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Phoenix

Sun Automotive 200

21/04/2001

John Martin's

Grandstand View

Saturday, April 21, Phoenix International Raceway: From 6:30 to 6:50 p.m., a "heavy sprinkle" of rain had fallen at the track, although I was feeling only the occasional random drop when the field started off on their first pace / parade / recon. / whatever lap at 7:00 p.m. I had taken up station in the infield just inside the East (9 degree) Banking (which leads onto the start/finish/pit straight of this oval-cum-infield road course), that being the place where I could get closest to the cars on the track without a fence between me and them -- there was still some natural light, and I wanted to take some pictures.

Jon Field in his Intersport Lola-Judd was right up with James Weaver in the Dyson R&S Mk. III (NOT Dyson's new Mk. III-C) on the front row, with 24 other cars trailing behind (Porschehaus having decided not to run its second Lola-Nissan SR-II car -- it had been in the paddock with a "For Sale" sign on it in the afternoon -- and the Archangel crew having discovered, on one of the parade laps, a gearbox problem in their #21 SR-II class-pole-winning car, to be driven by Lally and Macey).

In the afternoon, Jon Field had been mulling whether to start the race on his qualifying tires, which he'd flat-spotted during qualifying, or to put on a fresh set, which would have put him at the back of the starting grid. Since the race was officially declared "wet" before the start by the organizers (as the track was still quite damp), he was saved from having to make that decision, as all who wanted to were allowed to put on rain rubber.

During the parade laps I checked the grandstands along the main straight for spectators, and figured there were all of about 350 (!) scattered around there -- throw in about the same number in the huge new West Banking stands (under the giant illuminated "NASCAR Winston Cup" sign) and a few dozen more in the infield, and I'd be very surprised if the total number of paying spectators exceeded 1,000. Too bad, it looked like a lot of people were scared away by the lousy weather (hey, this is big NASCAR country, and you know how much racing they do in NASCAR when it rains . . . ).

On the first green flag lap, Weaver came by in the lead with his right foot firmly planted on the loud pedal, but Field didn't appear in his Lola until all the other cars had come by -- I figured he'd gotten too enthusiastic at the start and spun somewhere (he had, at the first turn). After that Weaver swiftly disappeared into the distance, while second place was being contested by a tight group consisting of the Doran-Lista Crawford-Judd of Didier Theys, the 74 Ranch R&S-Judd of Jack Baldwin, and the Norma-Mader.

During the opening laps I was pretty busy with my camera, but it looked like the Bingham / Johnson Saleen S7R was pulling away from the bright yellow Schumacher / Snow Porsche GT-1 in the GTS class, and likewise the Conway / Goad Corvette from the Miller / Leeman Mustang in AGT. In the SR-II class, the second Archangel Lola-Nissan of Clinton / Durand was running in formation with the similar Porschehaus car of Julien / St. Jacques (left), with the Archangel car generally in front. At that point I had no idea who was leading in the GT class.

At this early point the Marziale / Messley Viper (below), which would eventually win the GTS class, was clearly way off the pace of even the slower GT-class cars, and I wondered if it was having mechanical difficulties. Turns out that they had cleverly started the race on slicks, and the driver was just taking it easy while the track was still damp.

By about 7:20 it had gotten pretty dark, so I set off across the Goodyear bridge to the outside of the track, towards my favorite spot in the grandstands above Turn 1 (the turn off the oval into the much-narrower infield portion). By then, Baldwin had gotten around Theys and had set out after Weaver at a good clip.

By the time I got to "my" spot, Baldwin had made up a lot of ground on Weaver, but before he could think about getting past both cars stopped for slicks (a definite dry line having developed on the track by this point). The Dyson crew did their usual professional job and got James back out in a trice, but Baldwin had a much longer stop, apparently because of a
stuck wheel nut. As it turned out, the 74 Ranch car would not again be a factor for the win after that first pit stop.

Meanwhile, Field in his Intersport Lola had been charging back up the scoring pylon, and when Weaver and Baldwin stopped he took the lead, only to surrender it a few laps later when he stopped for slicks too. At that point, Theys in the Lista car inherited the lead, which he held for quite a while, as team manager Kevin Doran kept him out on wet rubber until it was time for the car's regularly scheduled fuel stop, at which time Fredy Lienhard replaced Didier. After that, the Lista Crawford would also no longer be a factor for the win, and the race then became a two-car struggle for the overall victory between the Dyson R&S and the Intersport Lola.

Whether because of all the wind and rain that we'd had during the day, or whatever, the usually-informative PA system seemed to be working in only a few places, and those places didn't include anywhere near where I was sitting (in fact, there was a dead loudspeaker directly in front of me), so virtually all the information I had from then on as to the race positions was what was posted on the lighted scoring pylon in the infield. Unfortunately, that pylon shows only the first five places overall (plus the number of laps completed, and the number of laps behind the leader of the second-through-fifth-place cars), so I completely lost track of the struggles in the "lower" classes.

