This Driver Remains a Vision of Success

You picture a race driver and you picture a guy with the visual acuity of a circling hawk or a Ted Williams reading the rotation on a curveball.

If ever you needed a guy who could go right down to the bottom of an eye chart, who could tell you the sex of a flying gnat, it would seem to be in the corners at Indy.

Much has been made of the fact Danny Sullivan is trying to drive Indy with a broken arm. But look at it this way: He can see, can’t he?

How would you like to drive the Indy 500 blindfolded? By Braille?

It’s not that driver Bobby Rahal is blind, exactly. In a pinch, he could make out the “E” on the eye chart. Actually, it’s only his left eye that’s 20/200. His right eye is much better--around 20/150.

A lot of guys worry about getting their necks or backs broken on race day. Bobby worries about getting his glasses broken. He’d be better off losing a wheel.

You have to admire a guy who can climb in a cockpit on a day when the temperature of the air is 90, the car is 140, the humidity is near 100 percent. Then he wraps a woolen scarf around his mouth like a stagecoach robber, straps on a bubble helmet with the interior heat of an active volcano.

Your glasses have to fog up at those temperatures. It’d be hard to putt under those conditions, never mind tooling a 750-horsepower, man-eating engine down a main straight at 235 m.p.h.

So what’s a Bobby Rahal doing here in a contest with guys who would ask you which eye if you told them to shoot the eye out of a running squirrel? What is this, the Indy 500 or a Mr. Magoo cartoon? Does Jim Backus get the voice-over if they make it into a movie?

Well, for openers, Bobby Rahal has won this thing. He’s one of eight guys in this year’s grid who did so. He’s finished the race three of the seven times he’s qualified for it. If you don’t think that’s remarkable, you don’t know Indy. The attrition is just this side of the Battle of Jutland.

Indianapolis Motor Speedway is a place for a guy who’s fit enough to fight a bull with a knife and fork. If you can’t get in the Marines, you probably shouldn’t get in a race car. The directions aren’t arduous. You just turn left till you see the checkered (or the black) flag. You drive in a groove that’s already blackened with rubber.

But there are times when the tolerances are micron slim, when life turns one way and death the other.

There isn’t a driver in the race who would hesitate to take on Bobby Rahal in a corner. His brain is 20/20.

There are probably only seven racers in Sunday’s 500 who can win the race. Bobby Rahal is one of them.

He is the idol of every guy who ever squinted at a street sign or had trouble distinguishing the p’s from r’s on the eye chart. There was a time in this country when athletics were closed to guys who wore glasses. Dorothy Parker achieved immortality with her line “Gentlemen seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses,” but she could just as well have written, “Guys seldom throw passes to guys who wear glasses.”

Happily, this is all behind us. The days when the kid in eyeglasses would be labeled “Four-eyes” or “Perfessor” or “Specs” have disappeared. Calling a guy “Goggles” went out of style when Kareem Abdul-Jabbar showed up on court in them. Eric Dickerson gave optometry an enormous boost. Hale Irwin showed you could read an Open green through lenses. Richie Allen could hit homers in bifocals.

Still and all, Bobby Rahal managed to look as owlish as an appellate judge when he showed up in a race pit.

Indy race cars are going at speeds no one dreamed possible a decade or two ago. Mario Andretti, no less, who won this race 20 years ago after qualifying at 169.851 m.p.h., was asked if he ever dreamt that less than 20 years later, you would have to top 220 m.p.h. to win the pole and 213 just to get in the race. Mario shook his head. “We used to brake in those days. The way they’re running right now, you could just throw the brake pedal away. The only place you use it is in the pits.”

But if you don’t need brakes, you need eyes more than ever. Says Rahal: “Of course I wear my glasses. For me and for every one around me.” Why not contacts? “I can’t stand them,” he said. “I tried them and don’t like them.”

Race drivers, of course, like World War I pilots and spot-welders, have always worn leather-trimmed goggles. But they were to cut down the wind, not improve the vision. Rahal’s feat encourages the eyeglass set to expect to see a guy on a high wire any day now wearing horn-rimmed glasses.

Bobby Rahal would be a bona fide contender if he raced with a bag over his head. The race is supposed to belong to Rick Mears, who has been clocked around here going 226 m.p.h. Rick is on the pole and in, so to speak, the driver’s seat in this Indy 500. He has the Roger Penske chassis and the Chevrolet engine. That’s the automobile equivalent of an athlete being on steroids. Penske cars have won four out of the last five 500s. In fact, Bobby Rahal is the only one who upset the meticulous Penske program when he won in 1986.

Can Rahal do it again this year? “If a non-Chevy power can do it, I can,” insists Rahal. “We’re conceding four miles an hour to the Penskes.”

The history of the Indianapolis Speedway is, the fastest car does not always win. The fastest car, i.e., the pole winner, has only won 13 Indys (out of 72). The race motto is, to finish first, first you have to finish. In only seven races, Rahal is already 10th on the all-time money list.

When qualifying opened May 14, Rahal smoothly went out and put his car, a Cosworth-powered Lola, yesterday’s power plant around here, solidly in the field with four stylish laps of 219 m.p.h. Rahal has never been first at the start of the race, only the finish. His winning race speed, 170.722 (in 1986) is the fastest Indy ever run.

Still, he’s like the Harvard backfield. He can’t see without glasses. You have to wonder what he would do if he could. Probably hit the wall in Turn One. The cars are already going faster than you can think. Approaching the speed of sound. They may have already gone through the speed of sight anyway.