Countywide : Racer Hopes Time Is on His Side

With 3,800 feet of garage space, Frank Currie has more room for cars than most people have in their entire houses.

Leaning on his 1920 Packard Special on Tuesday afternoon, the 64-year-old Anaheim man described with the technical detail of a scientist the technique he hopes will bring him victory in the Interstate Batteries Great American Race, which starts Sunday.

“I’ve got charts figured out so that when I go around a corner going 50 m.p.h., I can drop down to 30 m.p.h. and get back to 50 m.p.h., only losing seven seconds,” said Currie, who won the 1991 Great American Race with his 32-year-old son, Raymond. “If I’m 10 seconds behind, I can run at 10% for 100 seconds, and I’ll be back on course.”

Currie and about 20 other Orange County antique car racers will be among the hundreds of participants in the 11th annual race in which many of the cars are older than the drivers. The 4,250-mile race will begin at 11 a.m. Sunday on the Huntington Beach Municipal Pier and wind its way through the desert, mountains and plains across the country. Fourteen days, 16 states and 47 stops later, the winners will cross the finish line in Norfolk, Va. July 10.

The cars, which never go over 50 m.p.h., must be at least 50 years old to race in what is billed as the world’s largest old-car rally.

Teams try to match computer-generated, pre-timed driving instructions while they are equipped with only a stopwatch, a wristwatch, speedometer, paper and a pen. No odometers are allowed.

Concealed clocks record the car’s times at different points daily, and penalty points add up for each second the car is early or late. The race is scored like a golf game--the driver with the score closest to zero wins the $50,000 prize.

Currie has been preparing his fire-engine red Packard for the race for more than a month, painstakingly tuning his three speedometers. He said he lost the race last year because his speedometer was unreliable.

Currie is the retired owner of Currie Enterprises, an Anaheim company that makes high-performance parts for race cars. His interest in racing, he said, dates back to his teen-age years of drag racing.

Although Currie insists that he enjoys the race immensely, he said it does bring back some painful memories. When he called home after he won the 1991 race, a family member told him that his 2-year-old grandson and the boy’s maternal grandfather were killed in a boating accident.

“It was the biggest thing I ever won and the biggest thing I ever lost, all at the same time,” he said. “You never get over it.”