but as far as we know, only Formula One teams do what we do to correlate the car’s performance from wind tunnel readings.”

Using a one-seventh scale model, on a moving plane, Electromotive engineer Yoshi Suzuka has made more than 2,700 experiments with chassis configurations.

Suzuka formerly worked with Dan Gurney on the All-American Racers’ Indy car program and with the Frisbee Can-Am car.

One major change, one that Brabham credits with much of the car’s success this year, was a switch from Bridgestone to Goodyear tires. Bridgestone was a secondary sponsor last year but when the company decided to drop out of professional racing this season, a change was necessary.

“We couldn’t believe how much difference it made,” Brabham said. “The Goodyears made a half-second difference in the interval in Turn 9 alone at Riverside. On some tracks, they were as much as two seconds quicker.”

THE ENGINE

When the IMSA GTP project was initiated, Electromotive, Inc., a separate company headed by John Knepp and Devendorf, was contracted to develop a turbocharged V-6 racing engine. “There was no evolution to the engine,” Devendorf said. “We designed it, built and raced it. We measure the engine’s performance on the dynamometer and when we have it the way we want it, we bolt it in the car and know it will work.”

Devendorf has a secret weapon, however, in an electronic engine control processor that he designed himself. It measures what the engine is doing and also tells it what to do.

This year Electromotive Engineering developed its own aluminum cylinder block.

“The aluminum block was a 50-pound improvement in weight and has twice the strength as the stock block,” Devendorf said. “We built it right here in El Segundo.

“This car may have a Japanese name, but it has the latest in United States technology.”

THE TEAM

Geoff Brabham, 36, was an Indy car driver without a car when R.W. (Kas) Kastner, Nissan’s national motor sports manager, signed him for the 1988 IMSA season.

Brabham, a former Can-Am champion whose father Jack won three world Formula One championships, had driven Indy cars for Rick Galles for several seasons but was left out in the cold when Galles signed Al Unser Jr. to drive for him this season.

Brabham was in Lime Rock the weekend of the Indianapolis 500. It was the first time he had not driven in the 500 in eight years.

“I missed Indy, but only to the extent that I might have been in a good car,” Brabham said. “I certainly didn’t miss the aggravation of running a mid-field car.

“There is a lot of similarity in driving a GTP car and an Indy car. The problems are still the same, trying to go as fast as you can and not make any mistakes. The GTP car has more down-force, but it’s heavier and has more horsepower. It’s 500 pounds heavier than an Indy car so its power-to-weight ratio is not as good, but driving it is really not so much different.”

John Morton, 45, lives in El Segundo and has been driving sports cars successfully for more than 25 years, ever since he came West from Chicago in 1962 to attend Carroll Shelby’s driving school at Riverside.

He got his biggest thrill last year at Riverside when he and Hurley Haywood teamed in a Jaguar to win the final IMSA GTP race at the track where he began his career. Morton was driving when the Jaguar passed the Holbert-Robinson Porsche on the next-to-last lap of the race.

What was probably Morton’s worst accident--at least the most spectacular--occured May 27 at Lime Rock when he was testing a second turbocharged ZX. As the car crested a steep hill, going between 120 and 130 m.p.h., it became airborne. When Morton let off the throttle, instead of settling back down, the 2,050-pound car soared straight upward, then stalled and fell back on its top.

“We have pictures that show it absolutely vertical to the ground and the tail is 10 feet off the ground,” Devendorf said. “The car is nearly 16 feet long so you can imagine how far up John was before it came down.”

The impact was so severe that Morton’s open-face helmet was ripped off--with the strap still secure. Surprisingly, his injuries were minimal. He had second-degree facial burns, a gash on the left side of his mouth that gives him the look of a perpetual smile, and numerous bumps, bruises and cuts.

“John made a miraculous recovery,” Devendorf said. “He probably could have raced at Mid-Ohio, but we thought we’d better wait one race and brought in Tom Gloy to drive with Brabham.”

The teaming of Brabham and Morton at Watkins Glen recalls an incident involving them in 1980, when they were on opposing teams in a Can-Am race.

Brabham was leading with Morton a close second when both pitted on the same lap.

“I was at one end of the pits and Geoff was at the far end,” Morton recalled. “I was in a rush to get out first because I was sure if I did that I would win. I was going down pit road around 80 or 85 when Geoff pulled away. His car wouldn’t shift, so he was bucking along about 35. I thought he’d let me by so I kept going, but then we hit.”

The embarrassing pit collision knocked both of them out of the race.

“At least this time I won’t have to worry about John getting in my way,” Brabham said with a laugh after listening to his teammate’s description of the accident.

In 1970, when Devendorf was an amateur driver from El Segundo with one national championship under his belt, he drove a Triumph GT-6 to victory in the Sports Car Club of America’s E production championship.

During the year he received assistance from British Leyland, specifically from Kastner, a crusty, straight-shooting, cigar-smoking former driver who was the British factory’s competition director.

Sixteen years later, Kastner and Devendorf were back again, working on the Nissan GTP program.

“Kas came on with us early in 1986 and he smoothed out a lot of problems, like getting management in the proper frame of mind to understand that we had to have time for testing before we could race,” Devendorf said.

“Kas handles the politics of racing, and when you’re involved on an international level of competition, that can be a full-time job. He’s been around for so long, and has been involved in so many different facets of racing that there’s nothing that escapes him.”

What Kastner doesn’t want to escape is the championship.

“We spotted them two races by not running Daytona or Sebring, so now as long as the Jags keep running second, we virtually have to win every race to catch them,” Kastner said. “There are seven races left and we’ve got to keep the routine going. It’s like gymnastics, we have to keep doing the same thing over and over in the same way--and hope we get the same results.”