San Juan Capistrano Racer Changes Lanes : An Accomplished Motocross Driver, Jeff Ward Is Taking a Run on the Indy Car Circuit

When newcomer Jeff Ward showed up for qualifying at the Indianapolis 500 last month, he said just about everyone asked him if he was related to Rodger Ward, a king at the speedway in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

No, he told them, although he certainly wouldn’t mind following in his footsteps.

But it didn’t happen this year. Ward made two qualifying attempts, but his average speeds in the 224-m.p.h. range in a year-old Lola Ford-Cosworth fell below the 225.023 posted by the final driver in the field, Eliseo Salazar.

Not a bad showing, however, for a rookie’s first run at auto racing’s glamour event.

“I hadn’t even sat in an Indy car until I went there this year for the rookie tests,” said Ward, 33, who lives in San Juan Capistrano with his wife, Candice, and their 2-year-old son.

“We weren’t that far off qualifying speed this year, and the bubble was around 220 the year before.”

A blown engine on the first day of qualifying hurt, then rain delays and other mechanical problems later in the month didn’t help matters.

Until three years ago, all of Ward’s racing background had been in motorcycles, and that wasn’t even in high-speed road racing, but in motocross events.

“Yeah, two wheels in the dirt, with all those jumps,” said Ward, smiling. “We’d never get much over 70 miles per hour, but it’s still pretty fast. You don’t realize how fast it is until you have to stop quickly.”

Several Indy car drivers have raced motorcycles, Ward said, but none has had as long a career in motocross competition as he had before switching to autos.

Motocross is physically demanding, with many riders in their teens or not much older. Ward started racing professionally at 16 and stayed until he was 31 but knew his body couldn’t take that kind of pounding very long into his 30s.

Even a string of national championships and star status on Team Kawasaki couldn’t change that.

Ward looked around for a new brand of racing, and jumped into an Indy Light car for the first time in 1993.

“I’m sure some people thought I probably should have started at a lower level in the cars, but I wanted to get in at as high a level as possible and see what happened,” he said.

The Indy Lights have many of the same characteristics and the look of the Indy cars, but are smaller with less power. But they run at many of the same venues the Indy cars do, on the road courses and the ovals, and have the same governing body.

Ward said a big difference between racing motorcycles and a high-speed race car boils down to money. “The costs aren’t nearly what they are in auto racing,” he said.

Ward, who grew up in Mission Viejo, made a good living for 15 years on the motocross circuit, which has become increasingly lucrative because of the financial commitment from the highly competitive motorcycle factories.

Factory rider salaries have soared well into six figures, and purses have grown steadily with the increase of ESPN television coverage.

“There’s really good money now in motorcycles, and I made a very good living for several years,” he said. “But now I’ve been putting money into auto racing for the last couple of years just trying to get to where I want to be.”

Ward was able to get into a few Indy Light races in 1993 and 1994. He ended up finishing fourth in his first race at Phoenix in 1993, but he was dogged by mechanical problems in the other four he entered that season, and his car owner at the time was operating on a limited budget.

He also raced only a few times on the circuit in 1994. “I spent a lot of time searching for sponsorships,” he said.

Ward’s status as a driver got a boost this year when he joined Arizona Motor Sport Racing, partially owned by two former motorcycle racers, Jeff Sinden and Neil McNeice, along with Joe Kennedy, who has a strong background in Indianapolis car engineering. Sinden and Kennedy had been part of the Menard Team that raced Gary Bettenhausen and Al Unser Sr. on the Indy car circuit.

“I had talked to them [Sinden and Kennedy] about driving Indy Lights because I’d known them from motorcycles,” Ward said.

“But I had pretty much given up on it, and then all of a sudden, out of the blue, they called me and said they were ready to go with a full, 12-race season with the Indy Lights. That’s a big commitment.”

Sinden, the team’s managing partner, said he saw Ward drive at Laguna Seca Raceway in Monterey in 1993.

“I could tell from watching him in that one race that he had the ability,” Sinden said.

When Unser retired, the newly formed Sinden Team looked around for another driver and picked Ward.

Ward did so well in the early stages of this season in the Indy Light car, the racing team owners decided to try to qualify him at Indianapolis in a full-size car. Even though that effort fell short, Ward has shown ability. The owners gave him a two-year contract to drive an Indy car the next two years, beginning with the 1996 season.

“We’re very pleased with what he’s done,” Sinden said. “He knows how to race wheel to wheel, and he has a lot of patience with a car, which is a good trait in a driver. He lacked a little experience at first in helping us set up the car, but he’s learned that quickly.”

Ward is fourth in the PPG Indy Light point standings after seven races. He finished second at Miami, third at Detroit and was among the top 10 in three of five others, including a seventh-place finish at Long Beach. A blown transmission prevented him from finishing Sunday’s race in Portland, Ore.

“There’s not a lot of purse money in the Lights,” he said. “First is usually worth around $20,000 and second $10,000 and it scales down from there, but what I’ve been doing is paying my dues to get into the big cars. That’s where the money is. Just finishing last in the 500 this year was worth more than $170,000.”

Ward said he has received encouragement from other Indy car drivers, most notably Robby Gordon of Orange and Paul Tracy of Paradise Valley, Ariz. “Chip Ganassi of the Target Racing Team has been real encouraging to me too,” Ward said.

Ward’s father, Jack, also has been supportive of his racing career since his early days on motorcycles.

“He’s a former professional motorcycle rider himself,” Ward said. “He played pro soccer in Glasgow, Scotland, then got into motorcycle racing in Europe after that. When we landed over here, he continued to ride, and I’d go with him to watch. When I got going, he stopped and just helped me.”

Jack Ward remembers buying his son a mini-bike when he was 5.

“I was mostly a trials rider, which is more obstacle riding, but Jeff always wanted to go fast,” Jack Ward said. “I think he’ll do well in the cars too. I can see a big difference in him now over when he started three years ago. He’s much more aggressive and confident now.”

Ward has had his share of spills and broken bones, and four years ago bruised his heart in a motocross crash.

The same kind of dangers also stalk him now in the sleek Indy cars. Maybe more so.

“You think about it more when you’re out of a car than when you’re in it,” he said. “But when you see a crash like the one that Stan Fox had at Indianapolis this year, and you think that it could happen to any one of us at any time. You just forget about it when you get in the car.”

More than 30 years ago, a reporter asked Rodger Ward about his racing fears. It was 1962, the year he won his second Indianapolis 500 and was sitting atop the auto racing world.

His thoughts weren’t much different from the way Jeff Ward looks at it now.

Rodger Ward was silent for a few seconds, and then he said, almost as if offering justification for his flirtation with serious injury or death: “ . . . But racing is my life.”

From that standpoint, Jeff Ward and Rodger Ward are related--in spirit, not by blood.