Andretti Takes His Time to Get to Phoenix : Indy cars: After winning two poles this season, Michael concentrates on today’s race and qualifies fifth.

In the first two Indy car races this season, on street courses in Miami and Surfers Paradise, Australia, Michael Andretti was the dominant driver in his Ford Cosworth-powered Lola, but has little to show for it.

He started from the pole in both races, led the first 48 laps at Miami and 51 of 65 laps in Australia before crashing. As a result, he has only eight points in the PPG Cup standings, 24 fewer than leader Bobby Rahal.

Now, the schedule calls for an oval race, the Slick 50 200, today at Phoenix International Raceway.

Andretti and the Paul Newman-Carl Haas team have changed their tactics.

Instead of making an all-out effort to win the pole and be the fastest car in every timed session--as he did at Miami--Andretti directed his efforts the last two days to preparing the car for today’s 200-lap race around the high-speed mile oval.

He qualified fifth Saturday at 179.511 m.p.h. and will start in the third row, behind pole-sitter Bryan Herta, Emerson Fittipaldi, Jacques Villeneuve and Paul Tracy. Herta, a second-year driver from Valencia, ran a record 181.952 m.p.h., one of 18 drivers to better Tracy’s year-old mark of 176.266 m.p.h.

“Phoenix is so quick that we’ve been more concerned with getting the right race-day setup,” Andretti said. “Qualifying is not such a big deal here as it is on a road course because here you can win from anywhere.

“And the important thing is that winning pays 20 points and qualifying only one.”

There is precedent for Andretti’s comments: Roberto Guerrero won from the last starting position in 1987, and no one has won at Phoenix from the pole since Rick Mears in 1990.

“We’ve dug ourselves into a hole and it can come back to haunt us, but the year we won the championship (1991), we came from a long way back, so we know it can be done. The positive side is that we ran real strong both races.

“Another encouraging thing is that even though Rahal is leading the series, we still feel the Penskes (defending champion Al Unser Jr. and Emerson Fittipaldi) are going to be the main challenge, and they’re no better off than we are.”

Unser, who won eight races, including the Indianapolis 500, last year, also has eight points. Fittipaldi, last season’s runner-up, has yet to score a point.

This has been a year of change for Andretti.

After a year in Formula One and another driving an Indy car for Chip Ganassi, he returned to the Newman-Haas team to replace his father, Mario, who retired at the end of the 1994 season. Curiously, it was Herta who replaced Andretti on Ganassi’s team.

When Nigel Mansell, the other Newman-Haas driver, decided to go back to Formula One, it left another opening that was filled by Tracy.

“It’s really different, not racing against Dad,” Michael said. “He’s here, but he’s not in a race car. I think if he’d known how things were going to work out, that I’d be back with our old team and Nigel was going to leave, and that the Lola was going to be so much improved, he might have stayed on for another year.

“I’m just so glad we had four years as teammates. That was something very special. No one ever will really know what that meant to us. What we shared was something very, very few people ever have a chance to do.”

When Mario retired, it also meant that Michael, at 32, became the leader among active drivers in race victories, with 29, and pole positions, with 27--to which he already has added two more.

In switching teams, Michael also switched chassis, from the Reynard in which he won in Australia and at Toronto last year, to the Lola, which had a disappointing 1994 performance.

“The new Lola is much, much improved,” Andretti said. “You’ve got to give a lot of credit to their engineers, they stepped up to the challenge after a bad year.

“I had a gut feeling before I even got in the car that it was going to perform the way it has. All the wind-tunnel readings were positive, and when I got the car on the track, it backed up the wind-tunnel reports.

“Aerodynamics have become the most powerful factor in a race car. A 747 jet can take off at 180 m.p.h., and we do 230. That ought to tell you something about the importance of aerodynamics.”

Aerodynamic improvement, however, has caused an acceleration in speed that Andretti finds dangerous on a mile oval such as the one at Phoenix, where cars lap at close to 20 seconds.

“The cars are on the edge at all times,” he said. “During the race, the turbulence is a lot worse than it used to be when we were running 180 with the bigger wings. Then, when they made the wings smaller to cut down speeds, it didn’t work. The engineers figured out how to go faster.

“It used to be a lot of fun to race here, but not anymore. The car feels awful, especially in the race. I think having small wings on a small oval is more dangerous.”

It is also dangerous trying to fight a driver of Rahal’s capabilities when you’ve lost second gear and your brakes. That’s what happened to Andretti in Australia, where he tried to hold second place from Rahal and crashed on the last lap, dropping to ninth.

“It was my fault,” Andretti acknowledged. “When I looked in the mirrors, I thought Bobby was closer than he was. I’d lost second gear, and it was the worse gear to lose because I use it on every corner but one. Bobby was all over me on the last few laps. I tried to give myself a little bit of room to hold him off, but when my brakes locked up, I knew I was going to lose it.

“If I hadn’t lost that gear, I don’t think anyone could have caught me.”

Andretti led the first 41 laps, relinquished the lead briefly to Stefan Johansson while pitting, then led for 10 more laps before being passed by Tracy, who went on to win.