Jim Guthrie Hoping to Beg, Borrow His Way to Indy

Just when it appeared the Indy Racing League was coming up short in the way of interesting new names for the Indianapolis 500, along comes Jim Guthrie to breathe some life into a lackluster entry list.

Who is this 35-year-old body-shop owner from Albuquerque who literally stole last week’s Phoenix 200 from Tony Stewart, the pride of the IRL and the No. 1 driver for the richest team in the series?

When Guthrie nursed his Oldsmobile Aurora-powered Dallara home to victory on little more than fumes, it was his first

win of any kind in a professional career in which the highlights had been a third, seventh and 10th in the Toyota Atlantic series, a sixth in the January IRL race in Orlando, Fla., and an 18th in last year’s Indy 500.

His team, Blueprint Racing, is located in the garage behind his home. His crew isn’t paid a dime. His car doesn’t even have a spare engine.

He has no major sponsor.

“I was going to thank my sponsor after the race, the way all the winners do, but then I realized I didn’t have one,” Guthrie said, laughing.

To get the car ready for this year’s opening race, Guthrie’s father borrowed against a $20,000 IRA to pay for insurance and living expenses in Orlando.

“The money got us there and we paid it back with the check [$63,250] we got for sixth place,” the younger Guthrie said.

The rest of the money--a Dallara costs $263,000--came from friends who paid $5,000 each for a share of the team, plus $30,000 each from the Santa Ana and Mescalero Apache tribes in New Mexico.

Guthrie looks on his victory at Phoenix not as a major accomplishment but as “just practice” for the Indianapolis 500.

“I’ve never been so focused on one single event in my entire life,” he said of the 500. “I said after Phoenix, it was kind of a David and Goliath story but I don’t know if you can call it slaying the giant. If we win at Indy, we’ll be able to call it that.”

However, things might be changing for the 5-foot-8, 150-pound Guthrie. The phone at his Albuquerque garage has been ringing regularly since he beat Stewart to the finish line by .854 of a second.

“We haven’t seen any checks yet, but the opportunities are there,” he said. “If the influx of sponsorship is what I think it’ll be, we’ll go to Indy with a spare car, two spare engines and an opportunity to do it the easy way, after years and years of the hard way.”

Blueprint Racing, which Guthrie owns with Ed Rachinski, the team’s president and founder, and Tommy O’Brien, team manager, has been operating on a shoestring, a frayed one at that.

“The crew is just a bunch of close friends, guys who built hot rods together, went skiing together and take time off from work without pay to help with the car,” he said. “Maybe I’ll give them a little bonus from the [$170,100] Phoenix win. They deserve it.

“And the engine needs some help too. It’s been living on loving care. It has 860 miles on it and that’s a whole lot more than was expected of it. Some of the money is going to buy a spare.”

That’s an additional $75,000.

Last year, after some modest help from the Santa Ana tribe, Guthrie took his race car to the reservation during the off-season, talked to a group of youngsters and let them sit in the cockpit. This year they gave him $30,000 to represent the Santa Ana Star Casino, which they operate.

The Mescalero Apaches, who own a resort, the Inn of the Mountain Gods, pledged another $30,000 in the hotel’s name, but they put it in $5,000-a-month increments.

“Every penny helps, whenever it comes,” Guthrie said. “If we didn’t get a penny from them, it gave the team a great feeling to see the look on the kids’ faces when we showed up on the reservation with the No. 27.”

The first thing Guthrie did Monday was visit his fellow rookie teammate, Sam Schmidt, in St. Joseph’s Hospital in Phoenix, where Schmidt was taken with neck and spinal injuries after an accident during the race. Schmidt was released and returned to his Las Vegas home Tuesday.

“I felt really bad for Sam,” Guthrie said. “He was running sixth and looked like he might have a top-five finish in his first [IRL] race,” Guthrie said. “But you know, if it wasn’t for his accident, we probably would have run out of gas.”

Guthrie, who made only two pit stops to six for runner-up Stewart, ran the last 87 laps on a single tank of methanol--an impossible task had not 36 of them been run at slow speeds behind the pace car, under the caution flag. The last 11 were the result of Schmidt’s accident.

CART

Between now and April 11, when drivers and cars arrive to prepare for the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach, they will have completed a 7,000-mile trip to Surfers Paradise, Australia, and back. CART will race there April 6 and in Long Beach the following Sunday. Teams will leave today from L.A. International Airport in chartered jumbo jets for Brisbane, where they will arrive Sunday after refueling stops in Honolulu and Fiji. Each team is allowed two cars per driver, plus an additional 8,350 pounds of equipment.

Immediately after the race, the cargo will be repacked and trucked to Brisbane for a return flight to Los Angeles. Thanks to the international dateline, the planes will leave Australia at 3 p.m., Brisbane time, and arrive here at 10:45 a.m. the same day.

NASCAR

Winston Cup teams have the weekend off, but for Dale Jarrett and Dale Earnhardt, it may be more nerve-racking than if they were racing in Saturday’s Galaxy Foods 300 Busch Grand National race at Hickory, N.C. Both will have third-generation driver-sons making their debuts in the Busch series.

Jason Jarrett, 21, son of Dale and grandson of former NASCAR champion Ned Jarrett, and Dale Earnhardt Jr., 22, son of his namesake and grandson of the late Ralph Earnhardt, will be trying to qualify on the .363-mile Hickory Motor Speedway’s banked oval.

FORMULA ONE

When the Grand Prix circuit returns to action Sunday at the Interlagos course in Sao Paulo, Brazil, the defending champion will have a new look. Damon Hill, who won in Brazil last year en route to the Formula One championship, was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire last week by Queen Elizabeth II. He received the award at Buckingham Palace, just as his late father Graham Hill had in 1968 after he had won his second world title.

“The room seems smaller than I remember it,” said Hill, who accompanied his father to the palace in 1968. “I’m very, very proud to be honored by the queen and by the country in this way. It’s an extremely precious thing.”

NHRA

Ford signed driver-of-the-year John Force to bolster its funny car roster, but it has fallen off in pro stock, once its strongest drag racing program when Bob Glidden was winning his 10 National Hot Rod Assn. championships. After Glidden retired two weeks ago to develop Winston Cup stock car engines for Geoff Bodine, not a single Ford tried to qualify for last week’s ATSCO Nationals at Houston. It was the first time in 27 years that no pro stock Ford was entered in an NHRA event.

Top-fuel driver Marshall Topping, who suffered a broken knee and bruises to his chest and lung in a fiery 275-mph crash during qualifying for the Gatornationals three weeks ago in Gainesville, Fla., has returned to his home in Balboa to recuperate. More surgery is planned on his knee, but Topping says his long-range goal is to “get back in the car and beat this thing.”

The NHRA has the week off, but will be in Rockingham, N.C., next week for the Winston Invitational.

LAST LAPS

Cajon Speedway will open its 37th season Saturday night with the Coors Light 100, a NASCAR Featherlite Southwest Tour race, on the three-eighths-mile paved oval at Gillespie Field in El Cajon. Sean Monroe, taking over the Chevy Monte Carlo formerly driven by Chris Trickle, is the points leader. Trickle remains in a coma in a Las Vegas hospital, the victim of an apparent drive-by shooting Feb. 9.

Former NFL defensive back Ronnie Lott has been named to the Professional SportsCar Racing (formerly IMSA) board of directors. . . . Pro drivers for the Toyota Pro-Celebrity race April 12 during the Long Beach Grand Prix will include Silver Crown champion Jimmy Sills, off-road legend Ivan Stewart, Trans-Am champion Tom Kendall and three-time Formula One champion Jack Brabham.