This Time, Fittipaldi Has His Back to Wall

Imagine that! An Unser winning the Indy 500!

How’s that for stop-the-presses stuff?

But wait! There’s more! How about, “We interrupt this broadcast to bring you a special news bulletin fresh off the wires from Indiana. Roger Penske’s car won the 78th Indy 500.”

If you can recover from that shock, I’ll get down to the fine print.

First of all, for most of the day, it wasn’t a race, it was a parade. Penske cars and Mercedes-Benz engines giving a recital. Those other 31 cars were mere scenery. Or the brass section. They kept crashing into walls trying to keep up. The Mercedeses, on the other hand, kept turning left. It looked like a Secretariat race.

But Indianapolis is satanic.

You’ve heard all the cliches--Yogi Berra said, “It’s never over till it’s over.” Dick Motta said, “It’s never over till the fat lady sings.”

Put ‘em all together and you have a fix on Indianapolis. It’s never over until the yellow lights go out.

Five years ago this week, they had the 73rd Indy 500, and, as luck would have it, two cars came into the main straight only noses apart and a lap or two ahead of the competition. In one of them was the wily Brazilian veteran and one-time world champion, Emerson Fittipaldi. In the other was an Unser. Emerson had locked wheels with some of the registered legends of the racing road. Right on his hubcap was--of all things--an Unser. You could tell because he was leading the race. Unsers usually are.

Unsers win because they hate to let anybody by them on a track. And Little Al Unser was so upset to find Fittipaldi trying to go around him that he edged his car down to the cutoff point to put a stop to this. That’s when their cars collided.

The Unser for a change got the worst of it. Little Al’s car swiveled into the wall. Fittipaldi’s got through. It was Lap 199 and Fittipaldi continued on to the checkered flag.

We fast-forward now five years to Sunday afternoon about five minutes before 2. Once again, Fittipaldi and Little Al are dueling in the late stages of the race. They are the only two cars on the lead lap.

This time, Fittipaldi is ahead. He has almost a lap lead on lap 184.

He had only to coast for 15 laps. With a 31-second edge, he could even afford the luxury of a stop for gas and still win.

Everyone knows what to do in this situation. In golf, you play for the fat part of the green. In football, you fall on the ball. In boxing, you clinch. In poker, you stand pat. Simply get the thing in the hangar. Don’t do anything rash. No one knows what the great Fittipaldi thought he had to do. A fighter leading on points doesn’t throw crazy rights. A football team with a lead and the ball doesn’t pass.

Fittipaldi attacked. Somehow, on turn 4, near where five years before he had gone in the corners with young Unser and come out with roses, he now ran his car down on the apron where the new configuration of Indy has put corrugated ridges. His back-end spun. He lost steering. He swerved across the track and into that boulevard of broken dreams--the wall.

He handed the race to young Unser. Little Al had only to take heed and clinch and fall on the ball himself and say “I’ll play these” and he could rocking-chair his way to his second Indy victory.

What happened? Well, it is the view of young Unser that his teammate (read “adversary” in this case) was trying “to bury me.” That is, recover the full lap lead he had barely lost moments before. Overtake Little Al again. Put a full lap between them. “Emmo got in my turbulence. He was trying to put me down a lap. But what happened was, his front end wouldn’t turn. I know, because the same thing almost happened to me a lap before. You see, you do everything in your power to put a competitor a lap down. It would have been a final nail in my coffin.”

Fittipaldi will admit only he made a mistake going so low on the track.

Whatever the facts, the final score of the race will show E. Fittipaldi finished 17th. Stats, as usual, lie. He was like a golfer going for a 2 who hits it out of bounds and in the water and makes 12. He died with his guns out and his lip curled. He had the best car in the race. He simply forgot where he was. Indy hates for you to get too cocky. It’s always got the wall for guys who take liberties with her. He lost what he should have won, but the other Mercedes won anyway.

If you ever get on a riverboat or in a card parlor and you see Roger Penske sitting there riffling a deck of cards, get back out of there. Fast. If you don’t, sure as God made little green apples and it rains in Indianapolis in the summertime, you’re going to be looking at a lot of straight flushes. Not yours, his. If he’s got dice, they’re his. Don’t fade him. Fade, period.

This was the ninth time an Unser has won this race. But it was the 10th time Penske has won.

In the lore of auto racing, Penske comes into focus as the greatest coach in the history of his game, a Knute Rockne of the Brickyard, as it were. Vince Lombardi of this automotive Super Bowl.

When he puts a team on the track, you better get ready to punt.

Usually, when an innovator comes to Indy with a new idea for a power plant, it either doesn’t work or doesn’t last. The rear-engined Fords were the last to revolutionize Indy--and it took them three years.

So, nobody was unduly alarmed when they heard Mercedes-Benz was getting into racing for the first time in more than 70 years.

But when they heard it was Roger Penske calling the plays, they ran to the rule book. Sure enough, Roger had found a loophole that allowed him to put a motor in a race car that legally could out-boost and out-horsepower the rest of them.

Giving this racer’s edge to an Unser, a Fittipaldi--and a Penske--is like giving Nick the Greek a fifth ace, a lion another claw or Germany another army.

It’s a bit of overkill. Unsers win races without Penske and Penske wins races without Unsers.

Penskes and Mercedes-Benzes are formidable enough, but a Penske-Mercedes-Unser team should be in violation of antitrust laws.

After all, the word “Unser” means “ours” in German. So, “Unser Indianapolis” would not necessarily be hyperbolic. But adding Penske should be Roger and out.