Notebook / Sam Farmer : Latest Daytona Slide Painful for Kendall

For much of last weekend’s Daytona 24 Hours Camel GT sports car race, Tom Kendall felt like one of those stuffed animals plastered to a car window with suction cups.

Kendall, 22, a three-time International Motor Sports Assn. GTU-class champion who lives in La Canada, finished sixth in the Trans-Am class and 17th overall. But he could only drive in two-hour stints because of back spasms.

And he wasn’t suffering alone. Co-drivers Max Jones and Buzz McCall also complained of back pain.

The problem?

The driver’s seat in their Chevrolet Beretta was too wide and the gravitational force that comes with shooting through a curve turned Kendall and his partners into pinballs.

“It was like sitting on a bench seat so your back is doing all the work instead of your seat holding you in,” Kendall said. “Kind of like sitting on a milk crate.”

The drivers commissioned the car’s owner to hammer away at their aching backs while they were not driving.

In addition to seat problems, Kendall had to adjust to the additional physical strain associated with the move up from GTU to Trans-Am cars. Kendall reached speeds of 193 m.p.h. in the qualifying race--more than 40 m.p.h. faster than he drove in a GTU car.

Kendall was leading into the 19th hour of the race when the car’s transmission, which had been changed earlier in the race, failed. Kendall finished the race in second gear.

The predicament was not unusual for Kendall, however. In his two earlier Daytona races (1986 and ‘87) he was leading at the 19-hour mark. By the 20th hour, he had either dropped out of the lead or the race.

“Next year the strategy will be to park it at the 19-hour mark, wait until it passes and go from there,” he quipped.

Kendall says finishing sixth was “kind of a letdown” but still impressive because of the size of his crew. “To give Lincoln-Mercury (the eventual winner) as big a scare as we did gave everyone satisfaction,” he said.

Kendall plans to drop the GTU circuit and begin racing in the Trans-Am series.

“After I won the GTU championship last year, Chevrolet didn’t want to stay where they were and I definitely didn’t want to run a fourth GTU,” he said. “Just looking at the rules and the added exposure that the Trans-Am series was getting, we decided to go there.”

Ten Trans-Am races will be televised on cable station ESPN this season.

Kendall will drive a GTO car in the Miami Grand Prix on March 5 and says he will try to drive in as many GTO races that do not conflict with the Trans-Am series as possible.

Burial at three: St. Francis High guard Allen Freemon only takes shots that he feels are within his range--like anything inside the half-court stripe.

Freemon has made 79 of 204 three-point attempts and, according to the most recent statistics, leads the Southern Section in three-point shots.

Coach John Jordan says he gives Freemon free rein to let fly from wherever he chooses.

“It’s one way to counteract or lack of an inside game,” Jordan said. “He has the green light. If he’s open, he should shoot the darn thing.

“If we’re up by 12 or so, it’s the nail in the coffin.”

And Freemon enjoys watching an opponent’s morale crumble under a three-point bomb.

“I’ll bust a three and, jeez, for us it’s just like a slam dunk. The fans go wild and that just pumps us up more,” he said.