INDIANAPOLIS 500 : He Finally Gains Spotlight, but Stays in Race’s Shadows

Rich Vogler is one of those people who needed only 20 years to become an overnight sensation.

Thanks to ESPN’s new “Thursday Night Thunder” series, thousands of viewers have discovered sprint car and midget auto racing--and Vogler.

“I’ll walk into a store somewhere and I’ll hear girls mumbling, ‘Is that him? Isn’t that Rich Vogler?’ ” he said.

Not surprising, since little has happened in those types of racing the last decade or so that Vogler hasn’t had a foot in. He has won the national championship five times since 1978, and the 1980 national sprint car title as well.

So, obviously, Indy car owners are stumbling over their checkbooks in their haste to sign him up, right?

Well, no, they’re not, this no longer being 1963. And Vogler, for all of his winning, remains a 39-year-old midget-sprint car driver trying to, you should excuse the expression, crash the big time.

Vogler will be racing here Sunday in the Indianapolis 500--he will be starting 33rd, that’s last, for the second straight year--but he also started Thursday night, in a sprint car show at Indianapolis Raceway Park, and Friday night, in a race for championship dirt-track cars at the Indiana State Fairgrounds.

So for Vogler, 500 or no 500, life goes on pretty much as usual.

But that doesn’t mean he lacks a flair for the dramatic. This year, for the second straight year, he made the field on the final day of qualifying after bumping a former winner.

Last year, in a classic bit of high drama, it was Gordon Johncock who had to step aside for Vogler, after he had earlier bumped Vogler’s original car. This year, Johnny Rutherford, who would have been starting his 25th consecutive race here, was victimized by Vogler, who once again was driving a car he hadn’t intended to drive.

Vogler, a bit of a traditionalist, wishes that Rutherford could be driving here Sunday, too, but. . .

“That’s just the way life is,” Vogler said. “I didn’t go out there with the idea of knocking J.R. out. I just went out to try to get in.”

Besides, nobody has to remind him how unfair racing can sometimes be.

“It seems like all my racing career, I’ve been setting records of all types,” he said. “Maybe it’s written somewhere that I’m supposed to start the most times here in the last row. This is three times in my five starts.”

But he is starting, and even that’s a bit of an upset. When his own car came down with a severe attack of enginitis last Sunday, crew chief Mark Bridges put him in teammate Kevin Cogan’s backup machine, a 1988 March with a Cosworth engine, at the last minute and wished him well.

“The job he did was great,” Bridges said. “He had virtually no time in the car. I told him to go out and get a feel for it, to go easy the first couple of (qualifying) laps but he said, ‘No, I’m ready.’ He wanted to go right out and qualify.

“I thought that was a bad decision but he did it and he was real calm about it. Calm and steady, real relaxed.

“There are a lot of race car drivers and then there are guys who drive race cars. He’s in that category.”

Which brings up the question, once more: If Vogler’s so good, why isn’t he driving for one of the big-time teams?

If it were still 1963, he probably would be, for in those days the progression for drivers was from midgets to sprint cars to Indy cars. A.J. Foyt, Parnelli Jones, Jim Hurtubise, almost everyone drove sprinters and midgets to Indy.

But in the mid-’60s, the rear-engine revolution cast a new light on things. Suddenly, previously scorned road racers--”sporty car drivers”--were being courted, thanks to their experience in rear-engine cars.

And in the late ‘70s, when Championship Auto Racing Teams (CART) replaced the United States Auto Club (USAC) as the sanctioning body for all Indy car racing except the 500 here, the trend went from oval-track racing to road and street racing, another blow to oval-track drivers.

This year, for instance, of the 14 CART-sanctioned events, only five are track races.

That means that although an oval-track veteran might come in handy for Indianapolis and the few other track races, hiring him for an entire season of predominantly road races is not viewed as a prudent business decision.

Vogler, who cut his teeth on oval-track racing, first in three-quarter midgets as a youngster, switching to the real thing when he was 19, simply got caught in the switches.

“I happened to come around (the Speedway) just about the time the Indy series turned,” he said. “I was brought up around oval-track racing, midgets. My dad had one before I was even born. We never went to a road race of any sort.”

None of which means that Vogler wouldn’t like a shot at turning right, as well as left.

“I got to make a buck and that’s what I do when I win a midget race or a sprint car race,” he said. “But if I could take off a couple of years and just go Super V racing, Formula Ford racing or something like that to get the road racing experience, (I would),” Vogler said.

But, of course, even that probably wouldn’t be enough.

“I haven’t taken off work to hang around the Indy car races and be at the right place at the right time,” he said.

“The Indy car series, you do have to go there with a pretty good sponsor and that’s the way you get the sponsors, be at the right party and have the right guy take a liking to you, or the right company, thinking they can use you.

“With me racing 80 times a year, trying to make a buck, I really don’t have time to do that.”

So, most likely, Vogler will go on being a short-track star who nibbles around the edges of the big time, driving here and, he hopes, in the 500s at Michigan and Pocono.

But there is a goal here he wants to accomplish. Although he has started four times here, he has never finished, crashing three times--2 1/2 times through no fault of his own, he said--and retiring with mechanical problems the other time.

“I know if I finish, I’ll be up toward the front,” he said. “Last year I was running fifth or sixth and I know if I could have finished, I would have been up there.

“My expectation is to make it through the first lap--that’s the first thing--and then finish the race.”

Then he can pack the family into the motor home and head out for a sprint car race. Surely there will be one somewhere on Monday.