High Five at Indy for Simon : Auto racing: He goes the conventional two-car teams three cars better in a bid for his first checkered flag.

If you want to run up front in Indy car racing, the accepted way is to go with a two-car team with each driver contributing to the overall plan.

That is the way the Newman-Haas, Penske and Galles teams do it, and their drivers have won seven of the last nine Indianapolis 500s.

So what is Dick Simon doing with five drivers in the field for the 77th running of the 500 on May 30?

“If two is good, then five ought to be that much better,” Simon said. “It shouldn’t be much of a problem for me. I’ve raised nine children.

“Seriously, it’s more cost effective, and in a time when one car costs a little more than $500,000--without an engine--you’ve got to have some method of cutting costs. It’s an old marketing tool: You make it up in volume.”

Simon, who was a marketing genius before he became a professional race driver, meshes the sponsors of his five teams as effectively as his engineers mesh ideas for the cars. His lineup:

--Raul Boesel, Brazil: ’93 Lola-Ford Cosworth, qualified at 222.379 m.p.h., will start on the outside of the front row. He finished second in the Valvoline 200 at Phoenix. Best Indy 500 finish in six starts: seventh in 1988 and again last year. He will run the full PPG Cup season.

--Scott Brayton, Coldwater, Mich.: ’93 Lola-Ford Cosworth, 219.637 m.p.h., middle of the fourth row. Former Indy track record-holder. He started in the front row in 1985. Best Indy 500 finish in 11 starts: sixth in 1989. He also will run the full season.

--Stephan Gregoire, France: ’92 Lola-Buick, 220.851 m.p.h., inside of the sixth row. Fastest rookie in the field and, at 23, the youngest driver in the race. A graduate of the French Formula Three series, he will run for Simon only in the Indy 500.

--Jimmy Vasser, Discovery Bay, Calif., ’92 Lola-Ford Cosworth, 218.967 m.p.h., middle of the seventh row after practicing all last week in a Lola-Chevrolet. He finished third at Phoenix, putting two Simon drivers on the winner’s podium. He crashed last year at Indy as rookie, breaking his thigh. He will run 12 races.

--Lyn St. James, Daytona Beach, Fla.: ’93 Lola-Ford Cosworth, 218.042 m.p.h., inside of the eighth row. She finished 11th last year and was named rookie of the year. At 45, she was the oldest rookie to start the 500. She is scheduled to run 7-9 races.

When Gregoire qualified 40 seconds before time trials closed Sunday, putting the last of Simon’s cars in the field, it was the first time in modern history that one owner had five cars in the 500.

“Each one of them has his own engineer, his own crew chief and his own crew,” Simon said. “But at the end of the day, the engineers and the crew chiefs get together and discuss what they’ve learned, and what they need to learn. We have 62 people we can utilize, on any or all of the teams.”

Simon also pointed out that by having a stable of drivers, they can help one another.

“When Raul joined us last year, Scotty (Brayton) didn’t have much of a record on road courses and Raul worked with him and by the end of the year he was almost as fast as Raul. It worked the same way on the ovals. Scotty had the experience, and he helped Raul. You can see how well that worked.

“Then last week, Jimmy (Vasser) and Lyn (St. James) were having trouble getting up to speed. They weren’t comfortable with their cars, so Raul took the cars out and showed them what could be done. Both of them ran faster after that.”

And there is a reason he has engines from three manufacturers--Ford, Chevrolet and Buick.

“Last year, when the new Ford engine wasn’t available to us, we had to sign a two-year lease with Chevrolet to get their latest engines,” Simon said. “This year, after we became the test team for Ford, we had all our Chevy engines left over. At about $200,000 each, we didn’t want to just toss them in the junk heap, so when Jim Hayhoe approached us about running a car for (Vasser) and then Formula Project wanted us to handle Gregoire’s rookie year, we put them in Chevies for testing.

“We had 13 Chevy engines, only a year old, and a lease we had to honor. So, instead of letting them sit and gather dust, we put together a $400,000 sponsor package that would incorporate the old engines and the ’92 chassis and still make a solid product. There is nothing wrong with the cars. Philippe Gache had two of them over 224 m.p.h., and his backup is the car Lyn used to make the race last year.

