Rich, Fast Rick Mears Eyes Third in a Row : Auto racing: After finishing ’89 and beginning ’90 with victories, driver heads for Long Beach, where he has never found success.

In Indy car racing, the rich are getting richer and the fast are getting faster. And Rick Mears wouldn’t want it any other way.

That is because (1) Mears is closing in on $7 million in Indy car earnings, which could move him ahead of Mario Andretti as the all-time money-winner. Andretti has won $6,983,623 in 27 seasons. After winning two weeks ago in Phoenix in the 1990 opener, Mears, in his 15th year, is only $41,094 behind Andretti.

And (2) Mears set a track record at Phoenix of 168.169 m.p.h., despite new rules designed to decrease speeds. And he has already tested at 221 m.p.h. at Indianapolis in less than ideal weather, which means that his year-old Indy record of 224.254 m.p.h. is probably in jeopardy.

When Mears, 39, was told that his victory at Phoenix looked “ho-hum,” he laughed and replied: “Ho-hum is the best kind. I’d like all of them to be that way.”

The veteran driver from Bakersfield, whose racing roots go back to off-road competition at Ascot Park and in the desert, has won the last two Championship Auto Racing Teams PPG Indy Car races--the 1989 season finale at Laguna Seca in a Penske PC-18 and this year’s opener at Phoenix in a newly designated Pennzoil Penske Chevy 90.

Sunday, in the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach, he hopes to make it three in a row, over a twisting street circuit where he has had no luck. In five starts, his best finish was a fifth last year, when he never challenged the front-runners, winner Al Unser Jr. and Andretti.

Many observers have thought that the Penske team’s lack of success at Long Beach, where Danny Sullivan also has failed to win, is because it slights the street circuit to concentrate on the Indianapolis 500, racing’s big banana, which comes up next. Mears insists that is not so.

“We have never had a good test track to prepare our equipment,” he said. “It’s difficult to prepare for a street circuit because you can’t test on city streets. We’ve always worked hard, but when we tested at places like Laguna Seca, Riverside, Willow Springs and Firebird, over in Phoenix, we didn’t learn what we needed because we couldn’t really duplicate the conditions you find on a street course.

“This year, we tested at West Palm Beach (Fla.) on a track that is as close as it can be to Long Beach. Emmo (Emerson Fittipaldi) tested there last year and was pleased with what he learned. I’m anxious to get on the track Friday to see how we compare with everybody else.”

Fittipaldi, now one of Mears’ teammates on Penske’s three-man super team, drove for the Pat Patrick-Chip Ganassi team last year and went on from Long Beach to win the Indianapolis 500 and the PPG Cup driving championship.

The ability to drive successfully on a temporary circuit will take on added importance in this year’s 16-race schedule with the addition of street courses in Denver and Vancouver, Canada, and the dropping of the big oval at Pocono, Pa.

Qualifying for Sunday’s 158.65-mile race--95 laps of an 11-turn, 1.67-mile course--will begin today at 2 p.m., with the race shaping up as the field against Penske. And even though the Penske trio has never won at Long Beach, the way they’ve been running, this may be the year.

Penske drivers have won the last four races: Sullivan at Road America, Wis.; Fittipaldi at Nazareth, Pa., and Mears at Laguna Seca and Phoenix. Mears has won the last three poles, all at track-record speeds.

Much of the team’s success has been credited to the British-built V-8 engines that Penske helped develop in concert with Chevrolet and Ilmor Engineering of Brixworth, England. Those engines won 14 of 15 races last year, losing only in the rain at Meadowlands, N.J., where Bobby Rahal piloted a Cosworth-powered car to victory.

Mears, however, insists that the engine is only part of the story.

“The Chevrolet engine, obviously, is the best engine out there,” he said. “But as more teams get Chevys, it will become apparent that it isn’t magic just to have the Chevy. A lot of guys complain about the ones who have them, but I think if you looked closely, you’d find that there is more to the winning team’s superiority than just the engine. It is a total package, from the owner to the driver to the crew to the sponsor to everyone connected with putting the car on the track.

“Watch what happens this year. Instead of six drivers with Chevy engines, there are 10. Will they all be winners? I don’t think so, unless they develop a team unity to match the engine.”

The new Chevy-powered cars will be driven by Rahal, A. J. Foyt, Arie Luyendyk and Eddie Cheever, joining the Penske trio, Unser and Mario and Michael Andretti.

Surprisingly, Mears believes that having three drivers on one team is a help, rather than a hindrance, for the Penske forces. It has never worked before, and most drivers admit to prefering to be a one-driver team, rather than two--and certainly not three.

“It gives us more testing, a broader outlook and frees us up to do more of our off-track work, which is growing every day,” Mears said. “We can trade off testing time and know there will be no drop in quality. If one of us has a sponsor to answer to, there are still two left for testing. And it’s good to have someone like Danny or Emmo confirm what I might have found during a test.”

Mears is considered one of the premier test drivers in racing. The significance that Penske places in his judgment was never more apparent than at Phoenix.

After the car set a track record in qualifying Saturday afternoon, the engine was replaced, and Mears went out for a few laps to break it in for the following day’s 200-mile race.

“I only had time for two fast laps, but I didn’t like the tone it made. There was something about it that sounded different. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I mentioned it to my engineer (Pete Gibbons) and my crew chief (Richard Buck). While I was still mulling it over in my mind what to do, Buck was dismantling the engine and getting ready to put a new one in.

“That’s part of what I mean by a total-package team. The crew had just changed the engine an hour or so earlier, and here they were, taking it out and changing it again. We didn’t know if anything was wrong or not--we still don’t--but there was a question in my mind, so they reacted. It takes nearly two hours to change one of our engines, but they never hesitated.”

That was only part of the job. The next morning, with car owner Penske, who had flown in from Tokyo a day earlier, personally directing the operation, the car was hauled a few miles away to the Goodyear Airport, so that Mears could test it.

“We knew it was a strong engine because we’d had it on the dyno, but we had to run it to make sure the carburetor worked properly for our pit stops, and we had to make sure there were no leaks, no water or oil dripping out, after it was installed,” Mears said.

“I drove it around in a circle a few times to get it warmed up, and then I ran it down the runway with a burst of speed like you’d run a dragster. Then I’d turn around and do the same thing coming back. When we were satisfied everything was in place, we took it back to the track.

“The way the car performed (in the race) was absolutely beautiful. For a brand-new car, it was as perfect as it could be. Nigel (designer Nigel Bennett) had made only the most minute changes, mostly in the aerodynamics because of the new rules that reduced the groundforce from last year’s PC-18. He doesn’t believe in going off with radical ideas. He’d rather take what’s working and try to make it better.

“When he finishes with the drawings, Richard Buck takes over and puts together what I believe, at every race, is the best car on the track. Last year was his first as crew chief, and the car finished every race but one.”

But that is the one most people remember. It was Indianapolis, where Mears fell out with a broken piston, ending for a year his hopes of joining Foyt and semi-retired Al Unser as four-time winners of the 500.

“You can’t test a piston to see if it’ll break,” Mears said. “I think a bad batch of pistons got sent to Indy. Michael Andretti had the same problem, and it never happened anywhere else.

“But, hey, we had a very good month up to that point.”

It could even have been called a “ho-hum” month for Mears. Which just goes to prove that in racing there’s no such a thing as a “ho-hum” race--even if it looks that way when Mears is cruising along in front of the pack.