Motor Racing : The Race Was the Easiest Journey for Weaver

James Weaver of Great Britain knows all about the glamorous, world-hopping life of a race driver.

The veteran sports car racer got his first taste of Indy-car racing last weekend at the Long Beach Grand Prix, but the experience was only the end of a killer travel schedule that would have sent lesser men to bed for an extended rest.

Weaver won the British Touring Car race at Oulton Park, England, on Easter weekend, then hopped on an airplane on Monday and flew to Los Angeles, then on to Phoenix.

On Tuesday, he shot a TV commercial, then flew back to LA and was back at his Wiltshire, England, home by Wednesday at noon.

Two days later, Weaver went to Silverstone, England, to practice for that Sunday’s touring car event. He won that race, then caught a flight from London to New York.

Two hours into that flight, the plane lost one engine and had to return to Heathrow Airport in London. Weaver caught another plane and arrived in Phoenix 26 hours after leaving London.

“By the time I arrived in Phoenix, I had to immediately get into the race car and test it for two or three hours, then leave for Long Beach to get organized for the race weekend,” Weaver explained. “By the time I get home to England on Monday, I will have flown a little over 24,000 miles (since the first trip to Phoenix).”

Weaver, driving for the new CART Indy-car team of Rob Dyson, finished 11th in Sunday’s race, his Indy-car debut.

Richard Petty, the longtime king of stock car racing, has struggled this season, missing a NASCAR Winston Cup race for the first time in 15 years.

In fact, the 51-year-old driver has failed to qualify for three of the last four races heading into this weekend’s 500 at Martinsville, Va.

Amid rumors of a team shake-up at the Petty Enterprises shops in Level Cross, N.C., Petty made a move this week to turn things around.

He hired Larry Rathgeb as supervisor of research and development for the team.

Rathgeb was a key designer and engineer for Chrysler in the 1960s and 1970s, working closely with Petty when the driver was the dominant force in stock car racing with Plymouths and Dodges.

“I still want to race and I still think we can be competitive,” Petty said. “We just need to update some things.”

The third annual Marlboro Challenge, a rich invitational race for pole and race winners on the CAR-PPG circuit, will be run on Saturday, Oct. 14, at Laguna Seca Raceway in Monterey, Calif., as part of the season-ending Indy-car weekend.

The special race was run the first two years at Tamiami Park in Miami, Fla., with Bobby Rahal winning in 1987 and Michael Andretti taking the 1988 event.

An announcement by Marlboro last weekend said the prize money for the event will be $820,00, a $90,000 increase from last year.

The winner will earn $250,000, with $150,000 for second place and $100,000 for third.

Al Unser Jr.’s victory in the Long Beach Grand Prix was worth $117,600, moving the 27-year-old second-generation Indy-car star into first place in earnings on road courses with $1,789,134.

Ironically, he moved past Mario Andretti, the man who Unser bumped out of the lead in a controversial incident just 12 laps from the end of Sunday’s race.

Andretti is now second in Indy-car road racing earnings with $1,753,576.

Alfa Romeo’s debut in the CART-PPG Indy-car series has been delayed until at least the Detroit Grand Prix in June.

The Italian car company is preparing an Indy engine to fit into a specially designed March chassis. The car was to be ready for next month’s Indianapolis 500, but a spokesman said the team does not yet have enough engines and engine parts built to be ready for Indy.

Volunteer workers at the Long Beach Grand Prix were provided with T-shirts that featured a slightly altered copy of a local speed limit sign on the back.

The T-shirts read: “City of Long Beach Speed Limit 195.”