Many of the Hardest Workers at Del Mar Will Be Commuters : Opening day: For various reasons, some trainers will stable their horses in L.A. and ship them south as needed.

The I-405/I-5 corridor between Los Angeles and Del Mar, frequently a time-consuming obstacle course for motorists, might have more congestion this racing season because of horse vans rolling in and out of Hollywood Park and Santa Anita. As Del Mar’s 43-day season opens today, a number of trainers, including Bobby Frankel, Neil Drysdale and Paco Gonzalez, will be drop-in participants, stabling and training their horses in the Los Angeles area and shipping them south as the races require.

Frankel won’t stable horses at Del Mar because of what he perceives to be a safety factor. With Drysdale, it’s mainly an economic move.

Eddie Gregson, who won the 1981 Del Mar Futurity with Gato Del Sol, the year before the colt won the Kentucky Derby, is also tightening his stable’s budget and is glad to be away from the crowded conditions at Del Mar during morning training hours.

Most of the stay-away trainers don’t plan to run fewer horses during Del Mar’s 55th season, but Frankel, who has won 234 races and 33 stakes at the track, including the last two runnings of the $1-million Pacific Classic, thinks the trend might affect the size of some fields.

“If you’ve got a borderline horse,” Frankel said, “you’d be more likely to run if you’re right there, but you might think twice about running if you’ve got to ship.”

Other trainers who will be vanning horses from Hollywood Park and Santa Anita include Mark Hennig and Sandy Shulman, who finished second to Ron McAnally in the standings at the recently completed Hollywood meeting, winning 24 races with 109 starters.

Del Mar officials don’t think the ship-in trainers will affect the quality of their Wednesday-through-Monday season.

“When I first heard about the situation, I was concerned,” said Joe Harper, the track’s general manager. “But actually we’ve had the biggest demand we’ve ever had for stall space, and we’ve even looked for extra space where we might add a few stalls.”

Harper estimated Del Mar has 2,300 stalls and said the requests have reached about 4,000, compared to the 3,500 range in recent years.

If opening-day entries are indicative, Del Mar will not be part of the national horse-shortage problem, which has been caused by too much racing and cutbacks in the breeding business. Today’s nine-race card drew 104 entries, and for the sixth consecutive year the Oceanside Stakes for 3-year-olds will be split into two divisions.

The number of horses entered for Thursday drops to 82, one of them Bertrando in the $60,000 Wickerr Stakes at one mile on grass. Bertrando won last year’s Pacific Classic and has earned $3 million, but didn’t race the first half of this year because his owners gave him an early start at a stud career.

Frankel used to train the Eclipse Award-winning Bertrando, saddling him for his last start, a second-place finish behind Arcangues in the Breeders’ Cup Classic at Santa Anita in November. But he didn’t agree with the idea of breeding the 5-year-old before resuming his racing career. Bertrando underwent surgery for a chipped knee after the Breeders’ Cup.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with the (Del Mar) track,” Frankel said. “All I know is that I break down a lot of horses there.”

Drysdale started only 13 horses at Del Mar last year, but his two victories, in the San Clemente Handicap and the Del Mar Oaks, were important, helping pad a record that led to an Eclipse Award for Hollywood Wildcat.

“The economy is the major factor,” Drysdale said. “The prices we’re charging to train have stayed the same, but our expenses have gone up. Vanning is not that big of a deal. What does it take, 45 minutes to get a horse from Hollywood Park to Santa Anita? Then it’s only about an hour and a half from Hollywood to Del Mar.”

Owners have been leaving the game in alarming numbers, and consequently many trainers are reluctant to increase their daily rates per horse, which are in the $70 range at the high end.

“I don’t know of a trainer who’s raised his rates in the last three or four years,” Gregson said. “When you’re stabled at Del Mar, you subsidize your stable crews because of the high summer rates down there, and I can’t justify that any more. Part of the fun of the game is the owners going to Del Mar to see their horses train and race, but I didn’t get any pressure from my owners to stable there this year.

“The track is so crowded down there in the mornings that it’s not the best place to train. The track has so many horses on it that it can make your horses nervous. They did widen the track several feet, but I don’t think it’s helped that much. We (trainers) wanted a real training track, something more than the (half-mile) pony track that can only accommodate a couple of a horses at a time. Instead, they gave us an $80-million grandstand.”

Horse Racing Notes

Two of this year’s Triple Crown horses, Powis Castle and Numerous, are entered in races today. Powis Castle, winless this year, is the probable favorite in the first division of the Oceanside as he makes his first start on grass. After running second in the Jim Beam at Turfway Park, Powis Castle was eighth in the Kentucky Derby and ninth in the Preakness. Gary Stevens will ride him for the first time today. After winning the Derby Trial, Numerous broke poorly in the Preakness and finished fifth, then a bruised hoof knocked him out of another race on the Belmont Stakes card. His return might come at the right time for trainer Charlie Whittingham, who will try to use Del Mar to recover from one of his worst Hollywood Park seasons. In the meet that ended Monday, Whittingham won with only four of 70 starters and didn’t win a stake at a track where he has won a record 817.

Brad Free of the Daily Racing Form doesn’t believe that trainers working their horses away from Del Mar will be an immediate handicapping factor. “These are all trainers who know what they’re doing,” Free said. “But of course if some sort of pattern develops after the meet starts, you’d have to start paying attention to it.” . . . The meeting runs through Sept. 14, with first post at 2 p.m. except on Friday, Aug. 5, when the races will start at 4 p.m. “We’ll see how we do, and then see if it’s worth doing some more next year,” General Manager Joe Harper said. “We don’t have lights, but you have to be impressed by the number of people Hollywood Park puts into their track on Friday nights.” . . . For the record: Hollywood Park’s daily average on-track attendance of 12,759 represented an increase of 2.4% over the previous season.