REMEMBERING TIM RICHMOND : TOO FAST, TOO BRIEF : Driver’s Controversial Life Ends in Seclusion, Mystery; Death Cause Remains Secret

Tim Richmond was a hard man to understand. He ran so fast, in the fast lane of life, that the memories of his 34 years are filled more with intrigue, mystery and innuendo than with fact.

He died the same way, secretively. The end came last Sunday in a hospital in West Palm Beach, Fla. Perhaps in keeping with all that had preceded it, the announcement of his death was not made until Tuesday.

Richmond, with little background in a sport that insists on experience, made his mark with astonishing suddenness in sprint cars, Indy cars and in NASCAR races.

“As a driver, Tim had the most talent I’ve ever seen,” said Rick Hendrick, who owned the cars Richmond drove in 1986 and 1987 and who owns the cars that Darrell Waltrip drives. “He had that spark and charisma that could inspire awe in his driving.”

Few, even those who detested his flamboyant, nonconformist life style, would argue that point.

The first race car he drove was a super-modified in 1977. The next year, he was the United States Auto Club’s sprint car rookie of the year. In 1978, he attended Jim Russell’s driving school at Willow Springs International Raceway in Rosamond and became the fastest student the school ever had.

With only five Indy car races behind him, he went to the Indianapolis 500 in 1980 and posted the fastest time of the month during practice. He qualified fifth fastest, raced with the leaders much of the day before running out of gas and finishing ninth. He was voted rookie of the year over nine others, including Hurley Haywood and the Whittington brothers, Don and Bill.

Racing fans got their first good look at him when the race was over. When winner Johnny Rutherford took his victory lap, he saw Richmond walking back to the pits and motioned for him to climb aboard. Never one to miss an opportunity to showboat, Richmond climbed on the car’s side-pod and waved his finger in a No. 1 gesture, pointing to Rutherford as they cruised toward Victory Lane.

Stock cars caught his fancy that year, and in his second season with NASCAR he won his first Winston Cup race, on the road course at Riverside. In 1986, he won seven races, two more than champion Dale Earnhardt, and was the hottest driver in racing.

In parts of eight NASCAR seasons, he won 13 races--four at Riverside--and $2,228,558.

However, Richmond was derisively called “Hollywood” by his peers because of his shoulder-length hair, bushy mustache, dark glasses and often bizarre dress--all out of character in the conservative Southeastern stock car community.

And he always seemed to have Hollywood-style women on each arm when he wasn’t in his race car.

The son of well-to-do parents, Richmond grew up in Ashland, Ohio, and Miami with a fast attitude--be it cars, girls, or even planes. He learned to fly when he was 14 and by the time he was 17 had his license for multi-engine planes and helicopters.

He was a football and track star at Miami Military Academy, which he attended from 1969 to 1973, before deciding he wanted to become a race car driver.

He was used to getting his own way. When he was bumped from the 1981 Indianapolis 500 by a faster qualifier, his father bought a car from A.J. Foyt that George Snider had qualified so that Tim could race. He finished 14th in what was his last Indy car ride.

He also reveled in saying outlandish things. When he won a race at Riverside on Father’s Day, for instance, he said: “I want to dedicate this to my dad for Father’s Day, as long as I’m not a father--at least I don’t think I am.”

After winning the 1986 Winston Western 500 at Riverside, the year’s final race, he became the favorite to win the 1987 Daytona 500 and the Winston Cup championship, but he never made either. The health problems that apparently led to his death began during that off-season.

Richmond failed to make his team’s year-end Christmas party, and Hendrick reported that his driver was in a Cleveland hospital with life-threatening double pneumonia. After a month in the hospital and a month in bed at his mother’s home in Ashland, Richmond secluded himself in south Florida for another four months.

“Until I got sick, I wasn’t ever really content or happy,” he said later. “I was always more worried about getting to the next step down the road. I was always running. I felt like I should be at the top of the ladder and I couldn’t stand climbing up the rungs.”

Richmond made what appeared to be a miraculous return to racing in mid-season of 1987. After testing himself in the Winston, a 200-mile race, he entered the Pocono 500 on June 7 and won it. The emotion of winning, however, was not all a high.

“I cried all through the final lap, the first time I ever did that,” he said. “I couldn’t believe I was back, but the next day I had severe depression. It kind of scared me. I just sat and brooded about what might have been if I’d been with the team all year.

