Who Is That Driver on the Pole--Again?

He is, unarguably, the best driver out there. He could be the best of all time.

But if he walked into a room in Beverly Hills or Ft. Lauderdale or even Gary, Ind., he wouldn’t create a stir. The hostess would probably ask him politely, “And what is it you do for a living, if I may ask?”

What he does for a living is win races. He has won three Indianapolis 500s. Only eight drivers in the history of the Speedway can make that claim. He has been on the pole six times. No other driver can make that claim. He was the first to go over 220 m.p.h. Only 10 drivers have won this race from the pole position, and he’s done it twice. If it’s an oval, he owns it.

His driving style is to motor racing what Sam Snead’s swing was to golf, Nolan Ryan’s fastball to baseball or Ray Leonard’s jab to boxing. Smooth. Effortless, but overpowering.

But he’s also a master at being overlooked. He doesn’t have the catchy name the fans associate with the game. He’s not an Andretti. He’s not Parnelli. He’s not A.J. He’s not even a Duke Nalon, a Shorty Cantlon, a Wild Bill or a Babe Something. He’s not a Duesenberg, Chevrolet, Pete DePaolo, Vukovich, Bettenhausen or Offenhauser. He’s not even close to Emerson Fittipaldi.

You hear those names, and you know where you are. But you hear Rick Mears, and you may frown and search your memory. People even mix him up with his brother Roger, who drove only 43 laps at Indy.

Rick won the second Indy he ran in. He qualified third in his rookie year with an outdated car, ran fifth much of the day but had to share rookie-of-the-year honors with someone named Larry Rice, who was out of racing the next year.

Rick Mears missed his calling. He should have been a spy. Or a butler.

He only gets on “Good Morning, America” the day after the race. The guys with the sound bytes are looking for the Unsers, Andrettis, Danny Sullivan. Rick has to win to make the late news.

Fortunately, this is no problem. He has started on the front row in the past five Indy races and eight of the past nine. He has the reputation of a guy who could take a stock Edsel and put it in the middle of Row 2. Or on the pole.

He should have won his fourth Indy in 1982. He lost the closest finish in the history of the race, by one-tenth of a second. He lost it in the pits, not on the track. His crew put a full load of fuel in his tanks to go only 16 laps. It took 23 seconds. The winner, Gordon Johncock, turned in a 10-second pit stop, taking on only a dollar’s worth of gas, so to speak.

So why isn’t Rick Mears “Mr. Racing” or “Roaring Rick” or the King of the 500?

Well, part of the problem is he’s like one of those ballplayers they used to call Old Reliable. He’s the Good Soldier Schweik. He never makes waves, creates controversy. He’s like the chauffeur. Even when his crew lost him the ’82 race, Mears stepped out of the car and saluted the winner for a heady race, not his crew for a dumb one.

Another part of the problem is he drives for Roger Penske, the real king of the 500. It’s like being a guy who catches a Ryan no-hitter. One of Joe Montana’s receivers.

Penske has won seven Indianapolis 500s. He won one with Mark Donohue, one with Bobby Unser, one with Al Unser, one with Danny Sullivan--and 3 3/4 with Rick Mears.

How much of it is car and how much is driver? It’s always a good question at Indy. But it’s of interest that Mears is the only one still with Penske. When Roger spends millions on an Indy car, he wants the driver as finely tuned as the machine.

Rick Mears fits a race car the way Bill Shoemaker used to fit a horse. There’s never a false move. You get 500 miles of impeccable handling. Cars just seem to run kindly for him, too.

It’s what attracted Penske to Mears in the first place.

Back in the mid-1970s, Mears was not in a glamorous ground-effects Marlboro Racing Team Penske Chevy at Indy. He was on the back of a backhoe in Ventura County, digging ditches for condos for a construction company.

When the owner sold the business, Mears stepped off the backhoe, put away his hard hat, got his hands on a four-year-old Eagle Offy and towed it to Indy with the family sedan, which was even older.

He would have been better off trying to qualify the family sedan than the Eagle, and his next job was selling Chevrolets in Phoenix.

He still went racing on weekends, and that’s when Roger Penske entered his life.

Penske studies drivers the way he studies cars, and Mears remembers sitting on the pit wall at Indy after he failed to qualify his aged Eagle-Offy when Penske came up to him and comforted him. “Better to miss qualifying than to hit the wall,” he told him.

Mears was seldom at the wheel in something seriously competitive in those days. So he developed a heady strategy: “I couldn’t outrun ‘em, so I had to outlive ‘em .”

Mears brought the cars back alive. “We didn’t crash anything,” he recalls. “We couldn’t afford to.” One spin and it was back to the backhoe.

Penske noticed. A car owner doesn’t like his cars brought back in a bag--or as fodder for a junkyard magnet.

Mears got his break when Mario Andretti went off to try his luck at Formula One racing in Europe. Penske got a break, too. He signed Rick Mears.

It was like Hepburn and Tracy, Astaire and Rogers. Perfect casting. Star billing. Above-the-title marquee. Mears was perfect for Penske.

“Roger never gave me an order,” Mears notes.

He didn’t have to. They were as perfectly attuned as a ballroom dance team. Roger Penske couldn’t have dialed in a better pilot for his sophisticated machinery. One by one, other drivers have left the Penske garage. Mears remains.

He never raises his voice, throws a tantrum or hits the wall. (Or almost never. When he did brush Turn 4 in practice this month, it was the first time he hung it on the concrete at Indy in his 14-year career. And he was back in a race car within an hour.)

He’s on the pole as usual again this year.

As one pit wall wag put it, “He’ll have more Poles than the Warsaw phone directory before he’s through.” But he’s used to being overshadowed. When he won the pole this year, Gary Bettenhausen went out and (a week late) bettered his time. Mears is philosophical. “Story of my life,” he laughs.

If the public has trouble recognizing him, there’s an easy solution: Try looking in Victory Lane today. Chances are, he’ll be the one holding up that big trophy.