When He Drives, It’s Beautiful

The other drivers called him “Hollywood.” They thought he was too pretty to be in a race car. The back seat of a limo, perhaps. His profile would get mussed, his hair out of place. This wasn’t Warner Bros., they warned him. This was for real. Nobody would call, “Cut!” if the car turned right. He couldn’t hire a stuntman for the race scenes. You had to do your own stunts here. There were no happy endings guaranteed. The star could get killed off in the first reel in this melodrama.

The first time he saw A. J. Foyt in his rear-view mirror, they predicted, he would go running back to makeup. Or the comparative safety of driving a cab in New York. They figured he was being a race driver just to have something to do till polo started up. Or he got tired of the yacht club. He would be out of there the first time he hit a wall or spun in traffic.

That was nine years ago. Danny Sullivan is still sitting in a race car every week strapping a helmet on, revving an engine and crossing himself. When A. J. Foyt--or any Unser, or any Andretti, or any Fittipaldi, for that matter--sees him in the rear-view mirror, they know they’d better turn up the boost.

You’re supposed to get race drivers out of Torrance garages, not posh military schools or state universities. They’re not supposed to have movie star good looks or rich fathers.

In Europe, royalty races--but boredom is the enemy of the titled classes. In America, the privileged get into the bond market, not the Indy 500. You don’t get race drivers out of Yale--or, in the case of Danny Sullivan, the University of Kentucky. You get them out of lube racks, off drag strips.

It wasn’t long before “Hollywood” became “Sully.” “Danny Boy” became “that *&!%!! Sullivan!”

There have been race drivers who were perceived as dilettantes before. They weren’t. Peter Revson and Mark Donohue both died in race cars. They were the real article. They rode to win. So does Danny Sullivan.

You’re not a race driver till you run at Indy. You’re not a star till you win. Danny Sullivan not only won the world’s most prestigious race, he did it surviving a 360-degree spin in the north chute and through a shower of crashing cars and runaway tires. An Indy race always manages to look at some point as if a naval engagement were in progress, but Danny’s year was a banner year for flying debris.

He and the wall at Indy are no strangers. Kissing cousins, you might say. He kissed it in his rookie year. He smacked it again in 1988 after leading the first 91 laps. And he hit it again in 1989. He drove with a broken arm that year. He twice set the single-lap record at Indy--both times it was broken by teammate Rick Mears. He has started in the front row twice but won from a start in the middle of the third row. If his cars are fast, he makes them faster.

He is the most famous Sullivan since John L. Race drivers tend to live in Indianapolis or Houston or Albuquerque, the gasoline alleys of America. Danny lives in Aspen. “I think so” is a long answer for most race drivers, followed sometimes by “Get outta here!” Danny hires a high-powered Hollywood firm, Rogers & Cowan, to handle his speaking engagements and public appearances. He has appeared on episodes of Miami Vice. He is no Garbo, but he avoids on-track friendships since his best friend on the track, Gunnar Nielsen, died tragically. “You sort of dare not get close,” he explains.

His life would be a nice part for Paul Newman, except Danny could probably handle it himself.

He didn’t set out to be a racer. He was well on his way to being a chorus boy. “He went to New York for a weekend and stayed three years,” recalled his mother, Peggy, at a prerace party for the Long Beach Grand Prix the other day. He was a waiter, cab driver, chicken farmer and playboy.

The family dispatched a family friend, Dr. Frank Falkner, to see if they could find him and rescue him from his young-man-about-Manhattan lifestyle before it became a way of life and he became a kind of complicated mannequin. “Check the tennis courts,” they told him.

Falkner promised the young Sullivan he would get him into auto racing if he would promise to return to college. The doctor then sent Danny not to Lexington, but to his native England to driving school to learn how to take Formula Ones into the corners. “He’s the best we have here, a born driver,” the school informed Dr. Falkner. The good doctor was appalled. “How can I tell his family?” he groaned.

He needn’t have worried. “Nothing Danny does surprises us,” Peggy Sullivan told him cheerily. “He never does what you want him to anyway.”

Danny Sullivan is at a crossroads in his career as the traveling Indy car circus arrives in Long Beach for the Toyota Grand Prix this weekend. Cutbacks in the highly competitive, highly expensive racing car market have seen him cut from the lordly Penske team, the Notre Dame of racing. He leaves the tried-and-true Penske Chevy for the newcomer Alfa Romeo.

A fourth-place finish in the opening competition of the PPG Indy Car series at Queensland, Australia, gives Sullivan 12 points (to winner John Andretti’s 20) in the 17-race rodeo, which has stops at Indy, Elkhart, Monterey and the streets of Cleveland, Detroit, Denver and Vancouver before the season is out. It’s a championship he won once, in 1988, and he was sixth last year.

He qualified 16th for today’s race.

But even if he were to race in a stock pickup with a dog in the back, no one is putting Danny down any more or suggesting he go back to Central Casting and get into a surfing movie. No one says, “What’s the matter--skiing bad?”

The girls might not like the classic profile covered up in a bubble helmet and flameproof bandanna, but Danny Sullivan, movie-star good looks and tango dancer’s figure and all, is a tough competition on the streets or ovals. No one wants him in the rear-view mirror, either, although if he’s not there, it might be because he’s a half a lap in front.