Motor Racing : At Age 39, Stuart Hayner Hardly Rates as a Driver of the Future

The paths that led Geoff Brabham, Danny Sullivan, Bill Elliott and Rusty Wallace into contention for 1988 driver of the year all started in the minor leagues of motor racing.

Raw talent must be honed and recognized before a driver can move up and race competitively in the big leagues of Indy cars, stock cars and prototype sports cars.

Brabham, who won 8 straight International Motor Sports Assn. main events in a row this year in a prototype Nissan, and Sullivan, the Indy car champion, both started in Formula Fords--Brabham in his native Australia and Sullivan in England.

Elliott and Wallace, who battled to the final race before Elliott won NASCAR’s premier championship, each raced stock cars for 12 years on tiny neighborhood tracks before moving to the superspeedways.

From the stock car bullrings and the side attraction races on Indy car and sports car programs come the champions of the future and one of the names that surfaced in 1988 was Stuart Hayner, an automotive after-market accessories business owner from Yorba Linda. Hayner won both the inaugural Corvette Challenge and the Escort Endurance championship in Sports Car Club of America showroom stock competitions.

Hayner, however, may not be your driver of the year of the future. At 39 he is already older than Brabham, Sullivan, Elliott or Wallace.

“People told me that if I won the Corvette Challenge the phone would be ringing off the wall with offers,” Hayner said with a wry smile. “Well, I’m still waiting for the ring. All I want is to drive for a good competitive team where I can continue to show my talent. Eventually, I’d like to move up to GTP.”

Hayner did receive a $100,000 champion’s bonus from the $1 million Corvette purse, however, a prize he shared with teammate/actor Bobby Carradine of Los Angeles. They drove cars sponsored by auto dealer Tom Bell of Redlands.

“We agreed before the season that we’d split everything down the middle. The cars cost $45,000 each to campaign for the season so we didn’t make a heck of a lot of money, but we beat some pretty good drivers in what I call a driver’s series.”

The inaugural Corvette series attracted an unusual range of talent, including 3-time Indy 500 winner Johnny Rutherford, perennial ice racing champions Tommy and Bobby Archer, noted women drivers Desire Wilson and Robin Dallenbach, sports car veteran Doc Bundy and Olympic decathlon gold medalist Bruce Jenner.

Juan Manuel Fangio II, nephew of the former Formula One world champion of the same name, finished second to Hayner and has already been tabbed by team manager Dan Gurney to drive a GTP Toyota in IMSA next year.

“I almost quit the series when I felt that the people in charge were trying to equalize things by handicapping my car, and some of the others who weren’t big names,” Hayner said. “I was really embarrassed at Riverside, my home track. I had two good finishes before coming home and I brought out some potential sponsors and all my friends were there. When the race started, the car felt like a piece of junk and I dropped back to 22nd before I managed to move up to 15th. The radar gun showed that my car was 11 m.p.h. slower than the top car down the straight, and the cars were supposed to be equal. I really caused some stink about what I felt was favoritism and some things were changed. Toward the end of the seasons the cars seemed equal again, the way they were advertised.”

In the Escort Endurance series, Hayner drove a Camaro for the Morrison-Cook team and edged teammate Bob McConnell for the championship.

“I don’t plan to run the Escort series next year,” he said. “It was too tough trying to make both races on the same weekend.”

For instance, on Sept. 24-25 he first qualified his Corvette at Mosport, near Toronto, on Saturday. Then he flew by private plane to Lexington, Ohio, where he drove the Camaro in a 12-hour race Saturday night at Mid-Ohio. Sunday morning he was back at Mosport barely in time for the driver’s meeting. He won the race that afternoon, the only one race he won in the 10-race Challenge series.

The win at Mosport moved Hayner into the season lead by 8 points over Fangio and all he had to do in the season finale at Sebring, Fla., was finish within one position of the Argentine driver to win the $100,000.

“I didn’t feel like I was driving defensively, but I admit that I was paying attention to where Fangio was and where I was,” Hayner said. “I drove as hard as I could, but I was looking for all the gremlins that can come and get you.”

Hayner finished fifth and Fangio seventh as the race was won by Mark Wolocatiuk of Riverside. Wolocatiuk ended up fifth in points.

“I’ll be back in the Corvette Challenge next year, for sure,” Hayner said. “I’d like to do some (IMSA) GTO or Trans Am races, too.”

Hayner also drove with Doug Goad in a Firebird to win a 4-hour race at Sebring back in March in the IMSA-sanctioned Firehawk Grand Sport Endurance series.

“A lot of people don’t realize that I’ve been racing for about 15 years because I didn’t get serious about it until 1982. Before that it was mostly desert motorcycles or karts. It was (Indy car driver) Pete Halsmer who got me into it. He came into my office one day looking for sponsorship money and we ended up living together for awhile and he talked me into racing for money.

“Before that, I had raced as a social thing. I thought that was what racing was all about, having friends who turned into rivals during a race. And when one of them crashed or broke, you helped him fix the car and raced against him some more. When you broke, he helped you fix things and so on. It was a lot of fun. A lot different from professional racing.”

INDY CARS--Billy Vukovich III, 1988 Indy car rookie of the year from Coarsegold, Calif., will drive a Lola-Judd for Hemelgarn Racing in next year’s 500 as a teammate of Ludwig Heimrath, Hemelgarn’s regular driver.

SPORTS CARS--Miller High Life, sponsors of the late Al Holbert’s Porsche IMSA team, will revive the team next year with Jim Busby of Laguna Beach as team manager. John Andretti will join Derek Bell and Bob Wollek as drivers. After Holbert’s death in an airplane crash last summer, the team was disbanded. . . . Chip Robinson, who won the 1987 Camel GT championship with Holbert’s team, will become a teammate of 1988 champion Geoff Brabham next year in a Nissan ZX-Turbo.

TRANS-AM--Kenny Hendrick, 19, who was the only Cal Club driver to win an event in the Sports Car Club of America’s national Valvoline Runoffs last October, will step up to the Escort Trans Am series next year in an Oldsmobile Toronado. The Chino driver, a student at Mt. San Antonio College, won the highly competitive Formula Ford championship with a unique combination of Firestone tires in front and Goodyears in back. He plans to debut the Olds during the Long Beach Grand Prix, Nov. 25-26.

DRIVER OF YEAR--Stock car driver Rusty Wallace, who waged a spirited but unsuccessful attempt to catch Bill Elliott for the Winston Cup championship, won the fourth quarter balloting for 1988 driver of the year honors. Wallace won 4 of the last 5 races, but came up 24 points shy. Indy car champion Danny Sullivan finished second in voting, followed by Elliott, drag racer Joe Amato, IMSA champion Geoff Brabham and Indy car driver Emerson Fittipaldi.

The driver of the year will be revealed Saturday night, Jan. 7, at the 17th annual American Auto Racing Writers & Broadcasters Assn. banquet at the Spruce Goose in Long Beach.