INDIANAPOLIS 500 : Sweetheart of a Ride From First to First

Rick Mears won the 75th Indianapolis 500 Sunday. In a Roger Penske car.

And the earth is round and water’s wet. Coal is black. Kansas is flat. And dog bites man.

It’s not exactly stop-the-presses stuff. Rick Mears is to auto racing what the old Yankees used to be to baseball, Notre Dame to football. Dempsey to boxing. Rick Mears with a race car is Babe Ruth with a bat, Magic Johnson with a basketball, Sinatra with a song.

He made it look hard Sunday, but longtime Mears-watchers weren’t fooled. It was vintage Mears. He just toyed with his field. Waited for the opening, then landed the right, played the ace, went to the whip.

Rick Mears treats race cars the way you might treat a beautiful girl. He romances them, cajoles them, coaxes them. He flatters them. Even talks to them. It was the way Shoemaker rode race horses, Billy Casper played golf or a riverboat gambler plays cards.

Rick Mears knows an Indy race is 500 miles long. This would seem an obvious piece of information to most people, but it’s surprising how many race drivers seem to think they have to win the race in the first turn.

Rick Mears started this race on the pole for the record sixth time. But he really only led the race for the first 12 laps--and the last 12. Mears doesn’t really care who leads the race between laps 12 and 188. Mears spends those hours trying to establish a rapport with the car, make it his sweetheart, get it eating out of his hand, not biting it. “With race cars, you have to find out what their personality is,” he explained to the press after the race. “You have to find out what they want, what they can do and what they will do.”

Most race drivers prefer to find out what their cars will put up with.

Mears’ ride Sunday was a marriage made in heaven. But it didn’t start out that way. Mears preserved his pole position to lap 12 when what seemed like the whole Andretti family jumped him. Patriarch Mario and oldest son Michael shuffled Mears back to third, then fourth, then fifth.

Mears didn’t panic, raise his voice. He did what any good newlywed should. He went to work placating his mate. “There was some under-steering, some changes that had to be made in the wings,” he noted. He was patient. He made sure he kept the competition in view, but the car happy. “Basically, the car stayed together. The problems we had, we sorted out together.”

The car crept up on the gaudy front-runners. His teammate, Emerson Fittipaldi, flashily took the lead and ran hard-hitting, front-running laps till he burned out a clutch.

Mears moved up from sixth, to fifth, to fourth, to third. He was always lurking. He even took to talking to his car. He wouldn’t reveal the dialogue, but it’s not hard to imagine him purring to it “OK, sweetheart, just a few more laps now.” An A.J. Foyt line might run more to “Don’t die now or I’ll kick you all around Gasoline Alley!”

The opposition was dropping off like swatted flies as Mears cooed to his racer. Mears finally pitted on Lap 169, took on tires and fuel. He proposed to finish the race with it. It was a calculated risk. Forty gallons of fuel are not a cinch to make 31 laps at Indy. His principal competitor, Michael Andretti, pitted on Lap 166 and therefore had to re-pit on Lap 183. It probably made the difference.

The last 30 laps were reminiscent of the old Clark Gable racing movies. Young Andretti and the veteran Mears were practically in a wheel-to-wheel duel. First, Andretti would slingshot around Mears and sweep to what seemed to be a commanding lead.

Mears just talked to his car, whispered sweet nothings in its fuel gauge. He swept around Andretti at Lap 188. He was home free.

Rick Mears on the front end is like jockey Johnny Longden used to be. A rival once said of Longden, “You can get to him, you can’t get by him.”

Rick Mears was not about to let anything get by him. When he gets you in his rearview mirror with five laps to go, you stay there.

A driver has won this thing from the pole only 13 times. Three of them, the driver has been Rick Mears.

It’s getting so it’ll be a bigger story if he doesn’t win Indy. He ties A.J. Foyt and Al Unser in lifetime victories with four. But Foyt has run in 34 Indy races, Unser in 25. This was Mears’ 14th.

The race was typical Indy. The cars got clear to the first turn in the first lap before Buddy Lazier crashed. They got 17 more laps in before Roberto Guerrero crashed into Kevin Cogan and part of the debris hit and knocked out Foyt’s car.

Only 11 cars were running at the finish. One of them was Rick Mears’. One of them is always Rick Mears’. He has finished nine of 14, unheard-of durability for Indy.

In horse racing, they handicap proven winners. Instead of letting Rick Mears ever again start on the pole or in front of the field, they should perhaps move him back automatically in the starting grid. Say, about to Terre Haute would even things up. Otherwise, “Mears Wins Indy” is going to be as standard a headline as “Iowa Goes Republican” or “Taxes Go Up.”