Different Formula

By SHAV GLICK

Sept. 21, 2000 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

INDIANAPOLIS —

Tony George turns the first card Sunday in his $60-million gamble to make Formula One acceptable to U.S. racing fans when he hosts the F1 traveling circus at his family-owned Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

Formula One, like soccer, has never reached the heights in this country that it has in the rest of the world. More than 350 million fans watch F1 races worldwide, but only a tiny percentage of those are in the United States.

So George, flushed with the success of his gamble in 1994 to break with tradition when he introduced NASCAR Winston Cup stock car racing to the speedway, is doing it again. It has been nine years since F1 raced in the United States, and George and his associates hope that everyone has forgotten that the debacle in Phoenix attracted only 15,000--or less--in 1991.

The SAP United States Grand Prix, the 15th of a 17-race schedule that involves five continents, will run Sunday on a 2.606-mile circuit with 13 turns created either inside or on parts of the 91-year-old 2.5-mile oval, home of the Indianapolis 500 and the Brickyard 400.

Practice for the 190-mile, 73-lap race will be Friday, qualifying Saturday.

To reach this point, George poured an estimated $60 million into overhauling the speedway grounds, as well as building a road-racing circuit that included a 13-story pagoda tower, 32 concrete garages that front on pit lane and 12 suites for Formula One guests.

George is guaranteed a winning hand this time. When approximately 250,000 fans crowd into his raceway, it will be the largest crowd to see a Formula One race since the series began in 1950. Reserved seats were sold out in May. This gives George and the IMS a racing trifecta--the Indy 500, with upward of 400,000 a few years ago, is the largest one-day crowd for any sport, and the 300,000-plus for the Brickyard is the largest stock car attendance anywhere.

“That’s something we can be really proud of, knowing Indianapolis Motor Speedway is host to three crowds like that,” said George.

Attendance for F1 is lower because it is impossible to see the road course from large portions of the oval track grandstands, which have been closed.

High-stakes card games are not won on the first hand, however. The test of George’s gamble will come two, three or four years down the road.

“We’ll see a financial profit this year, but I think there could be a backlash if the event is not successful and, if so, Formula One could probably risk losing the American market altogether,” said George.

F1’s past in the United States is strewn with disappointments--at Las Vegas, Detroit, Phoenix, Dallas since 1981 and before that, at Riverside and Sebring, Fla. Only the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach was a success, and it had Mario Andretti, who became the only American to win a Grand Prix in this country in 1977 and followed that by winning the Formula One title in 1978.

“Without Mario, we might never have made it past the third or fourth year,’ said Chris Pook, founder of the Long Beach race, which in 1984 left F1 to become a CART Indy car race.

And that brings up one of the most perplexing questions surrounding this race. How will Formula One be accepted with no American driver, no American team, no American presence except for corporate sponsors such as Ford, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, Yahoo, Compaq and others?

There was not been an American in the series since Michael Andretti’s abortive ride with Frank Williams’ team as a teammate of the late Ayrton Senna in 1993.

Even the race sponsor, SAP, is foreign. It is a German-based software company. The acronym SAP roughly means “systems, applications, procedures.”

Nationalism is the bond that makes Formula One so popular in the rest of the world, but how can it help in the United States if there are no American drivers? And even if there were, that is no guarantee of an American allegiance.

Take, for instance, the difference between the arrival of Michael Schumacher, the German Formula 3 champion, and Michael Andretti, the American CART champion, into Formula One.

When Schumacher joined Eddie Jordan’s Benetton team in 1991, there was minimal interest in F1 in Germany.

“It’s no secret that before Schumacher started his F1 career there was in Germany a very low regard for Formula One,” said Jordan. “But they got a driver on board and suddenly from Germany being very much into sports cars and touring cars, they have completely turned about face and are big F1 followers.”

When Schumacher wins, it is difficult to tell which group is the happiest--the Germans, or the Italians, who cheer for any driver in a Ferrari. Schumacher, a two-time champion, has driven for Ferrari since 1996. And the German media follow Schumacher, and the other two German drivers, Heinz-Harald Frentzen and Schumacher’s younger brother, Ralf, to every race, every practice and wherever they go in between.

When Michael Andretti tried F1 in 1993, not one American newspaper thought enough of his effort to assign a reporter to F1. Even when Mario was winning the championship in 1978, no U.S. paper followed the story with its own writer.

That was also quite a contrast to the first time Nigel Mansell came to the United States in 1992 when he was world champion. More than 20 British and European writers were on hand at Phoenix International Raceway for his first practice laps in an Indy car.