EXCEPT, that the scoring pylon was occasionally showing the Pobst / Hiskey Porsche GT-3R (#15) in fifth place overall and the only non-SR car in the first five places -- I didn't know if that was a screw-up or what, as most of the SR cars were still running at that point, but if it were correct it obviously meant that Pobst was leading the GT class (it was correct).

At about 7:30 I made a list of all the cars as they went by and discovered that, in fact, all 26 starters were still on the track, soon to be joined by the other Archangel Lola-Nissan, which exited the pits on the leader's 37th lap, its gearbox problems apparently repaired. So for a while, we had 27 cars on the track, before the Sherman / Bentley Miracle Motorsports
R&S-Ford apparently became the first retirement.

The Saleen seemed to be making more pit stops than was good for it -- did that mean the Porsche GT-1 was now leading GTS?

It had been precipitation-free, more or less, since before the start of the race, but round about 8:30 it started to sprinkle again, and within 10 minutes the sprinkle had turned into a deluge.

Having thoughtfully brought my plastic poncho with hood, I hunkered down in the open grandstands while all around me spectators were abandoning ship. The cars on the track gradually began to develop rooster tails as they went by. Eventually the pace car came out and a line of race cars formed behind it.

Round about this point in the race I discovered an important lesson, to wit: a Bic ball-point pen will NOT write on wet paper -- so I gave up on my note-taking. The second important lesson I learned at about that point was that if it's pouring rain and you stand up, you can't sit down again because your seat will have gotten soaking wet while you were standing.

Noticing that the three-dozen or so spectators still present in the main grandstands were now all huddling under the huge press center / administrative offices / whatever structure at the start-finish line, I slogged off in that direction, arriving right about the time that the rain began to slacken.

It appeared that an effort was being made to dry up one or more turns on the infield portion of the course with a jet dryer, and apparently the idea of having the pace car come out was to bunch the field up, thus giving the dryer operators more space to do their thing. However, this plan was frustrated when the pace car crew waved by a long line of cars in order to pick up the leading #16 Dyson car (in which Butch Leitzinger had replaced James Weaver in another fast stop by the Dyson crew). The problem was that the waved-by cars were being headed by the yellow Miller / Leeman AGT Mustang, which for some reason was moving barely faster than the pace car. Of course, passing another car under yellow is strictly verboten, so it appeared that a few hours would pass before the two trains of cars would be joined together again -- if ever!

As entertaining as all this was, it soon ended, as the Mustang headed for its pits with no tailights, leaving the dozen cars behind it to quickly race around and join the rest of the train. Although the Mustang's pit crew seemed to get its taillights working in short order, something else must have been wrong with it, as after removing the car's hindquarters and peering underneath, the crew put a tarp over the Mustang's windows and went away, presumably to their motorhome for hot chocolate! Lucky bastards, I thought, as with the end of the rain a great cold wind had come up, ripping one of the snaps off my poncho and giving us few remaining spectators a nice chill.

Then the red flag was displayed and the entire field pulled into the pits behind the pace car. Guessing that it would take an hour or more for the race to resume, I figured this was a good time to hit the bathroom -- while there, I was told by some guy who'd come in out of the cold that the running of the three-hour time limit for the race (against 200 miles, whichever came first) would also be stopped while the race was red-flagged, so that the length of the red flag period would be tacked on to the 10:00 p.m. deadline, if necessary (a classic example of an "anonymous source").

After digesting this info, I headed over to the West Banking grandstands, the better to make a quick getaway to my car in the mudhole -- er, parking lot -- behind it after the race. While climbing the stairs behind the grandstands, what to my wondering ears should appear but the sound of racing engines --when I reached the top and came out to look, I realized that yep, against all expectations the field was beginning to circulate again behind the pace car, the red-flag period having lasted only 13 or 14 minutes.

On the 114th lap, I think it was, the pace car set the field loose and Ollie Gavin (who had replaced Jon Field in the Intersport car before the rains came, and who had been making up ground on the Dyson car in the wet before the pace car came out) was immediately snapping at Leitzinger's heels (did I mention that there had been only four lapped cars between Leitzinger and Gavin in the pace-car train?). What happened then made it all worthwhile for the few dozen spectators who had stuck it out through the flood -- we witnessed the most dramatic and exciting ending to a race that I'd ever seen in person, in 39 years of race-going.

