For Crawford, Racing Success Can Mean Only One Thing

The Indianapolis Motor Speedway likes to bite.

And for some reason, it likes to bite Jim Crawford, which seems unfair because the relocated Scotsman has forsaken all other tracks and race courses in an all-out effort to win here.

Of course, it was the jealous Speedway that insisted on that arrangement, then saw to it by biting Crawford, hard.

In 1987, having posted the third-fastest practice lap and trying to qualify for what would have been his third Indianapolis 500, Crawford hit the wall in the first turn, moments after having taken the green flag. He shattered both ankles and his right shinbone--it still carries three surgical steel rods--and made a mess of his knee as well.

He has spent lots of his time since then in operating rooms, undergoing rehabilitation and physical therapy, and he is a long way from finished with any of those. His right ankle needs to be wrapped every morning, since his foot has this painful and irritating habit of turning under, and when he has to walk anywhere it’s with the help of a cane.

So that was the worst bite, that crash in ’87. But it wasn’t the first. And it certainly wasn’t the last.

Crawford, 41, a veteran of European formula car racing and the Can-Am sports car series, tried Indy for the first time in 1984. He passed his driver’s test but failed to qualify.

He was nipped a bit the very next year, qualifying a car that later was disqualified for being 20 pounds underweight. Undaunted, he jumped into another, qualified it and drove it to 16th place.

He got involved in Buick’s fledgling engine development in ’86 and got his March, powered by the stock-block V-6, into the race, but didn’t keep it there very long, finishing only 70 laps. Another little nip.

Last year, another cruel, although less physically painful bite. Immediately after the race, Crawford was told he had finished second, was taken to a vacant garage serving as an interview room and asked to address the gathered reporters on his runner-up finish.

It turned out to be a strange session, since many of the writers suspected that Crawford had not been second at all, and he was pretty sure of that himself.

“There are very few races where you can spend 90 seconds in the pits with 10 laps to go and still finish second,” he said the other day. “But when the result shows you were second, you don’t run up there and say, ‘No, I wasn’t.’ ” Long after the interview was over, Crawford learned that his suspicions had been correct. Indeed, he hadn’t finished second.

“I went to fifth, first, and then about 30 minutes later, I went to sixth,” he said. “That’s when I left the track, just in case.”

This year’s race has yet to be run--it will be today--but already Crawford has had to withstand another mauling.

After qualifying fourth in his Lola-Buick, he hit the wall again during a subsequent practice session.

“That was a big crash,” Danny Sullivan said, comparing Crawford’s misadventure to his own, in which he suffered a broken right arm. “I can’t believe he walked out of that crash. It hurt me just watching.”

Crawford, however, escaped with minor injuries, although the car was all but demolished, which made for some anxious moments for both driver and crew.

The rules here say that once a driver qualifies a car, he must drive that car in the race or move to the rear of the field. Or, qualify another car, which in this case would have meant a certain inferior starting position, if any.

There didn’t seem to be enough left of Crawford’s car to fix for the race but neither Crawford nor car owner Kenny Bernstein wanted to give up that starting spot at the inside of the second row. So the crew salvaged as much as it could of the tub, the car’s main component, and shipped it to the Lola plant in England for repair.

Lola described it as the worst repair job it had ever run up against but put six men on it, round the clock, got it fixed and sent it back. It arrived at the track at 9 p.m. Wednesday and Crawford’s crew spent the rest of the night marrying it with parts of the backup car so that Crawford could make Thursday’s mandatory final practice.

“It’s interesting because 90% of the car I ran today was parts from our (backup) car,” Crawford said after Thursday’s running. “It’s just a matter of doing things by the letter of the law.”

All of that to get into a race that never has treated him right. But then Crawford puts up with it all and doesn’t complain much. He shrugs a lot.

Last year, for instance, his right ankle was held in place--it no longer is--by a steel plate and half a dozen screws. As he drove, the up-and-down motion of his swollen foot on the accelerator caused a rubbing against the ankle. By the end of the race, the skin was rubbed away from the ankle, exposing a bloody screw head. Crawford shrugged, and limped off to the runner-up’s interview.

He talks calmly and dispassionately of his crashes, describing the most recent this way:

“The left lower A bracket that holds the (rear) wheel on parted company with the gear box and allowed the left wheel to fall over just a little bit. That causes the back of the car to drop and lifts the front, because the suspension is so stiff on these things. And as the back drops, the front wheel lifts off the ground and just goes its merry way.”

And the car hits the wall.

“You haven’t got time to think, it was so quick,” Crawford said. “By the time I realized something was wrong, I was about 10 feet from the wall. You barely have time to brace yourself.”

He also hopes that this, finally, will be his year here.

“It was very nearly perfect,” he said of his rebuilt car after driving it Friday.

And although conventional wisdom says the Buick engines here are doomed to early failure today, Crawford thinks otherwise.

“In four years, it’s become a completely different engine,” he said. “When they first started, you drove the car with your fingers crossed. Now, it’s an out-of-the-ordinary occurrence if something goes wrong with it. If something goes wrong with our engines, it’s at least as rare as something going wrong with any other racing engine.”

Because of his bad foot--it really is offset a bit from the bottom of the leg--Crawford is unable to drive road races, which, considering his background, should be his forte.

“It’s a completely different (driving) technique now than I used before,” he said. “I have to use my left foot more. That’s why ovals are easier but road courses (which require constant shifting and braking) are more difficult.”

And since Buick’s engine program concerns itself only with Indianapolis, and its resulting high exposure, Crawford has no ride for the other oval track races on the circuit. Although he spends much of his time testing here, he is, in effect, a one-race driver.

That, however, is a situation he hopes to change, surgically and soon.

“It will come down to (another year of) testing or going straight into another surgery to try and straighten my right foot out,” he said. “After two years of physical therapy, it isn’t geting any better, and I presume that it isn’t (going to).

“In the morning, I go to physical therapy and they crank it straight and tape it up like a football player’s foot. But I can’t stop it from bending under during the day.”

Crawford figures now is the time to have his next operation, giving himself until next season to recuperate.

“We’ll decide in the next couple of days,” he said. “I had a CAT scan a week ago and the doctors have to make a model that they can chip and grind away at to see how to do the operation. I don’t think it’s a very easy operation.

“But I might as well have it done. There’s nothing (else) to do anyway. Then I’ll be fit for next season. By next season’s Indy 500, maybe people won’t be talking about it anymore. Maybe I won’t be limping around anymore.”

And maybe he will be able to drive other races. And maybe the Speedway won’t bite him anymore. Maybe.