“You just can’t realize how much nationalism there is in Formula One until you go to the different countries and see how the public idolizes their drivers, and how the writers follow them around like shadows,” said Dan Gurney, who left Riverside in 1959 to spend 11 seasons chasing the F1 dream before returning home to become a car builder in Santa Ana. “It’s something we only get a glimpse of when an American team comes through in the Olympics. There are just too many other distractions in this country to get excited over a driver the way they do in Europe and South America.”

Said Jordan, an Irishman who came to the Indy 500 as driver Stefan Johannson’s manager in 1993: “If we can find the high-quality driver, not just in Indy car, IRL, NASCAR, dirt track, or whatever form of racing there is in the States, it is the obligation of the [Formula One] teams to try to cultivate and create the next Phil Hill, the next Mario Andretti, because that is what this race needs, without any question.”

Hill was the first American, in 1961, to win a Formula One championship.

The other big questions are: How will the high rollers of F1, accustomed to the glamour of Monte Carlo, Barcelona, Sao Paulo and Melbourne, react to the Midwestern tone of central Indiana, where Indianapolis is still trying to escape the nickname “Nap Town,” and how will Americans, accustomed to watching races with many passes for the lead, react to racing where even one pass is considered unusual.

Jacques Villeneuve, who won the Indianapolis 500 in 1995 and the Formula One championship in 1997, understands the situation.

“With Indy being one of the centers of open-wheel racing, it is quite good to go there,” said the Canadian veteran who drives for British American Racing Honda. “The only disappointment is that we are not going to be on the oval. I just hope the American fans don’t get disappointed with the show because it is impossible to get the same kind of overtaking on a road course as you get on an oval.”

Not only is overtaking an F1 problem, but so is competition. Although there are 11 teams with two drivers each in the series, only two teams--West McLaren Mercedes, with two-time champion Mika Hakkinen and David Coulthard, and Scuderia Ferrari Marlboro, with Michael Schumacher and Rubens Barrichello--have any chance of winning. One of the four has won all of the 14 races this year.

Rain, always a possibility in Indianapolis, could be the equalizer. Unlike their Indy car and NASCAR counterparts, Formula One drivers race in the rain and when they do, it often makes for an exciting show.

“If it rains, it will be brilliant for the fans that have never seen very quick racing cars race in the wet at Indy,” said Frank Williams, owner the BMW team. “That should be quite a sight.”

It rained hard Wednesday and more is on the horizon.

Frentzen, the only F1 driver who had been on the newly constructed circuit until this week, says it will be the “fastest track we’ve raced on,” predicting speeds of more than 200 mph as they race clockwise up the front straightaway--in the opposite direction of oval track cars.

“The fact that we’re running half of an oval track makes this situation completely different for us,” said Frentzen, who drove a passenger car around the track, but will be in one of Jordan’s Mugen-Hondas this week. “It is a racetrack that you can divide in two parts. The infield, which is sophisticated, is like a proper Formula One track. Then there is the other side, which is half of the oval. That means we’ll be able to reach incredible high top speeds, if we want to.”

For the first time since Monza in 1961, the Grand Prix cars will race on a banked track. Turn 13, which is Turn 1 for the Indy 500, is banked 11 degrees. Cars will enter the oval track midway between Turns 2 and 1, going in the opposite direction, and then continue up the front straightway before cutting into the infield before reaching the concrete walls of Turn 4.

When Long Beach was proposed as a Formula One site in the 1970s, Pook was told he had to put on one race, to prove the circuit was adequate, before F1 would compete. He staged a Formula 5000 race and F1 came in 1976. This time, not only was Indianapolis not asked to test the track with a different race, the drivers won’t even test it until Friday morning.

“The first question is to know how good the track is, and we can only answer that after the first lap,” said Peter Sauber, owner of the Red Bull Sauber Petronas team.

Drivers will get two hours of practice Friday and an additional 90 minutes Saturday morning before the one-hour qualifying session. Drivers are permitted a maximum of 12 laps, including warmup laps, during qualifying.

“Sometimes qualifying is the best show,” said Jaguar Racing driver Eddie Irvine. “It is so important to start near the front because passing is so difficult. In the race, who knows? It could be the best race of the year, or it could be so boring it brings everyone to tears.”

The biggest gamble is Tony George’s, but it’s also one for Formula One.

“If we don’t crack this one, we can probably wave goodbye to America,” said Jordan. “This is a golden nugget, and we must do the best job we can.”

Added Craig Pollack, owner of the British American Racing team: “If we get it wrong, it’s our own fault.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

U.S. GRAND PRIX

THE FACKTS

* What: Round 15 of 17-race Formula One schedule.

* Where: 2.606-mile road course, Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

* When: Sunday, 11 a.m. PDT. Practice Friday, qualifying Saturday.

* Distance: 73 laps, 190.294 miles (maximum of two hours).

* TV: Fox Sports Net and Speedvision.

* Series champion: Mika Hakkinen, McLaren-Mercedes.