THE INDIANAPOLIS 500 : Back for a Second Indy 500, Eddie Should Be Ready

Eddie Cheever is 33 but still taking driver’s education. The gentlemen starting their engines in the first row of today’s Indianapolis 500--Rick Mears, A.J. Foyt and Mario Andretti--have an average age of 49 and a whole lot of miles on the odometers of life. Cheever will occupy the fourth row. This will be his seventh race on an oval.

Foyt and Andretti gave him a leery leer before an Indy car race in Michigan last year that made fast Eddie feel like a hustler.

“What are you two talking about?” Cheever asked.

Foyt replied: “We’re deciding how much we’re going to let you get away with.”

Cheever loves these little love taps. When he joined the circuit, he feared that the more oil-stained drivers might ignore or resent him. Look at him as one of those pretty-boy European jet-setters who sipped chardonnay and thought Indy car racing might be a cute way to kill a Sunday afternoon.

But before his first Indy 500 last May, everybody flagged Cheever aside for a tip stop. Emerson Fittipaldi explained the differences between road and oval. Mears and Danny Sullivan begged him to stop braking going into treacherous Turn 1. Bobby Unser practically ordered him to watch the groove instead of the wall. Cheever ran eighth.

Not a bad debut at the brickyard, where he was named Indy’s rookie of the year--and later CART’s as well. For all his lack of road racing background, Cheever became the Indy 500’s fastest rookie qualifier ever and ended up earning more prize money in one season than any rookie in history.

Not a bad day, either, for a guy who at high speeds used to get carsick.

As a kid near his home in Rome, Eddie drove Go-Karts. His parents had moved from his Phoenix birthplace to open a chain of health clubs in Europe. Always an auto racing enthusiast, Edward McKay Cheever Sr. started preparing his son to be a driver much the way Marv Marinovich prepared Todd to be a football quarterback: Strict vegetarian diet. Three-mile jogs daily. Karate lessons. The coercion of Eddie’s father, one could call it.

His first Go-Kart race, though, Eddie stopped midway.

“These guys are crazy,” he said.

No kidding, he was told. “So, I did the only thing I could do,” he remembers. “I got crazy myself.”

By 15, Cheever was runner-up in the Go-Kart world championships and was employed gunning a company’s experimental engines on test tracks. At 20, he made his Formula One racing debut in the Grand Prix of South Africa. By 25, he was sixth in the world championship point standings and being courted to drive for Alfa Romeo. But just past his 30th birthday, he got an itch to switch gears.

Cheever went home to Phoenix and drove on a one-mile oval.

“You go around so fast, you feel like you’re in a washing machine,” he said. “Every 24 seconds, you are right back where you just were.”

Qualifying became more difficult than racing. Cheever wasn’t accustomed to snapping off quick laps. He was more used to the long haul. He was a game-day player, not a practice player. Week after week, he would qualify 13th. By the end of the actual race’s first lap, he’d sit sixth or seventh.

The recent Long Beach Grand Prix was typical. Cheever qualified 11th, finished third. Soon thereafter, at Phoenix, again he qualified 11th. On race day, he ran second for 35 to 40 laps, leaving Fittipaldi, Mears, Bobby Rahal and other far more knowledgeable oval drivers behind, before fading to eighth.

“They pay to see you race, not practice,” Cheever says.

Coming into corners at 230 m.p.h. was totally foreign to Cheever, most of whose racing experience was, well, totally foreign. He freely acknowledged being spooked by the Indianapolis Motor Speedway’s first turn. His natural impulse was to hit the brake, which was understandable but impractical for anybody intending to win.

Same with watching the wall. Once Bobby Unser persuaded him to ignore it, Cheever picked up 3 to 4 m.p.h., advice that turns also-rans into ran-fasts.

That’s why he listens when the older guys are talking to him--or about him. It didn’t matter whether Foyt or Andretti gossiped about him in English or Italian, since Cheever is fluent in three languages. He just wanted to know what they were saying.

Cheever describes his life as “the best of both continents.” He married his childhood sweetheart from Italy, and they have homes in Aspen, Colo., Rome and Monte Carlo. This is not some grease monkey. He collects Japanese art, is an amateur chef and enjoys sitting home fiddling with his computer. “Auto racing is my profession, not my passion,” Eddie Cheever says. “My first time at Indy was a thrill, and it was both intimidating and frightening. But now I’m driving to win. The horizon is cloudless.”

And he doesn’t get carsick anymore, which is always a big help.