Call Moves Off Road, on Track With CART

When Luiz Garcia Jr. of Sao Paulo, Brazil, drove his 1999 Reynard-Mercedes to the best finish of his two-year career in the CART champ car series Sunday at the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach, he depended on the mechanical knowledge of a Moorpark High graduate with an off-road racing background.

Dave Call, 33, is Garcia’s chief mechanic with the newly formed Arciero Project Racing Group team, owned by Albert Arciero of Irvine and Andreas Leberle.

Call built and raced off-road vehicles for the SCORE and Mickey Thompson series at his defunct Simi Valley shop, and eventually became crew chief for off-road legend Roger Mears.

Off-road vehicles are nothing like the champ cars, but Call’s abilities helped Garcia earn his first point by finishing 12th, despite the outdated equipment and an early excursion off of the course in turn nine while following defending series champion Juan Montoya.

Cal Wells of Irvine was the man who brought Call to the CART series. After his association with Mears, Call went to work for an off-road team owned by Wells, and when Wells and Arciero formed a CART champ car team for the 1995 season, Call made the move from desert to asphalt racing.

Hiro Matsushita drove for the Arciero-Wells team in 1995, and the late Jeff Krosnoff of La Canada signed on for the 1996 season.

After Krosnoff was killed in a crash at the 1996 Toronto Grand Prix, Call took time off “to recuperate.” He returned to racing in 1998 as chief mechanic for a Ferarri team in the American Le Mans series.

Call still finds the idea of setting up a truck to survive 1,000 miles of abuse over some of the roughest terrain in the world to be a bigger challenge, but he makes no bones about why he is working with champ cars.

“This is where the money is,” Call said. “Off-road racing is becoming extinct, because of the environmentalists, because it has no television package, and because it has no sponsors.

“The [champ cars] are more of a kit with a lot of bolt-on parts, where in off-road racing we build them from the ground up. In [the CART series], the window is very narrow as far as what you can do to the cars, where in off-road it is infinite.”

Call acknowledged working with champ cars is not without its own challenges.

“It is a bigger challenge in making the [champ] cars work within that window, because the advantages between competitors are so tight,” he said.

Garcia’s one-year-old car had to be altered to comply with rules changes that were implemented this year. He finished 17th in the opener at Homestead-Miami Speedway on March 25 despite not having the proper down-force, and he is pleased with Call’s work.

“The car has been ready every session, and there haven’t been any mechanical problems with the cars,” Garcia said. “I was frustrated about the old equipment, but Dave has been totally professional. He has been a real cheerleader, always perking me up and the team and the rest of the mechanics.”

Call mentioned another difference between working on champ cars and working on off-road vehicles.

“This is a full-time thrash [for mechanics],” Call said. “In desert racing, you thrash for five to 10 minutes, then sit around waiting for hours for them to come back.”

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Richie Hearn, a Glendale native who has been attending NASCAR races since being replaced by Norberto Fontana in John Della Penna’s Reynard-Toyota, was at Long Beach for the CART race.

Hearn said he is in the process of lining up a ride for the Indianapolis 500, which he will announce shortly. He also said he will not jump at any deal, and he ruled out the possibility of returning to Della Penna’s team in 2001 even if the owner can secure sponsorship to field a second car.

“I’ve been with John my whole career,” Hearn said. ‘The change would be good for me to run with somebody else.”

When Fontana first tested for Della Penna at Homestead-Miami Speedway in March, Hearn took the Brazilian out on the track in a rental car.

“There are two ways you can learn about ovals,” Hearn said. “Either you have somebody help you or you put it into the wall.

“I didn’t want him to learn that way.”

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Sean Woodside of Saugus, defending NASCAR Winston West series champion, was at the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach, but not to compete.

Woodside works behind the scenes in the film and television industry when he is not racing, and he was a member of the crew that installed the television monitors in the media center.

Woodside worked all three days of the grand prix, and drove straight from the CART series race to Irwindale Speedway on Saturday to compete in a super late model race.

Woodside was caught in an early accident and ended up finishing 22nd, but the television monitors in the media center worked just fine.