Southland Gets Up to Speed

Move over basketball, tennis and hockey.

Make room for motor racing. The vroom-vroom season is here. It might not be “March Madness,” but it’s certainly “Spring Speed,” and there’s never been anything like it in Southern California.

Over the next six weeks, virtually every racing series of national significance in the country will be appearing either in Fontana at the California Speedway or on the city streets of Long Beach.

A unique combination of oval and road racing at the same venue will get engines revved up this weekend when two sanctioning bodies make their Southern California debuts at California Speedway. The 3-year-old Grand American Road Racing series will test the new 21-turn, 2.8-mile infield road circuit on Saturday, with Tony George’s Indy Racing League running its Yamaha Indy 400 on the two-mile oval Sunday.

Saturday’s Grand American 400 will be four races in one, with 200-mph Ferraris, Lolas, Reynards and other exotic makes mixing it up with street-going GT cars that include Corvettes, BMW M3s, Mazda RX-7s and a variety of Porsches.

The IRL race will be a preview of the Indianapolis 500. For the first time since 1980 at Ontario Motor Speedway, the Indy cars will be running a pre-Indy 500 race on a track as long as two miles.

Not only will the full IRL cast, including defending Indy 500 champion Helio Castroneves, be on hand, but also Jimmy Vasser from Bobby Rahal’s CART team, getting acclimated to the IRL car he will drive at Indianapolis.

If the race follows the early 2002 pattern, it will be a showdown between Sam Hornish Jr., the defending IRL champion, and Roger Penske’s twosome of Castroneves, winner of last Sunday’s Phoenix 200, and Gil de Ferran, last year’s CART champion. Penske switched his team from CART to the IRL after last season.

Hornish won the season opener at Homestead, Fla., followed by the two Penske cars. Last week it was Hornish following the Penskes, finishing third.

Speeds are expected to exceed 220 mph as the Dallara and G Force cars, powered by Chevrolet or Infiniti engines, make their first appearance in California.

After a weekend off for Easter, racing returns to California Speedway April 6-7 with the superbikes, AMA’s most prestigious road-racing event.

Although the superbikes have been at Willow Springs Raceway in Rosamond for several years, this will be their first appearance in the greater Los Angeles area since a 1988 race on an artificial course set up on the Pomona Fairgrounds.

Nicky Hayden, winner of the Daytona 200 two weeks ago, and two-time AMA champion Mat Mladin will head the all-star field for a pair of 100-kilometer championship events. Mladin, who was injured in a prerace crash in Daytona, is expected to be at full strength for Fontana.

The motorcycles will run on a 21-turn, 2.3-mile course specifically designed for two-wheelers. Both days will be full of racing, with AMA-sanctioned events for 600cc supersport, 250 Grand Prix and Formula Xtreme on both days, besides the superbike main events.

“The new road course is really incredible,” said former world champion Eddie Lawson after a test ride. “The layout ensures that every race will be close and intense. With long straightaways and slow right turns, you’ll get a great mix of speed, hard braking and passing opportunities. This track actually makes me wish I was still racing.”

The 28th Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach on April 14 will give Southland fans their first opportunity to compare the street-racing CART champ cars on a 1.968-mile circuit with the oval-racing Indy cars that will run on the two-mile oval in Fontana.

It will also be the first chance to see what changes Chris Pook has made in CART since taking over from Joe Heitzler in December as president of the 23-year-old sanctioning body. Pook’s footprints will be everywhere, since it was in Long Beach that the former British travel agent first produced a successful street race that became the model for similar races worldwide.

Spectator grandstands to seat more than 63,000 people are already becoming part of Long Beach’s landscape. More than three miles of fencing and 14 million tons of temporary concrete walls will define the circuit, with 16,000 tires lashed together to minimize car crash damage.

Long Beach will be CART’s first U.S. race this year, the season having opened in Monterrey, Mexico, where Cristiano da Matta won his third consecutive raceafter finishing 2001 with wins in Australia and at California Speedway.

For the first time since CART was established in 1978, however, there will be no Penske cars. When Penske, one of the founders of CART, switched to the IRL, that left CART without its defending champion, de Ferran, and its Long Beach winner, Castroneves.

“Roger is an incredibly capable guy, but don’t cast the other guys in the CART series out of the window,” Pook said shortly after taking over the reins. “We’ve got some quality guys, really solid citizens, in this series. Just look at the number of winners we had last year in the CART series. There were 11 different winners.”

Paul Tracy, the Long Beach winner in 1993 and 2000, and Vasser, the 1996 winner, will be in the field.

Two weeks later, NASCAR arrives with its Winston Cup spectacle expected to attract more than 115,000 stock racing fans into California Speedway for the April 28 NAPA Auto Parts 400.

Rusty Wallace is defending champion, but the driver to watch will be Sterling Marlin, the 44-year-old campaigner who nearly won the Daytona 500 and then came back to win in Las Vegas and last Sunday in Darlington, S.C. He will be leading the Winston Cup old-timers against an under-30 group that includes Ryan Newman, Dale Earnhardt Jr., Kurt Busch, Kevin Harvick, Jimmie Johnson and Elliott Sadler, runner-up at both Daytona and Darlington.

The day before the Winston Cup race will be a busy one. The International Race of Champions, matching the best of NASCAR against the best from open-wheel racing in identically-prepared Pontiac Firebirds, will share the spotlight with Busch Grand National and Winston West stock cars. NASCAR’s Tony Stewart won the opening IROC race at Daytona, closely followed by Hornish and Scott Sharp of the IRL.

And if four weeks of nationally prominent racing isn’t enough, there are the weekly Saturday night shows at Irwindale Speedway, Perris Auto Speedway, Orange Show Speedway in San Bernardino and Ventura Raceway. Of special note is a two-day appearance by the American Speed Assn., a stock car organization, April 6-7 at Irwindale.

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Southland Races

* SATURDAY: California Speedway--Grand American 400 for exotic prototype and production GT sports cars.

* SUNDAY: California Speedway--Indy Racing League’s Yamaha Indy 400 for Indy cars. Also Grand-Am Cup 250 for street stocks.

* APRIL 6: California Speedway--Round 2 of AMA Chevy Trucks U.S. Superbike championship, the Yamaha West Region Dealers 100k.

* APRIL 7: California Speedway--Round 3 of AMA Chevy Trucks U.S. Superbike championship, the Yamaha 100k.

* APRIL 13: Streets of Long Beach--Toyota pro-celebrity race.

* APRIL 14: Streets of Long Beach--Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach for CART open-wheel champ cars. Also Toyota Atlantic and SCCA Trans-Am.

* APRIL 27: California Speedway--NASCAR Busch Grand National and Winston West series races. Also International Race of Champions.

* APRIL 28: California Speedway--NASCAR Winston Cup NAPA Auto Parts 500.