He Fades Into Crowd at Indy

This race used to be as American as pumpkin pie. Or iced tea. The drivers were named Bobby, Johnny, Gordon, Spike, even Elmer, Clarence, Duke and A.J.

Now, they’re named Nigel, Roberto, Stefan, Raul, and even Didier, for cryin’ out loud.

And, how about Teodorico?

Get a load of the first three rows of the Indy 500 this year. Only one of those guys was born in the USA. Al Unser Jr. That’s eight of the first nine drivers who are foreign-born.

You’d think you were in Zandvoort. The Nurburgring. Some Mille Miglia some place. Don’t American kids climb into race cars anymore?

You’ve got a Dutchman on the pole. That’s a first for the Indy 500. Next to him is Mario Andretti. Mario is as American as Pizza Hut now, but the fact remains he was born in Trieste, Italy. Then, we have Raul Boesel. He’s from the South. South America, that is. Row 2 has Scott Goodyear. Canadian. Stefan Johansson. A Svenska. The fifth row should fly the tricolor. They’re all Gauls. Both Nelson Piquet and Stephan Gregoire are from La Belle, France.

If it weren’t for the Unsers, this grid might read like a Paris telephone directory.

What’s going on in the world? The auto is as American as the coyote, isn’t it? The Europeans might excel in epee dueling, but not anything that involves wheels, right? Henry Ford would be mortified.

Not too long ago, you couldn’t have bribed a European to tee it up at Indy. The great Juan Manuel Fangio took a couple of spins here, turned white and said: “I’ll get back to you.” They’re still waiting.

Jimmy Clark was the patron saint of the new breed. He came over in a little underpowered Lotus in the ‘60s and gave America’s finest a lesson in artistry at the wheel.

He encouraged a whole generation of continental drivers. One of those paying attention was a young Milanese miner’s son, Teodorico Fabi.

Teodorico was a skier in those days, but he hankered to get into auto racing and out of downhill racing. He swapped his skis for a Go-kart and got into it.

No one hit Indy with quite the splash of Teodorico, who came to the Speedway in 1983 quite unsung, unknown, unable to speak the language. He had some success in Can-Am racing, but he had to pass Indy’s rookie-orientation test. They thought, with a little luck, he might make the field.

He made the field, all right. He went out and took the pole. He set the race record for average qualifying time, 207.395, and the one-lap record for the track, 208.049. He went faster than anyone had at Indy before.

Winning the pole at Indy is a very big feat, indeed. It leads to television appearances, luncheon speeches, dinner engagements, front-page exposure, instant celebrity. PPG even gives you $100,000 for it.

To Teo Fabi, it was just another day at the office. The automotive world was agog, but Fabi couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. I mean, the car was fast, right?

He wanted to go home the next day. His press agents were so aghast they needed smelling salts. At Indy, a pole winner is almost a bigger celebrity than a winner. Fabi wanted to return to Sorrento, so to speak, but his flacks wanted him on “Good Morning, America.”

Teo couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about. “I knew I had the fastest car. That morning, I had run the fastest laps, and I was even holding the car back a little,” he was recalling the other day. “I was 100% sure I would put that car on the pole.”

He did it--by two miles per hour faster than his nearest competitor.

“I had been on lots of poles,” he says, still a bit mystified. It was his introduction to the special hype of Indianapolis. It’s not like winning the pole in the Belgian Grand Prix. It’s Broadway, Hollywood, the Palace. Fabi wanted to go home and take his fiancee to the opera.

Fabi didn’t speak the language in more ways than one.

The racing establishment thought maybe it had stumbled on the Babe Ruth of the roaring road. They thought Fabi might be the next four-time winner, the greatest thing to come out of Italy since Caruso. They reasoned he had found a groove around this track no one else had.

He led the race for the first 23 laps that year, but was out by Lap 47 after a fueling mishap. He found out Indy wasn’t that much of a patsy.

Did he think it was easy at first? Fabi laughs. “The first few laps around this place, I said to myself, ‘What are you doing here?’ I thought, ‘This is the most scaring place I have ever been in.’ When you first drive it, Indy tries to send you home.”

Sometimes, in a box. But Fabi returned in ’84. He has never been able to duplicate his early success as the first rookie to win the pole since 1950.

He returned to Formula One racing but found, like a lot of guys born to drive, that he missed the special excitement that is Indy. “It’s different from European,” he explains. “It’s the way Americans want it. Friendly. It belongs to everybody. In Europe, the champions don’t speak to the journalists. They keep it to themselves. It’s like a secret. Unfriendly. Americans aren’t like that. They share. They’re glad for you.”

It’s like a national party, not a members-only bore, Fabi finds.

When he won the pole, he was one of a kind. Now, he’s a face in the crowd. There are more accents in Gasoline Alley than the United Nations.

Fabi’s 220.514 puts him far from the pole this year, the middle of Row 6. He speaks English better than the Duke of Wales now, but his car stuttered a bit on Carburetion Day. The race has been won by guys named Luyendyk and Fittipaldi in recent years. A guy named Jones (Parnelli) has won it, but there’s never even been a Smith in it.

Teodorico wants to be the third Italian to win it. If he’s got only an American in his rearview mirror, that may not be enough. Not only are eight of the first nine places driven by foreign-born drivers, but 54 of the 77 races have been won by drivers in the first three rows. It looks like Al Unser Jr. against the world. But Teodorico Fabi has rattled American racing’s cage before and, if the charge of the Foreign Legion is going to be irresistible, he figures he’s as good as any to lead it. Anyway, if he does, they can start calling him Ted.