Edition: U.S. / Global

Track Makes Indianapolis 500 No Sunday Drive

By JOSEPH SIANO, Special to The New York Times
Published: May 25, 1990

No matter who runs up front and who brings up the rear on Sunday, each of the 33 drivers in the Indianapolis 500 will pursue a common opponent. Everyone, as they say here, will be chasing the race track.

Finding the precise adjustments that provide the most straightaway speed and best handling in the four turns of the two-and-a-half-mile oval can seem like the pursuit of a tantalizing will-o'-the-wisp. A passing cloud bank, a sudden wind shift or the turbulent air from another car can literally be very unsettling at 220 miles per hour.

The contemporary Indy-car driver has computers that tell him exactly what the car's suspension and engine are doing at any point on the track. But the gadgetry is no substitute for his physical sensitivity to the car's every twitch and the mental dexterity to be aware of all that's going on around him while driving over 200 m.p.h.

''If the driver can't drive the car,'' said Rick Mears, the master of this track for the last decade, ''it doesn't matter what the numbers say.'' Derrick Walker, the general manager of the Porsche team, has perhaps the best computer monitoring system in Indy-car racing. But, as even he admits, ''The seat of the pants is still the best computer.''

Body Language

Walker's anatomical imagery is based on reality. ''You're absolutely strapped into that car,'' said Bobby Rahal, the 1986 winner here. ''You're wearing that car. And so your back might be telling you something, your fanny, your hands. You're getting all of these feelings through your entire body, which is commonly reduced to 'seat of the pants.' ''

Just as Ted Williams's vision was sharp enough for him to tell exactly which part of the ball his bat made contact with, the acuity of Mears's spine has inspired stories from other drivers.

Emerson Fittipaldi, Mears's teammate, remembers when, during preseason testing at the speedway, he pulled into the pits and was asked by Nigel Bennett, the team's chassis designer, if he had noticed a vibration from the car's back end when he entered a turn.

Fittipaldi hadn't. But when he went back out, sure enough, there it was. Mears had felt it and told Bennett.

The Key Link

Walker gave an insight into what separates Mears, a three-time winner and five-time pole-sitter here, from the drivers in the back of the pack.

''If you're the engineer,'' Walker said, ''and you're making adjustments on the car and can't feel them personally, your main link is through that driver. That umbilical cord, if you like, is your link to the car.''

''If a driver can't communicate with you, he's concentrating too much on driving the car through the turns, and his subconscious is not picking up the information,'' Walker said.

Mears said: ''I think that's a big part of it. Being able to run through the corner and be aware of what's going on all around you.''

During the final Indy 500 practice run today, John Andretti, one of Walker's two drivers, came in and shared information with Tim Wardrop, the track engineer for his car.

A 'Nervous' Car

Andretti, the 27-year-old nephew of Mario Andretti, spoke over a radio in his helmet and told Wardrop the car felt ''nervous'' in the middle of the turns, meaning he wasn't sure what it wanted to do. Using more of the racer's argot, he said the front end felt ''a little slow,'' meaning it wasn't gripping as well as the back.

In response to his input, his crew fiddled with just a few of the dozens of adjustments that can be made to the car's suspension and wings. By the time they were done, Andretti had the eighth-fastest lap speed today, 217.733 m.p.h. Mears was fastest at 222.750.

The slightest change in any one of these adjustments is immediately noticeable.

''When you're running 222 miles per hour,'' Rahal said, ''you can tell the difference between 222.0 and 222.3.''

And unless an Indy car is set up just right, the driver will watch helplessly as his competitors pull away. The days when a driver could carry a poor-handling car, tossing the back end out as he wrestled it through the turns, are long gone.

''On a speedway, you have to make the car carry you,'' Mears said. ''You can't carry the car all day for 500 miles. If you can physically see a car sliding around, the guy's in big trouble.'' The reason drivers spend all month running lap after lap of practice here is because slight weather changes drastically affect a car's handling.

If the day has been overcast and the sun suddenly breaks through, the track surface heats up and becomes slicker. A stiff breeze blowing across the four identical 90-degree turns gives each one of them its own personality.

Victims of the Track

Rahal and his teammate, Al Unser Jr., became victims of the mercurial speedway earlier this month.

A day before the start of time trials to determine starting positions on Sunday, Unser ran a sizzling lap at more than 228 miles per hour, with Rahal not far behind at 225.

Two days later, Rahal took his qualification run with the same setup and ran only 222 m.p.h. Unser ran a week later - again with the same setup - and dropped off even more, to 220.

Rahal, blaming extra humidity for slowing him down, sounded like a batter who had a drive caught on the warning track on July 4.

''The car handled beautifully,'' he said. ''But with that much density, you're going to get a lot of drag. So it just wasn't going down the straightaway as fast.

''You learn very quickly it's all a crapshoot.''

Which makes planning a race-day strategy pretty much useless.

''I start out the race and I see where the car is at,'' said Mears, a driver famed for his doggedness in 500-mile races.

He divides the race into segments, and experiments with small changes in the car after each one to see what works best that day.

''And I get through all those segments and changes,'' Mears said, ''And what I'm trying to do is I'm experimenting a little bit in the early stages to get my car to the absolute best I can make it by the last segment. So then, when we have to go racing, we'll have our best shot.''