Little Al Forced to Sit in the Corner

For 103 of 105 laps Sunday, the Long Beach Grand Prix was unfolding as usual. I mean, Little Al Unser was winning it. What else is new? Little Al wins Long Beach. And the Pope is Catholic, and there are bear tracks in the woods and the sun rises in the east.

They were getting the trophy ready. After all, young Master Unser has won this thing the last four years in a row. This race is not a contest, it’s just a recital. This track is to him what Yankee Stadium was to Babe Ruth or a dance floor to Gene Kelly. Merely a showplace for his talents. The rest of the field is the chorus.

And, then, it happened. The script hit a banana peel. The plot thickened.

All day long, Al Unser Jr. had managed to keep in front of his teammate, Danny Sullivan. Al Unser Jr. is to auto racing what Johnny Longden used to be to horse racing. He doesn’t let you by. As they said of Longden, “You can’t get by him.”

Ditto, Little Al. For 70 laps, teammate Sullivan couldn’t get by him. Danny dogged his tire treads, wrestled through the corners. It was racing at its finest, racing the way it should be--and not always is. It put you in mind of every old Clark Gable movie--where the hero and the best friend are wheel-to-wheel.

They twisted through the streets of Long Beach, not wheel to wheel, but front end to back end. They looked like one car going through the corners.

And then, they hit Turn 6 on the penultimate lap. What the matadors call the moment of truth. They were both slowed by the car of Hiro Matsushita, which was coughing its last almost in the middle of the track. They both dived for the corner.

What happened next is something for the pit-stop lawyers to argue for the rest of the year. Al Unser may have had whatever dubious right-of-way auto racing admits to.

But it’s really like a prizefight--protect yourself at all times. Al’s right front wing got clipped as he disputed the corner with Sullivan. It spun him around, and the race shot by him. First Sullivan, then Bobby Rahal and Emerson Fittipaldi. He lost it in his corner, so to speak. Sullivan managed--barely--to stay ahead of the desperately speeding Rahal (who lost by only 0.6 seconds) and the charging Fittipaldi, who was only a split-second behind.

Little Al Unser must wonder what he is doing wrong. This is the second time a last-lap spin has cost him. At Indianapolis in 1989, he got clipped by Fittipaldi on Lap 199. He can be excused tonight for looking heavenward and shaking his fist: “Me, again? Huh, God?”

He wouldn’t let Sullivan by sunday. He wouldn’t let Fittipaldi by at Indy. Maybe he needs to learn manners.

It’s simply racing luck. There are no instant replays in this game, no flag drops for offside or roughing the driver. If you are not running after a shunt--well, better luck next week. There is no court of appeals. Keep running. Or park it.

It was really a great race. The Turn 6 accident not only cost young Unser all chance, it may have coast Fittipaldi and Rahal. Each of them had to tiptoe past Unser’s spinning machine or they might have produced the first triple dead heat in racing.

I guess the moral of the story is, if someone wants to pass you in a tight corner, show then a little courtesy. But that doesn’t happen on the San Diego freeway. So, why should it happen on the Long Beach speedway?

Of course, these race drivers have all the best of it at Long Beach. I mean, all the cars are going the same way. Traffic is light--26 cars on a 1.59-mile stretch of highway. All the drivers are sober. No kids in the back seat complaining “Daddy, I have to go to the bathroom” or, “How much farther is it?” No motorcycle cops in the rearview mirror even when you reach 140 m.p.h. They may be the only Sunday drivers in the state who have it this stress-free. No one in the passenger seat complaining, “Can we slow it down a little, Mario, we want to get to Grandma’s in one piece?” Nobody unraveling a road map to ask, “Are you sure we take this road? Shouldn’t we have turned left at the intersection?”

My notion is, they should hold this thing on the Hollywood Freeway at rush hour. They should have one or more kids fighting and eating ice cream cones in the back seat. There should be three or more trucks spewing black smoke in front of them, a bus in the wrong lane, and a sig-alert in effect and your boss on the car phone wondering what you did with the Texaco account. Be nice if a helicopter overhead reported a tanker overturned in the inside lane ahead and your fuel gauge running on empty. Now, that would be a grand Prix.

Auto racers are funny. They call accidents “shunts,” they’re ecstatic if they get 1.8 miles to the gallon. They have a flag for everything--green for go, yellow for slow down, a two-toned one for move over, black for stop and get off.

But there’s no such thing as a neutral corner. The corner belongs to the guy who gets through it without spinning, crashing, turning upside-down. Who gets through it first with the wheels still turning. Sullivan is your 1992 Long Beach Grand Prix champion because, like Dempsey, you dassn’t go in the corners with him. He is champion because he was able to cut corners. Litle Al simply has to learn to say “After you, Danny (or ‘Emmo’).”