No Luster on His Indy Star

You’re Emerson Fittipaldi and everything’s all right. Car owners are fighting to put you in the driver’s seat. You get your pick of the cars, the crews, the parts. You fly first class, stay in the Palace. Money is no object.

You’re Danny Sullivan, any Andretti, Rick Mears, Bobby Rahal, and you’re getting in the automotive elite. The Roger Penske team, the Babe Ruth Yankees of auto racing, is courting you. You get machines hand-tooled for speed in elegant test centers in England. You get a garage full of the best backup engines the industry can tool. You’re a celebrity, people want your autograph. You’re auto racing’s answer to Bo Jackson, Joe Montana.

Then, there are the other guys. There are more of them. They fill out the field. They scramble for rides. They prowl the garages of Gasoline Alley, helmet in hand, gloves at the ready. Sometimes, they get in mystery cars. They qualify in used cars, last year’s models put together with Scotch tape and baling wire.

They’re the real heart of Indianapolis racing. Without them, there’s no 500. They have no real expectation of winning. But they don’t care. They’re just glad to be there. They talk of “making the show,” not winning the race. They’re spending thousands of dollars while the big factories are spending millions. It’s like trying to win the Kentucky Derby with a burro. They know all they’ll see of Penske’s cars is tailpipes, but hey, someone’s got to do it.

Indy knows who they are. They’re the spear carriers in this automotive opera. Their best hope is for major attrition. They need 25 cars to drop out of the race. They’re like guys buying a ticket on a lottery. They can’t run with the big boys, but maybe they can outlast them.

They had names such as Tingelstad and Dallenbach and Krisiloff and Gehlhausen. They were there every year, good drivers in bad cars, magnificent young men in their washing machines.

Sometimes, they escaped the chorus line. Johnny Rutherford used to be one of them till he got noticed, graduated from the back of the pack and become a speedway legend, a three-time winner. Gordon Johncock had to claw his way onto the front row before he became a two-time winner.

They know it’s a longshot, but so was Buster Douglas. You can’t win if you don’t play, and they call for cards even though they get into something that cynical mechanics say is “guaranteed for 30 miles or 30 seconds, whichever comes first.”

Scott Brayton knows the view from near the back of the pack as well as anybody. Scott knows what it is to try to win this pot with a pair of treys. He’s been in eight Indy races. He fills out the dance card faithfully--but you don’t see him in any of the full-page tire ads the day after. He’s usually trying to nurse a sick car through the chutes hoping nothing critical falls off and the oil doesn’t leak.

Scott Brayton has 20/10 vision: he can see at 20 feet what you have to go to 10 to make out. He’s been driving a car since he learned to talk. Some kids want a pony for Christmas, he wanted something with an engine in it. He dumped a go-kart in a snowbank when he was 6.

He laughs a lot and he talks a lot. Life is pretty uncomplicated for Scott. He just climbs in a car, floors it and sees how far he can go.

Scott Brayton could probably take one of those Penske Chevies and put it right where Rick Mears does--on the front row, in the lead for 160 or so laps and maybe in Victory Lane.

But Scott Brayton does not get one of those Penske Chevrolets. Scott Brayton is one of the hitchhikers of Gasoline Alley. He has to thumb a ride.

He does very well, all things considered. In 1985, he came within 2/10ths of a second of the pole. He qualified his Buick with the fastest qualifying lap ever turned at the Speedway until then--214.199 m.p.h.--but the transmission broke in the stretch on qualifying day, and he had to coast across the finish line to the second spot. Everyone at the track knew the untried Buick wouldn’t last much longer than the national anthem, but his lasted a bit longer than teammate Pancho Carter’s, 19 laps to six.

Getting in the race is always lump-in-the-throat business for the Scott Braytons, but he cheerfully sets about it each season. About two years ago, he became a distributor for Amway household products, and it occurred to him these entrepreneurial characters were naturals for auto race sponsorships. “I was making a talk and I realized there wasn’t a negative person in the room,” he said. “They dealt in positives.”

Brayton deals in positives, too. Back-row bumpers have to. “My first year at the Speedway (1981), I had talked a sponsor into putting $35,000 into my team,” Brayton says. “But I had to make the race or it was no deal. I had find to find six more miles per hour with time running out.”

Back-row crews always have to find six more miles. “I had to wave off two qualifying attempts and I was down to my last one and it was 4:45 on the last day of qualifying,” Brayton says. “Now, I believe in the Lord. I don’t preach, but I prayed to find those six more miles per hour. Just then, a friend of my father’s came up and told him, ‘Your son’s blowing a popoff valve. If you drill this little hole in the exhaust, you’ll stop losing that power.’ So, we did it--and if that hadn’t happened, you wouldn’t be talking to me now.”

He got in the race in the 10th row, ran 174 laps and finished 16th.

Those are the kinds of things the back-row bunch have to do to get on the track. They’re used to it. This year, Brayton was turning a nice groove, heading up over 220 on a qualifying run when, suddenly, his pit crew forgot to signal the flagman it was a run. With a car full of run, Brayton suddenly found himself facing a yellow, get-off-the-track light.

He had to re-qualify. On a windier day and a slower track. But that’s life in the caboose of the race. Don’t look for Scott Brayton up there with the soloists in this auto opera. He’ll be back there with the boys in the band, the stagehands, the understudies. They’re just hoping for the day the stars can’t make it, and they get their names in lights for a change. Scott Brayton is surrogate for every Dick Simon, Mike Mosley or Roger McCluskey who ever teed it up in here with high hopes and smoking car and made the race but not the headlines.