No Monkey Business : Victory at Phoenix Eases the Mental Load for Defending Indy 500 Champion Arie Luyendyk

A month ago, Arie Luyendyk was not looking forward to returning to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. He had won the Indianapolis 500 last year, but had done nothing since. He did not want to face the obvious questions.

“Everywhere I went, the first thing people wanted to know was why I hadn’t won since Indy,” he said. “It was getting pretty tiresome, especially since I didn’t have an answer. I knew that was all I would hear and I dreaded it.”

Then, on April 21, he won the Valvoline 200 at Phoenix, a victory nearly as surprising as the one at Indy, the first race he had won in an Indy car.

“Now I have good feelings about being here,” he said. “What do you say in America, get the monkey off my back?”

He turned around, as if to see if the monkey was still there.

“See, it’s gone,” he said, laughing.

As defending champion in next Sunday’s 75th 500, Luyendyk (pronounced LYE-un-dike) carries No. 1 on the sides of the bright orange Lola-Chevy he drives for the Phoenix-based UNO-Granatelli team owned by Bob Tezak and Vince Granatelli. In all other races this year, he is No. 9.

It is a totally different team from the one that won here last year. That one was owned by Doug Shierson, who had hired Luyendyk away from Dick Simon after the 1989 season to drive one of the hard-to-get Chevy-powered cars for his team.

Then shortly after the 500, his sponsor dropped out of racing and Shierson sold the team to Tezak, creator of the UNO card game and founder of International Games, Inc.

“Everything got confusing as the year went along and the worst thing, from a driver’s viewpoint, is that the budget didn’t allow for any testing,” Luyendyk said. “Consequently, we never capitalized on the momentum from our Indy win. It was just a very frustrating situation.

“The reason we did well here last year is because we had time to test and get the chassis working the way we wanted. We had nearly a month at the Speedway to fine-tune the car. At all the other places, we have about three hours to practice, so if you don’t do any prerace testing, it gives a tremendous advantage to the teams with the big budgets.”

In 13 races after Indy, Luyendyk’s best finish was a fourth at the Meadowlands in New Jersey. On five occasions, he failed to finish.

“I don’t want to say I was totally frustrated, but the most exciting thing for me all year (after Indy) was when I passed Emmo (Emerson Fittipaldi) for the lead at Michigan. I felt like I’d won the race, but it didn’t last long. The engine quit and we finished 19th.”

At the end of the season, two teams seemingly going nowhere got together when Tezak joined Granatelli and moved Luyendyk and his team from Adrian, Mich., to Granatelli’s state-of-the-art racing garage in Phoenix.

“I couldn’t believe it when Bob (Tezak) told me the team was moving to Phoenix because I was already living in (neighboring) Scottsdale,” Luyendyk said. “It was too good to be true, and we had two tracks (Phoenix International Raceway and Firebird Raceway) close by where we could test.”

Granatelli had been contemplating quitting racing before talking with Tezak. Didier Theys had been unable to do much with Granatelli’s underpowered Buick during the 1990 season and the best his threesome of Theys, Tom Sneva and Kevin Cogan could do at Indy was ninth.

“It was no fun to be running for 10th place every race, with no hope of finishing much higher,” Granatelli said. “If I had not made the deal with Bob and Arie, I probably would not be in CART today. I had just had enough racing without having fun.”

Another plus was Granatelli’s hiring of Maurice (Mo) Nunn as chief engineer. Nunn engineered Fittipaldi’s Indy 500 victory and CART PPG Cup driving championship for Pat Patrick’s team in 1989.

“Our team got started later than most, so I really wasn’t expecting a whole lot until we started to jell,” Luyendyk said. “Then we went to Phoenix for a test session, before the Australia race, and I ran quicker than I ever did there, in testing, practice or qualifying. I figured then we had the potential to do something big.

“Last year, our team managed to test only five days outside of Indy, and this year, by mid-February, we were ahead of that. Testing can, and usually does, mean the difference between winning and losing. I was already feeling good before the season started because of it.

“In the first race (Gold Coast, Australia) we finished ninth, but could have been a lot higher except for a freak pit incident. Then we got fifth at Long Beach and I started getting pumped. When we won Phoenix the next week, it changed my whole attitude about coming here. I’ve always enjoyed racing at the Speedway and the Phoenix win was a real confidence builder. It also answered a lot of the skeptics.

“Today, I think winning a second Indy is a definite possibility. Last year, even though I was in the front row and had driven fast all month, it was a bit of a surprise to win. It surprised everyone else, and it surprised me, too.

