Snowboarder Palmer Enjoys Smooth Ride

Just before the start of the 23rd annual pro-celebrity race Saturday at the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach, entertainer Donny Osmond honked the horn on his Toyota Celica and said, “I’m ready to win this thing.”

Retorted snowboarder Shaun Palmer, a two-time Xtreme Games gold medalist and the pole sitter in this particular shindig, playing off an old Donny and Marie song, “Donny is the country. I’m going to be the rock ‘n’ roll.”

It was a good line, but Palmer had it backward. He had the country drive, winning easily and bringing his car home without a scratch, while Osmond, the winner here in 1991, rocked, then rolled.

Four laps into the 10-lap demolition derby--even the pro drivers got into the crash act--Osmond found himself hanging upside down in his seat harness, thinking that the new first turn at the Aquarium of the Pacific in the reconfigured 1.82-mile course was a little too tight for the speed he’d tried to carry into it.

“It was going to be a great race until I got upside down,” he said of his detour into the tire barrier and slow roll onto the car’s roof. “I was hanging there and I see fuel dripping all around. I hit the fire extinguisher and said, ‘I gotta get out of here.’ ”

He did, with the help of emergency personnel, and escaped injury, but his crash typified the race. Andy Lauer, last year’s celebrity winner, hit the wall on the second lap. Roger Mears, the retired off-road racing champion, had two metal-bending encounters, and drag racer Gary Scelzi, used to running in a straight line, followed one right into the side of “Baywatch” star Jose Solano’s car.

“I was just trying to save my life out there,” said Angelle Seeling, who rides motorcycles in drag races for a living.

And Palmer, who escaped it all, observed, “When I caught up to the field later in the race, it looked like bombs had gone off and I was in a war zone.”

In the end, no one got hurt, all said it had been great fun in the identically prepared Celicas, and Mears, despite his misadventures, charged through the field for a second-place finish, giving the fans something to cheer. Charity won too. The race raised more than $100,000 for Southern California children’s hospitals.

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In the 70-mile Kool-Toyota Atlantic race, the season opener for the Toyota-powered open-wheel cars, Canadian teammates Alex Tagliani and Lee Bentham finished first and third.

Tagliani, who also won here in 1997, escaped early race congestion and won convincingly, out-accelerating runner-up Tony Lazzaro of Acworth, Ga., as they took simultaneous white and green flags for the last lap after a full-course yellow had slowed the action. He averaged 73.607 mph.

The late accident, by San Diego driver Nic Rondet, who piled into Turn 1 trying to catch Lazzaro, let defending series champion Bentham claim third place.

Alex Gurney of Newport Beach, son of former Formula One and Indy car driver Dan Gurney, qualified seventh but finished only six laps before he was sidelined in an accident.

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Felipe Giaffone of Brazil and Chris Neville of Scottsdale, Ariz., won poles for today’s supporting races. Giaffone qualified at 97.038 mph for the Dayton Indy Lights race and Neville was fast at 88.268 in a Ford Mustang for the BFGoodrich Johnson Controls Trans Am.