“For qualifying and the race, Vasser switched to a new chassis we bought from Carl Haas that we fit with one of our Ford engines. The Buick the Frenchman ran is the one that Brayton drove here last year.”

A few miles from the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Simon has a 35,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art racing complex where he builds, maintains, stores and buries the Indy cars that fill the lives of him and Dianne, his wife and race-team partner.

When it opened about 18 months ago, Robin Miller of the Indianapolis Star wrote: “When you walk in, you expect a bellman to appear, or at least someone to valet-park your car.”

The entrance is a glass atrium, patterned after the entrance to Ferrari headquarters in Italy, and the first thing visitors see is a show car that looks ready to take the green flag. The Simon show cars, immaculately styled, are changed frequently, depending on which sponsor is expected for a visit.

“You’d be surprised how many potential sponsors we entertain here,” Simon said. “And when we’re through with our business, they say they want to bring in their dealers and staffs for a corporate outing at our place. We had 7,500 distributors from Amway (Brayton’s primary sponsor) for an Easter Seal fund-raising party last year. They were spread all over the place.

“We built the plant for our racing teams, but it doubles as a great marketing tool.”

Inside, there are bays where each of the colorful open-wheel machines is pampered like a matinee idol. Each car is repainted before every race to better impress the sponsors.

There also is a corporate meeting room with computers hooked up to every imaginable form of communication. One benefit of that is that Dianne can remain home in Dana Point and run her part of the business while staying in touch with Dick, who spends much of his time in Indianapolis, overseeing the operation.

Among the memorabilia of which Simon is most proud are six plaques, each honoring him as the “Oldest Driver to Compete in the Indy 500.” They range from 1983 to 1988, when he was 54.

Simon has marketed himself and his products since he was 12 and set out to corner the lawn-mowing business in Seattle.

“I had 286 clients and I hired kids from school to do the work,” he said. “I had my own portfolio, with pictures of lawns we had cut and trimmed. I did all of the selling and collecting. I learned early on that I loved selling, and when I started racing I soon discovered how much I could merge my business life with it.”

Upstairs, out of sight, is a warehouse of obsolete equipment--a graveyard of engines, complete cars, broken cars, wings, suspension pieces, wheels, every imaginable race-car part.

“When the rules changed this year on wing sizes, we were left with a shelf full of wings that weren’t worth a penny,” Simon said. “And they cost $17,000 each.

“That’s one of the frustrating things about this business. You build a car, make it competitive, for maybe $700,000, and either the rules change or someone comes up with a better idea and what you have is instant obsolescence. If you can sell it at all, the best you can get is $100,000, maybe $125,000 if it’s in perfect condition.”

Simon, in partnership with former Indy car driver Eldon Rasmussen, also does fabrication work and builds parts for other Indy car teams.

“Our engineers designed the new nose cones that had to be converted to the 1991 and 1992 Lolas under the new rules, and Rasmussen built many of them,” Simon said. “We build our own suspension for our cars, and for a lot of other cars, too.

“When you buy a new Lola, the first thing you need to do is take it apart and throw away a lot of it and build your own parts. It takes about another $50,000 in labor and parts to make a car race ready after it arrives from England.”

Despite all the energy, enthusiasm and salesmanship, one thread runs through Simon’s career--both as a driver and an owner--that nettles him: He has never had a checkered flag.

In 183 races over 18 seasons as a driver, Simon’s best was a third in the 1970 California 500 at Ontario.

“I had never failed to win at any sport I ever took up,” he said. “I won 20 of 21 super-modified main events at the Salt Lake City Fairgrounds in 1965, and I figured it wouldn’t take me long to be a winner in Indy cars when I started out in 1970.

“When I went year after year without winning, it would just eat away at me. It was still that way when I decided to give it up in 1988 and concentrate on running my own team. Now I’m still waiting.”

Boesel has twice finished second for Simon, at Detroit last year and at Phoenix last month. When Boesel was second and Vasser third, both on the podium with winner Mario Andretti at Phoenix, Simon’s eyes welled.

“Can you imagine how I’ll act when--and I say when, not if--we win our first race?” he asked. “I’ll probably go completely bananas.”