“Last year I went nuts when I crossed the finish line. I was screaming in my helmet so hard that by the time I slowed down in Victory Lane, I guess I looked pretty calm. But I wasn’t. I was really pumped, thinking about my parents back in Holland watching the race, and of my wife, Mieke, who was right there with me, and about how she’d been right with me through the bad times, too. Oh, what a feeling!

“I have savored that moment enough for the past year that I would like to have it happen again. Next week.”

Luyendyk won’t have the good fortune to start in the front row this year, however, even though he is again the third-fastest qualifier in the race at 223.881 m.p.h. He will be in the fifth row, alongside Gary Bettenhausen, whose 224.468 in a Lola-Buick was fastest, because they both qualified on the second qualifying session--a day too late. Rick Mears, who will start on the pole, qualified the first day at 224.113.

“I would rather be starting in the front row, like last year, mostly because that way you don’t have to deal with the heavy traffic for the first few laps,” he said. “I started from the fifth row in 1989 and it wasn’t a comfortable feeling.”

Luyendyk, 37, is a native of Sommelsdyk, Holland, who came to the United States in 1981 in hopes of advancing a racing career that had begun when he worked as a teen-ager in his father’s race car garage. His father, Jaap, drove a Lotus 7 in competition.

The younger Luyendyk won the European Super Vee championship in 1977 and moved up to Formula Three. When his career seemed to stall in Europe, he decided to try the U.S. Super Vee series in 1981. He finished fourth in the standings, but his driving caught the attention of countryman Aat Groenevelt, owner of the Provimi Veal team.

In 1984, Luyendyk beat out Chip Robinson for the Bosch Super Vee championship and was rewarded with a ride in Groenevelt’s Indy car. He was rookie of the year for both the Indy 500, in which he finished seventh, and the PPG Cup standings, in which he was 18th.

Over the next five seasons, Luyendyk labored with under-financed teams, coming close to winning on several occasions but never quite getting the checkered flag. In 1988, at Phoenix, he led for 33 laps and was heading for victory when a pit fire knocked him out of the race. During that lean stretch, he finished second only once and third twice in 72 races.

“If you looked at my record, it might not have seemed too good, but when you stop and think about the teams that I was with, then you’re taking other factors into consideration,” he said. “Sometimes, a good driver can at least partially offset equipment that is not the best. A fair example, I think, would be 1988, when I led a couple of races and the equipment didn’t hold up. You need both--driver skill and fine equipment--to be a serious threat.

“Last year at Indy, that’s what we had.”

Although he ran well in practice last year, it was still a surprise in Gasoline Alley when Luyendyk qualified in the front row, outside of Fittipaldi and Rick Mears. Much more likely candidates seemed to be Al Unser Jr. and the Andrettis, Mario and Michael.

“Coming into May, we had two goals, to qualify in the front row and to win the race,” he said. “Once I’d achieved the first, the second one didn’t loom as large. I got a feeling that maybe it was my year when I won the trolley car race around the War Memorial (in downtown Indianapolis) they have for the front row drivers and their wives. I barely beat Rick and Theresa Fittipaldi, but it gave me a winning feeling.”

Luyendyk drove a classic race in the 500, letting Fittipaldi burn up his tires with a blistering pace that helped make 1990’s the fastest Indy. After leading for 128 laps, including the first 92, Fittipaldi slowed perceptibly and Bobby Rahal took the lead. On lap 167, Luyendyk tailed Rahal down the backstretch and moved into the lead with a daring inside pass through the third turn.

From then on, the red, white and blue car pulled away and won by more than 10 seconds.

Luyendyk averaged 185.981 m.p.h., more than 15 m.p.h. faster than the old record set by Rahal in 1986.

What did winning mean to Luyendyk?

“It made me more recognizable as a person, but it didn’t do what I thought it would do for sponsorships,” he said. “It hasn’t changed my life much. I’m a little richer and have more obligations to meet with the media and racing fans, but I still have to work out every day and drive the car.

“If it did anything special, it gave me the opportunity to open my own art gallery in Scottsdale. I am not a student of art or anything like that, but there are some forms of art, especially European Impressionism, that I enjoy. I get pleasure from displaying them.

“Most of all, though, I’m a race driver. Sometimes I think that I am a great driver. Other times, I am not so sure. If things turn out to be as good (in the 500) as I think they will, why then, maybe I will be better able to rate my abilities.”