“I guess I’d thought about winning the championship so much, and when I won Pocono I proved we could do it, and when I realized we didn’t have a chance because of all the time I’d missed, it got to me.”

After Pocono, Richmond won at Riverside, and it appeared that his career was flourishing again.

His next race was to have been at Darlington, S.C., where he was defending champion in the Southern 500. He withdrew shortly before the race, however, complaining of a cough that threatened a relapse of pneumonia. Four days later, he resigned from Hendrick’s team.

“Maybe I tried to come back too soon or too fast,” he said. “I was trying to do too much and do it all myself. I’d race, do interviews, make appearances for the sponsor and then try to keep up with my personal life. I found it was too much.”

Even then, however, he still had his wild moments. While celebrating his Pocono victory one night in Indianapolis, he fell off the stage at a concert by Huey Lewis and the News.

Then, too, rumors persisted that something more serious than pneumonia had caused him to quit.

Two weeks before his death, rumors surfaced that he had already died, and there was as much talk in the Winston Cup garages about the reclusive Richmond and what had really happened as there was about lap times.

“I can’t tell you any more, but you’d better start getting your obit ready on Tim,” a mechanic buddy of Richmond’s said to a reporter a week before his death.

The death was listed officially as natural, but Richmond’s seclusion during the last year only spurred speculation.

Barry Dodson, who was the crew chief on Richmond’s car when he drove for Raymond Beadle’s Blue Max team in 1985, said: “I wish (Richmond’s family) would reveal the real cause because until they do, rumors are going to be continuously brought up. And that’s all they are, rumors.”

Richmond seldom did the ordinary thing. His moods and appearance ranged from the bizarre to the ridiculous.

Once, after winning a race at Watkins Glen, N.Y., Richmond appeared at the victory banquet wearing a peg-cuff suit that was as provocative as the two women he was escorting. Most of the other drivers were dressed in sports shirts and slacks, or jeans and racing jackets.

He once told Gary Long of the Miami Herald that he wanted to be Paul Newman in reverse--to go from being a champion race driver to a renowned actor. The closest he got was as a double for Burt Reynolds in racing scenes for the movie, “Stand On It.” Shortly before he was hospitalized in 1986, he had spent some time in Hollywood, taking acting classes.

He could be as offensive as he could be enjoyable.

He once showed up for a corporate executive’s luncheon looking as if he hadn’t slept or washed for a week, and almost cost his team its sponsorship.

Another time, he showed up to help promote a race in Atlanta and asked if the Atlanta Invitational was a golf tournament, a joke unappreciated by the sponsor.

When he began to wander in late for prerace drivers’ meetings, and fell asleep during one, fellow drivers questioned his dedication and allegedly asked NASCAR officials to investigate his habits. Although NASCAR denies the connection, it soon announced a drug-testing program.

“Obviously, Tim’s situation brought it out in the open,” said Geoff Bodine, Richmond’s teammate.

Richmond was the only one who failed the test and was suspended in January 1988, shortly before the season-opening Daytona 500. A later test showed that he had used only such non-prescription drugs as Sudafed and Advil, but in large doses. Richmond said he had been taking medication for a sinus problem.

NASCAR officials reinstated him but said he could not race without giving them his medical records.

Richmond refused and countered with a $20-million suit against the sanctioning body for defamation of character, claiming that NASCAR had released unsubstantiated information prematurely.

“If Tim Richmond is Peck’s bad boy, this does not give anybody the right to defame him,” Richmond’s lawyer, Barry Slotnick, said. “It has been a campaign of rumors and innuendo to keep him from driving in the Daytona 500.”

The suit cost Richmond a lot of support among his fellow racers.

“I’m not for anybody or anything who tries to destroy something most of us have spent 30 years trying to build up, and this seems to be what he’s trying to do,” said Richard Petty, the sport’s leading spokesman.

Richmond did not drive, but halfway through the running of the Daytona 500, a plane flew over the track pulling a banner that read, “Fans, I miss you. Tim Richmond.”

The suit was resolved out of court last January, and neither side would comment on the settlement.

“The case has been resolved and dismissed,” was NASCAR’s terse announcement.

Richmond never surfaced publicly after that, however. He lived on a boat in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., and associates claimed they saw him occasionally in bars along the south Florida waterfront, often barefoot and unkempt.

He was hospitalized in February after a motorcycle accident in which he allegedly fell and hit his head on the pavement. Nothing more was heard of him until the announcement of his death last Tuesday.

Tim Richmond is gone at 34, but the mystery lingers on.