HIS SHIP CAME IN

A little more than a year ago, Billy Boat’s only reason for being in Indianapolis was to drive a midget car at 16th Street Speedway, a few miles down the road from Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

He had no ride for the Indy 500, nor any reason to expect one.

Boat won that midget race on May 8. The next morning he was sitting at breakfast when a friend approached him and said, “A.J. is looking for you.”

“Timing is very important in life, and it has been my good fortune that my timing is right,” said Boat, who will start on the pole in Sunday’s 82nd Indianapolis in one of A.J. Foyt’s cars.

“Even with timing, though, you have to make the most of every opportunity. I have been fortunate, working with A.J., to accomplish that so far.”

Foyt already had Davey Hamilton and Paul Durant as his Indy 500 drivers last year, but he wanted Boat in a third car, the one that had been Scott Sharp’s before Sharp suffered head injuries that kept him out of the race.

Boat had to pass a 10-lap refresher course before he could qualify, but when he got his chance he lapped the 2.5-mile rectangular oval at 215.544 mph and started 22nd.

By the 51st lap, Boat took the lead when Tony Stewart pitted and eventually finished seventh, the second highest rookie.

“Three years ago, this moment was so far from reality it wasn’t even funny, and I have to thank Tony George. It’s kind of amazing when you think about it,” Boat said.

Boat is the prototype of the driver that George had in mind when he formed the Indy Racing League in 1996, stating that he wanted to make the Indy 500 available to young Americans who drove open-wheel cars on ovals, rather than the parade of mostly foreign drivers with road-racing backgrounds.

“The IRL has opened doors for oval-track, American drivers, and without this opportunity it would have been near impossible for me to get to Indy. Drivers who win races in midgets and sprints get recognized now, and it has given us the chance to be hired to drive Indy cars. It’s more like it was in the days when A.J. was coming up through the ranks.”

Born and reared in Phoenix, Boat, 32, is a product of Arizona and Southern California midget and sprint car racing.

“It’s great training for Indy car racing,” Boat said. “In midgets and sprint cars, you learn to race, to run close to other cars, to run in traffic and drive a race car on the edge. Once you adapt your style to an Indy car, the instincts you learned in midget and sprint car racing help you to win races.”

Curiously, Boat has in a way followed the path of Foyt in that both were winners in California Racing Assn. sprint cars before going to Indy, and both were multiple winners of the famous Turkey Night Midget Grand Prix. Foyt won in 1960 and 1961 at old Ascot Park. Boat has won the last three, in 1995 at Bakersfield, 1996 at Perris and last November at Ventura.

“I can’t say if I’ll be back this Thanksgiving because right now all our thoughts are about the 500, and the rest of the IRL season. When that’s over, we may get to thinking about other things.”

In 1995, Boat was the USAC Western States midget champion, winning 18 of 27 main events, which tied a USAC single-season, single-series record set by Sleepy Tripp in 1988.

Between May 20 and Sept. 16 that year, he set a USAC record of 11 consecutive victories.

Boat admits to being superstitious. During his 11-win midget streak, he wore the same Aladdin boxer shorts for every race.

When he qualified last Saturday, he was wearing Mickey Mouse 50th anniversary boxers.

“I’ll be wearing them for the race too,” he said. “Maybe I can get a new streak going.”

Boat hasn’t won since he drove at Indy and earned a permanent IRL ride with Foyt, but he has one pole, at Las Vegas, and has been second twice. He was in the victory circle last year at Texas, but officials later ruled that because of a timing and scoring error, the winner was Arie Luyendyk.

“Even though we had it taken away from us, I gained some confidence from taking the checkered flag, going through what I thought was the experience of winning at this level,” Boat said. He was credited with second place.

In two IRL races this year, he finished 21st at DisneyWorld in Orlando, Fla., and third behind Sharp and Stewart at Phoenix.

Last Saturday he stepped out of the shadow of his boss and gave Foyt another Indy 500 pole--A.J. won several as a driver-owner.

“The Indy 500 is the thing we’re here for, not the pole,” Boat said. “I feel it’s more of a bonus for my guys [crew] because they worked so hard on the car. Starting up front is important because you never know what can happen in the back of the pack.

“It’s definitely safer up front. I don’t know what’s going to happen in back, you win the race on the 200th lap, not on the first.”

Kenny Brack, a Swedish driver Foyt plucked from the ranks of European Formula 3000 cars, will be on the outside of the front row with Texan Greg Ray in the middle.

“We don’t have any team plans for the start,” Foyt said of his two drivers. “You can’t plan things like that. One of the guys in front will accelerate faster than the others, and I told Billy and Kenny that if it’s not them, to let him go. I want Billy to bring the field down clean. I’m not worried because the two guys I have are very heads-up drivers.”

Billy’s father, Bill Boat, says he knew it was just a matter of time before his son got the right break. He says he has known Billy had the talent since he first rode a motorcycle when he was 8.

“We used to go motorcycle riding in the desert with Ron Shuman, who used to drive sprint cars for me, and Billy was riding an 80cc Yamaha,” the elder Boat said. “Ron and I were hauling along, going 60 or so miles an hour and I kind of forgot that Billy was with us.

“I looked around behind me and there he was right with us on that little 80cc bike. From his first race, when I had to hold him up at the starting line, he was always good. He would learn just from talking to other drivers about racing. He’s like a sponge, he absorbs knowledge.”

When he’s not racing, the younger Boat runs his own company, B&B; Fabrication, a metal fabrication and manufacturing shop specializing in Porsche, BMW, Corvette and other high-performance automotive exhaust systems. The company, which he started in 1986, employs 30 people and is based in a new 30,000-square-foot facility in Phoenix.

“People ask me what I do for a hobby, and I have to say between my business, my family and my two oldest children racing quarter-midgets, I don’t have much time for anything else. If I had a two-week vacation, I’d probably spend a week snow skiing in Colorado and a week on the beach in Hawaii.”

Boat was valedictorian of his class at Alhambra High in Phoenix and graduated from Arizona State with a degree in finance.

“Billy is a winner, on the racetrack and in the business world,” Foyt said. “Having a winner on the team is all you need to know.”