Now, Fittipaldi Is Just Another Good Ol’ Boy

Every time you see Emerson Fittipaldi in a garage in Gasoline Alley or on a pit wall in Kokomo or Sheboygan, you want to ask him, “What’s the matter--butler got the day off?” Or, “Get lost on your way to the palace at Monaco, did you?”

You wonder what a nice sporty-car guy like him is doing in a place like this--the cockpit of one of those brutish, hair-on-the-chest Indy cars. I mean, there isn’t a monocle in sight. If anybody is called “Count,” he’s a band leader, and a “Duke” is a ballplayer, not a peer. Hardly anyone goes to a dance wearing a sword.

For a long time, a lot of us thought Fittipaldi was just slumming, trying to see how the other half lives, like one of those guys who used to go up to Harlem with top hat and gold cane.

The sporty-car types don’t usually last long when they get a load of how the Indy crowd plays it. It’s the difference between a polo game and a dock fight, between being in the Roman Colosseum with a pride of lions or chasing a fox over a hedge.

I mean, Lake Erie certainly isn’t the Cote d’Azur, downtown Detroit ain’t Monte Carlo, and no one ever confused Indianapolis with Vienna.

You’re not winding through the fairy-tale country of the Black Forest, you’re usually screaming around an oval furnace ringed by hoarse spectators, through the fumes of frying chicken, vapors of beer and the fuel clouds of cars that get 1.3 miles to the gallon. Oval racing is a little like having a fight in a closet. With Mike Tyson.

Fittipaldi loves it.

It’s astonishing to those who have watched the American version of auto racing for any length of time. I mean, here our top drivers are named, “Fireball,” or “Shorty,” or “Wild Bill.” There, they’re named “Marquis De Portago” or “Baron Von Trips.” Or Nikki. Or Your Highness.

Most of them don’t last long over here. The great Juan Manuel Fangio made one practice spin in an Indy car once and decided to get out before it ate him. Alberto Ascari tried one race. Forty laps were enough for him. The great Jimmy Clark won it, finished second (also 31st) and drove five races before he died in Europe. Graham Hill came out of Formula One to win Indy, tried it twice more and went back to white scarf and champagne racing.

Fittipaldi is quite a specimen. First of all, there’s that hair, long and curling at the neck. In the chorus of crew cuts at the Brickyard, he looks like something out of King Arthur. Then there’s his background. Indy car racers come from garages in Torrance and Texas. Not a lot of people in their background showed up for work in epaulets or on horseback. He speaks five languages. Most guys on pit row are working on their first.

A.J. Foyt used to call Fittipaldi, “Playboy.” Like everyone else, A.J. figured Fittipaldi would be long gone the first time one of the Unsers got on his tailpipe in a corner.

Fittipaldi had been the toast of Europe. Twice world champion, he won 14 Grand Prix races. Fast, smooth, popular, he knew which fork to use. Also, which gear to shift. No graduate of a body shop, he is upper-crust Brazilian. His grandfather came from northern Italy and his grandmother from southern Russia.

“When she was emigrating over here,” Fittipaldi said, “she had a choice of the United States, Canada or Brazil. She said ‘Which one is warmer?’ When they told her ‘Brazil,’ she said, ‘Give me a ticket there.’ ”

Why would anyone walk away from racing in the Alps and along the Mediterranean to take on the industrial wastelands of New Jersey or spas like Nazareth, Pa.? What does he have against castles and quiche and royalty?

“I got sick of the intrigue, the petty rules-making. They have taken the sporting spirit out of international racing. It’s all become a cruel business. It is no fun any more.”

He retired to his native Sao Paulo, where he grew oranges and sold Mercedes-Benzes. It wasn’t exactly boring, but neither was it like cornering at the Nurburgring.

“Racing is exhilarating,” Fittipaldi said. “A race car is exciting, like a beautiful woman.”

In Brazil, he was practically a conglomerate. But, without a wheel in his hand and four under him, Fittipaldi became restless.

So, he came to Indianapolis and started experimenting. He passed his driver’s test and entered the 1984 race. Now, starting out oval racing at Indy is like trying out mountain-climbing on Everest, learning to hunt against tigers. When his engine quit after 37 laps the first year, Indy figured it had seen the last of Senhor Fittipaldi.

It was wrong. The second year, he even led the race four times. He was good enough to be picked up by Pat Patrick’s Marlboro Racing Team and, last year, Fittipaldi finished second at Indy, beaten by only 18 seconds by Rick Mears.

He is now an accepted member of a very exclusive fraternity, the Indy car drivers. They don’t accept just anybody. A.J. doesn’t call him “Playboy” anymore. He’s now “Emmo.” Nobody asks him if he plays Mozart in the cockpit. It’s as if he were just another good ol’ boy out of Texarkana.

He would like to win the PPG cup, emblematic of the 15-race Indy-car championship. He would be only the second driver in history (Mario Andretti is the other) to have won that plus a world championship. He has won six Indy car races and over $2,800,000 in them. He is tough competition.

You would think Fittipaldi would be favored in the Toyota Grand Prix at Long Beach this week. After all, this was his kind of circuit prior to 1982. But he wrecked his PC-18 at Phoenix last week and is awaiting restoration.

Before his car came to rest--in pieces--Fittipaldi, without checking to see if he was bleeding, was on the two-way yelling to the pit, “Get the backup car ready! This one is done.”

That’s an Indy driver.