It’s Home Sweet Home for Racing

Listen! Can I ask you something? When you go to an open-wheel auto race, do you like to see one with an Unser--any Unser--in it? An Andretti? Fittipaldi? Bobby Rahal? Paul Tracy? Zanardi? Robby Gordon? A Juan Manuel Fangio? A Jones boy? A Penske in the pits with a stopwatch on a contending car?

Of course, you do! Me too.

Just as you go to a ballgame, you want to see Junior Griffey, Mark McGwire, Cal Ripken, a Bonds.

You don’t want to see some guys just called up from Peoria. Or a replacement player.

In most places, you get a refund when they have to use stand-ins in stars’ roles. You want the real Green Bay Packers, not some facsimile.

That’s why I can’t wait for the resumption of open-wheeled Indy racing in Southern California in the Marlboro 500 at the new California Speedway this Sunday. It’s a CART (Championship Auto Racing Teams) event, so you get the first string.

This part of the country used to be a hotbed of auto racing. Something like 80% of all the old Indy 500 racers used to be built in garages along Hawthorne and Torrance. Drivers like Rex Mays, Parnelli Jones, Dan Gurney, Troy Ruttman, Sam Hanks came from here. So did the offset engines and a huge percentage of the mechanics. Movie stars periodically dipped into the game. Before there was a Paul Newman in a race car, there was Douglas Fairbanks. They had a board track in Beverly Hills and Mary Pickford was usually there. World War I flying ace Eddie Rickenbacker raced here. Dirt tracks proliferated.

Roger and Greg Penske and associates (who include Los Angeles Ram Hall of Fame linebacker Les Richter) are trying to restore that golden age.

They have built a huge state-of-the-art track, a gorgeous $120-million facility at Fontana on the site of the old Kaiser steel mill, and they will hold their first major open-wheel championship there Sunday.

It’s an audacious undertaking. The property had been as important to the war effort as the fleet back in the war years when Henry Kaiser was building Liberty ships to carry the fight to the Axis and he needed steel closer than Pittsburgh to keep the line going.

After the war, steel fabrication moved abroad, leaving Fontana rotting in the sun.

Meanwhile, entrepreneurs of every stripe had been trying to restore auto racing to the region. It had flourished in the heartland of Indiana and down south in the meantime, but California lagged behind.

Riverside International Raceway became a major venue, but it was mainly a sports-car configuration and it fell prey to Realtors who thought the land was too valuable to be devoted to the sport of auto racing.

Ontario Motor Speedway was a monument to racing but had to be erected with municipal bonds, $25.5 million of them, which proved a crushing debt load and the enterprise went into receivership and the wreckers’ ball.

This track is the property of the stockholders of Penske Motorsports Inc., has no municipal or government funding and has a checkered flag outlook.

The point is that, at a time when many sports are retrenching, downsizing, wondering where everybody went, auto racing is thriving. It doesn’t need mutuel windows, it doesn’t have multimillion-dollar payrolls for its athletes, and TV is coming on the run to put it on prime time.

But, like any sport--or any entertainment--it needs stars.

It’s got them Sunday. Even the engines have old familiar names--Ford Cosworths from the glory days of Indy, newer Mercedeses, Hondas and Toyotas and even a Lola chassis or two.

Flags will be flying, bands will be playing, 40,000 balloons will be rising against a backdrop of 10,000-foot mountain peaks. More than 110,000 hot dogs will be sold, 40,000 hamburgers, and enough cups of beer (330,000) to stretch from Malibu to San Diego if laid end to end. A happening. An American picnic.

The real Charlie Chaplin used to pace the pits in the old Marmon Wasp days. A guy dressed like him will be aboard Sunday.

Southern California without the roar of the race cars is the old Vic without the rolling strophes of Shakespeare, Yankee Stadium without the thump of home runs, Hollywood without Klieg lights. It’s our birthright. Before ever there was a Ram, Raider, Dodger or Laker--almost before even a Trojan--there was a race car.

The Kaiser heirs wondered what to do with their 550-acre white elephant. Penske provided the answer. A good one it is. A two-mile oval with 14-degree banks.

It’s not the sport of kings, it’s the sport of the people. Whether they’re the bubbas of the stock car circuits, or the luxury-suite set. Whether they wear gold chains and come in stretch limos or wear cutoff jeans and come on motorcycles. It’s as American as Thanksgiving, the sight and sound of 28 of the world’s mightiest power plants dueling in the sun, dicing with death, daring the devil and streaking for a checkered flag and immortality.

The automobile is our national bird, a sport as red, white and blue as the dawn’s early light. It has come back home. The Rams and the Raiders may be gone, but a California speedway is back where it belongs.