MOTOR RACING / Shav Glick : Redican Is Still Sprinting at 45

At 45, an age when most race drivers are thinking about hanging up helmet and gloves, John Redican is experiencing a sprint car renaissance.

Redican won the California Racing Assn.’s opening main event last month in Bakersfield and, going into tonight’s opener at Ascot Park, leads the CRA standings with 379 points to 351 for Jerry Meyer of Chino, last year’s runner-up.

Defending champion Ron Shuman, without a victory after three races--two others were rained out--is fifth.

Redican, who lives in Chatsworth with Kathy Simpson, his girlfriend-car owner, has been racing since 1968 but sees this year as his first serious challenge for a season championship.

“With the start we got and the support we’re getting from our sponsors, this could turn out to be a fantastic year,” Redican said. “It would be even more fantastic if we could win the final season at Ascot.”

Ascot is scheduled to close in November, after 33 years.

“It’s hard to believe that just over a year ago we were going to chuck it in, and I was going to take a ride with someone else,” Redican said. “The costs had escalated so fast that we couldn’t sustain our car any longer.”

A phone call from Sherman Pickerell of Pick’s Racing Engines in Irvine brought Redican and Simpson out of contemplated retirement.

“Pick called and said he’d provide us with engines if we kept racing, and he wanted to do it anonymously,” Redican said. “You don’t find many sponsors like that. We were overwhelmed. Then Rose Noutary came along and said she wanted to help by getting us a chassis, so now she and Kathy are sort of co-owners and things couldn’t be working out better.

“I go to the track now believing that I can win. It wasn’t always that way.”

Redican has been interested in racing since he was 4, when his father, Skee, took him to Ascot Park and other tracks where he raced midgets and sprint cars.

“I used to drive my mother nuts, telling her I was going to drive a race car as soon as I was old enough,” he said. “She’d had enough of racing with my dad and didn’t really want me in it.”

Redican drove his first sprint car at the defunct Speedway 605 in Irwindale in 1968, but outside of a victory in the Salute to Indy 100 at Ascot in 1977, he had little success until he met Simpson in 1980.

She came from a racing family and had been a racing enthusiast since she was a teen-ager. Although she drove stock cars, her dream had always been to own a sprint car, and she bought her first in 1979. A year later, after getting a new Stanton chassis, she hired Redican to drive.

Redican credits her for boosting his confidence and turning him into a winning driver.

“Kathy came to me one night and said, ‘You’re lazy. You’re not getting near as much out of the car as you should,’ ” he recalled. “She told me that she didn’t want a driver who wasn’t trying as hard as he could; that she didn’t want someone who was content to cruise along in fourth or fifth place and be happy. Which, she said, was the way I was driving.

“Well, you can imagine how furious it made me. This was long before we started dating, and it was a female car owner telling me I’d better shape up or move on. Of course, it turned out she was right, but it’s hard to hear something like that when you’re 36 or 37 and been racing all your life.”

Redican has 13 victories in CRA, 10 of them in the last three seasons. He won four races in 1987, one in 1988--when he broke a knee in a crash at Ascot and missed part of the season--four last year and one this year. He finished third and fourth in this year’s two other races.

Car reliability has been a key to Redican’s recent success. Last year he started all 53 CRA races, a feat matched only by Meyer.

“We only broke three times in 53 races, and we’ve only had two engine failures in 130 races in the last three years,” he said. “That’s a real testimony to the kind of engines (Chevy Donovans) we get from Pick.”

Redican, director of parts and service at a Hollywood car dealership, does his own chassis work along with three volunteers--Danny Grunkemyer, Jim Hudkins and Craig Stowell.

“Every day, except race day, it’s the same,” Redican said. “I work 10 hours at the agency, come home, eat and head straight for the garage and work until 11 or 12. It seems like that’s been my routine for 22 years.”

Redican will face a stiff challenge tonight in the 30-lap main event. Three Arizona drivers--Shuman, Lealand McSpadden and Billy Boat--will race, along with such local favorites as Meyer, Rip Williams, Mike Sweeney and two-time champion Brad Noffsinger.

Redican once thought of racing Indy cars or stock cars, but he is content to stick with Kathy Simpson and his sprint car.

“At my age, it’s more practical to be the big fish in the little pond than the other way around,” he said.

SPEEDWAY BIKES--National champion Bobby Schwartz will carry a big lead into the final round of the Coors Spring Classic series tonight at the Earl Warren Showgrounds in Santa Barbara. Schwartz, who won last week in Costa Mesa, has 66 points to 60 for Kelly Moran, who won the opener at Long Beach two weeks ago.

MOTOCROSS--Multi-national champion Rick Johnson will miss tonight’s Supercross at Las Vegas and next week’s at the Rose Bowl after breaking a finger in a fall last week at Daytona. Johnson, who missed most of the 1989 season, won the opening motos of the national 250cc outdoor series at Gainesville, Fla., and hopes to race in the second round April 1 at Hangtown . . . The CMC Amateur Nationals will be held this weekend at Glen Helen Park in San Bernardino.