MOTOR RACING / BRIAN MURPHY : Lady Luck Still Scorning Lyon

At 29, Bob Lyon of Newhall still boasts that he can beat any local racer on any given day--as long as they compete on the basketball court.

Lyon, a 1980 Canyon High graduate, was named most valuable player in the Santa Clarita Valley as a prep basketball player, but his arena of competition has changed.

The easygoing stock car racer who started at Saugus Speedway and has now moved to the NASCAR Southwest Tour made a surprise visit to his old haunts last Saturday and tried to qualify for the 40-lap Sportsman main event.

Why, pray tell, was he missing the Southwest Tour Firecracker 100 at Mesa Marin in Bakersfield on the same day?

Quite honestly, Lyon said, he needed a break.

Lady Luck has been frowning on Lyon’s 1991 campaign. Twice while Lyon was leading races, misfortune struck: once in the form of a flat tire, the other brake failure.

In addition, both of his car’s engines have been damaged enough to need rebuilding.

With both engines incapacitated, Lyon figured he would take a midseason break and head back to Saugus for the night.

“We just need to step back, evaluate everything, get everyone pumped up and get everything positive again,” Lyon said. “I’ve never had a year this bad and I’ve been racing since 1981.

“I don’t know what we did wrong, but we must have upset somebody upstairs.”

Lyon remains outwardly upbeat and said that he and his crew will be back on the Southwest Tour for the Olympia 100 at Eureka on July 27.

“We’re going to have a new engine, new cylinder heads . . . hey, a new everything,” Lyon said with a smile.

Unfortunately, the old karma lingered last Saturday at Saugus where car trouble put an early end to his attempt to qualify.

But remember--that basketball challenge still stands.

Role reversal: The tried-and-true path of a racer: As a toddler, he or she raced go-karts. As a teen-ager, he/she would race midgets. And, as a young adult, he/she would finally graduate to stock cars.

So what in the name of Cale Yarborough is Sportsman points leader Lance Hooper of Palmdale doing at Saugus Speedway every third Saturday morning at 6 o’clock?

Racing go-karts, of course.

Hooper said that he was drawn into this wild and crazy form of racing--where your rear end is just 1 1/2 inches off the ground and vibrations are enough to rattle the sturdiest of molars--on a whim.

Now, he’s stuck with it. And he has become the points leader in the Super Stock division of go-kart racing at Saugus.

“It started out as fun,” Hooper said, shaking his head with a grin. “And it still is a lot of fun. . . . But now I’m the points leader out there.”

Hooper said a customer at a Newhall auto repair shop, Lola Williams, owned some go-karts and that “she was always teasing us, asking us when we were going to get out and race with the real racers.” So Hooper called her bluff.

Other Sportsman racers, according to Hooper, including Pat Mintey Jr. of Quartz Hill and Tom Eurton of Valencia, also find their way out to the speedway in the wee hours of the morning.

On the down side, as Hooper points out, racing go-karts makes for a long day. He has to wake up in Palmdale at 4:30, and, if he races Sportsman cars later that day, will spend as many as 18 hours at the speedway.

So when does he sleep?

“When do I sleep?” he asked rhetorically. “Exactly.”

Don’t panic: Fans of Dave Phipps, the Simi Valley driver who has won three Sportsman points championships, need not worry about the absence of Phipps’ No. 4 car tonight.

Phipps will be in the No. 7 Sportsman ride, owned by Joe Stewart of Chatsworth, while the engine is rebuilt on his No. 4 car.

Phipps said that his car has not been handling well and he sent it to the shop for a major overhaul. The car should be ready in two weeks but Phipps said that he will not drive it then. Instead, he will drive Jerome Ruzicka’s No. 26 car.

Ruzicka broke a bone in his foot last Saturday in a small bang-up, and will allow Phipps, an old friend, to drive his car until his foot heals. Phipps said that his No. 4 car will still probably need more money poured into it--money that he doesn’t want to spend at this time.

“He’s doing me a favor by letting me stay in the points race,” Phipps said. “And when he comes back (in mid-August), then my No. 4 car will probably be ready.”

Driving the No. 7 car last Saturday, Phipps finished 10th.

Points update: Local boys continue to make good on the Southwest and Winston West tours. Palmdale’s Ron Hornaday Jr. maintained his grip on first place in the Southwest points standings with a second-place finish at the Firecracker 100 at Mesa Marin. Hornaday (1,254 points) is slightly ahead of Rick Carelli of Denver (1,245) and Jon Paques of Albuquerque, N.M. (1,235).

In the Winston West points race, Granada Hills driver Bill Sedgwick fell from first with a third-place finish at the Winston 200 in Portland last Saturday. Sedgwick, however, remains in the thick of things, tallying 809 points to trail leader Mike Chase of Bakersfield (820) and 1990 champion Bill Schmitt of Redding (810).

Get well soon: La Canada’s Tommy Kendall alarmed racing fans--and all sports fans--across the country last Sunday when he was involved in a spectacular crash at Watkins Glen, N.Y., in an International Motor Sports Assn. race. Highlights of the crash made many national sports shows that night.

The left-rear tire on Kendall’s car fell off in a high-speed turn, sending the vehicle in a 360-degree spin before smashing head-on into a tire barrier. It was estimated that Kendall’s car was traveling 140 m.p.h. coming out of the backstretch into the turn.

Kendall’s right leg was broken in two places, his left ankle was broken and his right ankle pulverized. Kendall will remain hospitalized for two weeks, then must stay off his feet for three months before returning to Indianapolis for six months or more of rehabilitation.

Kendall’s doctors at Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis said Friday that the 24-year-old’s fractures have been repaired and his overall condition is satisfactory.

Said a hospital spokeswoman: “Sounds good, doesn’t it?”

It certainly does.