Both Gavin and Leitzinger looked completely desperate as they quickly caught up with the backmarkers and began to carve them up -- Gavin even taking to the grass on the outside of Turn 1 when they caught up to three backmarkers at one point, without seeming to lose any significant amount of time to Leitzinger. Adding to the drama was the fact that no one (at least, not in the grandstands) was quite sure if, or when, the race would be called on time, so no one knew how much time Gavin had to make the pass.

Before we had an answer, the pace car came out again for a Porsche that had stopped on the oval just outside of the hairpin turn where the infield portion joins the oval. "Oh no!" I cried out, as I was afraid the race would end under yellow, but the track workers did a quick job of pushing the Porsche behind the wall -- luckily it had stopped just beyond the only real break in the outside wall -- and the pace car set the field loose again with only a handful of laps to go.

On the first green lap after the restart, Gavin (who'd been right behind Leitzinger in the pace car train, no lapped cars between them) did the deed by going inside of the Dyson car at that infield-to-oval hairpin, pushing Leitzinger to the outside of the turn, but without making contact. Leitzinger lost the rear of the R&S as Gavin went past, turning it into a 360 on the wet track as his rear wheels spun helplessly.

Once Butch got pointed in the right direction, he set out after Ollie with even more desperation than previously, sliding the rear of the car around everywhere and even taking an off-course excursion in the infield to get around a backmarker that didn't get out of his way quickly enough -- he was clearly making up ground on the Lola, but he ran out of laps, and the Intersport Lola was first under the checkered flag, to give Jon Field his first major victory ever, and a big boost to Ollie Gavin's stock as a truly mad Englishman.

On the Speedvision broadcast that I watched later, Leitzinger was briefly seen running away into the night after jumping out of his car as soon as he'd stopped it -- presumably to avoid rude questions. The big question in my mind, and probably in his and every other knowledgeable observer's, was: could Weaver have kept Gavin behind the Dyson car all the way to the finish, if he'd been in it instead of Leitzinger?

In Leitzinger's defense, I'll say this: it sure seemed to me that on both restarts, Gavin's tires were ready to race as soon as the green came out, whereas Leitzinger's seem to take a few laps to begin to work well. Thus, it may have been a classic case of a race won (and lost) by tires -- although I'm sure no one in the Dyson team would ever admit that their tire brand lost the race for them.

After that (and by the way, although I never figured out exactly how many laps the race was supposed to go -- it was supposed to be 200 miles on a 1.51-mile track, you can do the arithmatic -- I'm pretty sure "134" was at the top of the scoring pylon after the checkered flag fell), I headed out through the mud to my car, grateful to be warm and dry at last as I sunk into the driver's seat. I simply didn't have the energy to trudge to the other end of the track to go over the Goodyear bridge into the paddock to find out more (nor to negotiate the miles of storm fencing around the track and paddock looking for a gate through it in the dark) -- and anyway Leitzinger, the one person I really wanted to talk to, was probably keeping himself unavailable.

If I may now remove my race watcher hat and replace it with an editorial-comment chapeau for a few paragraphs: I've certainly been very critical of the "Audi Parade Series" in the TMS Forum, and without a doubt Don Panoz would give up at least some part of his fortune to have at least one race this year with as much drama and excitement as I had just witnessed at Phoenix.

However, it seems to me that the Grand-Am series is beginning to have a different kind of problem than the ALMS's "Audi-itis", epitomized at Phoenix by the absence of the flaming-red Risi Ferrari (or ANY Ferrari) and its international driving team of Schiattarella and Kelleners from last year; and that is that all but a handful of the drivers at Phoenix were from the U.S. and Canada.

Oh sure -- many, even most, of the Grand-Am cars were built in Europe, and we had the very French Norma-Mader bunch, and a French Porsche GT team I think, and Weaver and Gavin and Lienhard and the charming Theys -- but I can't avoid the feeling that the series has become significantly less international than before.

At first, the split between the ALMS and the Grand-Am (successor to the short-lived USRRC) didn't seem to make a lot of difference, as each series made an effort to schedule its races on different weekends than the other, and Panoz ran his GT coupes in the USRRC, while Dyson and others ran their cars in the ALMS.

Now all that's changed, and not for the better. The only SR teams still appearing in both series are Jon Field's Interscope outfit and Dyson Racing, I believe. I'm very sorry I didn't ask Field about his feelings on the two series when I had the chance Saturday afternoon, but I wonder how long he'll be happy running for fourth or fifth place in the ALMS, and whether he'll go the way of the Rafanelli team before him. And do Rob Dyson and Pat Smith REALLY think they can challenge for ALMS wins with their new R&S Mk. III-C?

Only time will tell what will happen to sports car racing in America -- for myself, I can't believe that the ALMS team are happy with a series where the make of the winning car at each race is known even before the transporters are unloaded -- while these Grand Am races are mainly just for North American drivers, with a couple of crazy Englishmen thrown in . . .