AUTO RACING LAGUNA SECA QUALIFYING - Pole Win Is End of Long Road for Mears

Now, Rick Mears hopes, people will quit bugging him about not being able to drive a road race course as well as his fellow Indy car drivers.

Mears edged his Penske teammate, Danny Sullivan, with a record-breaking lap of 110.168 m.p.h. in a dramatic last-minute effort Friday around Laguna Seca’s twisting road course. That earned him the pole position for Sunday’s Champion Spark Plug 300-kilometer race.

It was the first road race course pole for the Bakersfield veteran since 1982 at Elkhart Lake, Wis., which had been his only one until Friday. In the meantime, he has won 30 poles at oval tracks.

“Getting the pole at this track means a lot to me,” Mears said. “I’ve been close before and I’ll admit it’s a little bit of a relief to win one on the road.”

Mears did not know that Sullivan had zipped a lap at 109.628 m.p.h. moments before, knocking Italian Teo Fabi off the top spot.

“I thought Fabi was on the pole, but I wasn’t concerned with that, really,” Mears explained. “What I wanted was to get the tires to come in at the right time, to get all the corners right and get a clean lap. When it was over, I knew it was my fastest but you never know what the other guys are doing.”

Fabi, who brought Porsche its first Indy car win when he won last month at Mid-Ohio, dropped to third-fastest at 109.471.

It was the fourth time this season that Mears has broken a track record. The old Laguna Seca mark was 107.283 set last year by Sullivan.

Nine drivers bettered the year-old record, which Mears credited to resurfacing of the 11-turn, 2.214-mile circuit.

“It’s definitely a lot nicer,” Mears said. “You don’t have to hold your breath as much. The new surface eliminated some bumps in one of the corners and that really helped.”

Mears traces his reputation as not being the quickest of drivers on multi-turn courses to his accident in September, 1984, at the Sanair track in Canada that severely crippled both his feet.

“I didn’t drive on a road course for a year after the accident because of all the shifting, and our learning curve stopped and the others continued with their learning,” he said. “Then when Sullivan joined our team, I found myself being compared with one of the fastest there is on a road course.

“It seemed like I wasn’t gaining, but I really was. I had Sullivan to use as my yardstick. I’ve worked very hard since 1984 to get to this position today.”

Sunday’s race will end the 15-race Championship Auto Racing Teams season and a win by Mears could tie him with Emerson Fittipaldi in PPG points. Fittipaldi, however, has already clinched the championship, even if he and Mears end up deadlocked in points, because the Brazilian driver has the most wins, five. Mears has two.

“I still think it would be neat to tie Emmo,” Mears said. “I’d get a big kick out of that.”

Fittipaldi will collect $400,000 for winning his first PPG/CART championship to go with the two Formula One titles he won. Second place pays $250,000.

Two drivers, Bobby Rahal and Michael Andretti, could win $400,000 merely by winning today’s Marlboro Challenge, a 100-mile sprint with a field of only 10. The winner’s purse for the race is $250,000, but Rahal and Andretti are in line for a $150,000 bonus from the sponsor because they earlier won races sponsored by Marlboro.

Rahal won at the Meadowlands in New Jersey, and Andretti won at Michigan International Speedway.

The younger Andretti is defending champion, having won last year in Miami. When the Miami race was dropped from the CART schedule, the Challenge was added to this weekend’s Laguna Seca package.

Drivers became eligible by either winning a race, winning a pole position or finishing in the top 10 in the PPG Cup standings.

Fittipaldi and Mears will start in the front row, with Michael Andretti and Sullivan in the second row. Rahal will start seventh.

A. J. Foyt, who was injured in an accident at Charlotte, N.C., two weeks ago while practicing for a NASCAR stock car race, could not get a medical release to drive here, so he turned over his No. 14 car to Rocky Moran, the part-time driver from Pasadena.

Moran, who had problems getting up to speed during morning practice, qualified 20th at 104.278.

“It was Foyt’s magic,” Moran said. “When I first went out there, the car was sliding around and had no grip. I came in, he made some changes and it was a whole new race car.”

Foyt’s reaction: “Maybe I make a better team manager than driver!”