Slow Road to Fast Lane

INDIANAPOLIS —  When Buddy Rice was a sophomore at Shadow Mountain High in Phoenix, he was a good enough infielder to attract attention from college and pro scouts at summer baseball camps. He also was racing karts in Arizona.

His boyhood idols were Ozzie Smith, the ultimate shortstop, and Ayrton Senna, the ultimate racer.

When he was 16, his dad told him he had to make a choice: to make good in either sport, he had to give it his full effort.

Rice chose racing.

On May 30, he will be on the pole for the 88th Indianapolis 500, the point man in the Greatest Spectacle in Racing as he brings the field to the green flag.

Still, he wonders.

“I go to Diamondback games all the time, and I still look at those guys out there and wonder if I’d have made it,” Rice said Sunday after taking part in the traditional front-row photo shoot on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway start-finish line.

Curiously, it was a baseball player, Hall of Famer Robin Yount, who gave him his first break in professional racing.

“Robin loved to race too, and he and I were racing go-karts together in 1996 when he helped me with some better equipment, and then later he got me acquainted with Bobby Rahal,” Rice said.

Rahal is the owner of the Honda-powered G-Force that Rice qualified at 222.024 mph Saturday to win the pole, and Rahal also is the man who called Rice when he needed a driver to take Kenny Brack’s place after the 1999 Indy 500 winner was seriously injured.

Rahal, a three-time Indy car champion and the 1986 Indy 500 winner, has been championing Rice since he first watched him in the Formula Atlantic series in the late 1990s. It has not been a smooth road, however, for the ruddy-faced Arizonan.

“I won the Atlantic series in 2000 and I had always been told that it was a step up the ladder system to the IRL, but it never happened,” said Rice, somewhat bitterly. “To be honest, young American drivers really haven’t been getting the chance to move up in the sport. I had won the title and Rahal signed me as a test pilot and tried his best to find me a full-time ride, but nobody called.

“It finally took something I’d rather not have happened for me to get a break. I wouldn’t be here if Kenny hadn’t got hurt. It’s not the most perfect situation, it’s Kenny’s car when he gets back. There’s talk of a two-car team, but that is something that will have to be worked out when he is ready to drive.”

Brack is here, working with Rice and teammates Roger Yasukawa and Vitor Meira, as well as performing as a guitar virtuoso on Carburetion Day with the Subwoofers, who are acting as the lead-in for Grammy Award-winning artist Blues Traveler.

No date has been set for Brack’s return.

“For what’s happened and how the month has gone for the Rahal-Letterman team has been unbelievable,” Rice said. “ ... To have started with a one-car team and make it into a three-car team in a little over two months is absolutely remarkable.

“It has been a cooperative deal. Vitor has been working on full tanks most of the month so Roger and I didn’t have to focus on that. Vitor and I have similar driving styles, so it was good to have him working on the race setup, while I worked on qualifying trim. I think without having the multiple-car effort, even if we qualified like we did -- three in the first four rows -- we’d be having to struggle next week to make sure we had a solid full tank car.”

Although nothing has been announced, team insiders say that Brack and Rice will be full-time teammates when the Swede returns, with Meira becoming Brack’s backup. Yasukawa is contracted with Rahal for this race and perhaps one other.

Rice knows what it is like to struggle. After starting out 20 years ago watching his father, Bud, win Division 7 drag race championships, Rice wondered if he would ever make it to where he is today.

“I played around with karts with guys like Yount, and in 1996 I got my first chance in a pro race with the Dodge Shelby Pro Series,” Rice said. “One of my best memories is of winning from the pole at Las Vegas.”

After working his way up the ladder, through U.S. Formula 2000 to Toyota Atlantic, he won the Formula Atlantic championship in 2000 and thought that he was on top of the world. He sat back and waited for offers to drive a CART or an IRL car.

“It never happened, for whatever reason, and it’s never happened repeatedly over and over,” he said. “At that time, I became a backup driver at Rahal and I’d already been working for them quite heavily. Some of our opportunities that we were trying to make just didn’t come together. The whole year 2001 was a wipeout. But that didn’t discourage me.”

In 2002, he finally got a chance with the Red Bull Cheever team for the final five IRL races. In his first start, at Michigan, Rice started and finished second, behind rookie teammate Tomas Scheckter.

Back with Cheever in 2003, he drove the first 13 IRL races. He had four top-10 finishes and was running at the finish of 12 races. As a rookie at Indianapolis, he was the top Chevrolet-powered driver with an 11th-place finish.

“I felt like I was on top of the world again, but I found life is more like a roller coaster,” he said. “But that’s nothing new around here. Everybody has a roller-coaster ride to get where they’re at. I mean, every driver you go talk to, they’ve driven every year, but not all the years have been all that great.”

With three races remaining, Cheever dropped him.

“I didn’t have anything positive for this year before Rahal called me in December,” Rice said. “I wasn’t going to quit, I had some sports car offers, but nothing serious.

“Now, instead of worrying about my next ride, I’m concerned with getting my car ready for the race, and doing the best job I can for Bobby Rahal and all my sponsors.

“People said we were under the radar qualifying the way we did, faster than we had practiced, but I prefer to say it is because of the effort put in by Honda, by all our engineers, by the crew and by my teammates.

“Especially Honda. Look at their record this year. I have won two poles, here and Homestead, and Dan [Wheldon] has won two. And he and Tony Kanaan have each won a race and Honda won its most important race at their home track [Motegi] in Japan. And look what they did here Saturday.”

Honda-powered cars took the first seven spots in the 500 field and eight of the top 10.

In his three races this year, Rice has finished seventh at Homestead-Miami, ninth at Phoenix and sixth in Japan.

“I hung it all the way out in qualifying, so I know where the limits of my car are,” he said matter-of-factly. “I know we have to go into the race with the right setup because as deep as this field is, with the new aero package, you can slip back fast if things are not just right.”

Win or lose, you probably will find him in a batting cage, or taking infield practice, with his baseball buddies.

“I’m a big fan, and I still love getting in there and taking my licks,” he said. “I still wonder what might have been.

“Of course, when I look at that $100,000 check I got for winning the pole, I’m pretty satisfied with where I am.”

Where will the roller coaster take him next?

*

(Begin Text of Infobox)

Starting Grid

Order for the May 30 Indianapolis 500 after the first two days of qualifying at Indianapolis Motor Speedway (r -- rookie):

*--* Pos. No. Driver Auto MPH ROW 1 1. (15) Buddy Rice G Force-Honda 222.024 2. (26) Dan Wheldon Dallara-Honda 221.524 3. (27) Dario Franchitti Dallara-Honda 221.471 ROW 2 4. (36) Bruno Junqueira G Force-Honda 221.379 5. (11) Tony Kanaan Dallara-Honda 221.200 6. (5) Adrian Fernandez G Force-Honda 220.999 ROW 3 7. (17) Vitor Meira G Force-Honda 220.958 8. (3) Helio Castroneves Dallara-Toyota 220.882 9. (55) r-Kosuke Matsuura G Force-Honda 220.740 ROW 4 10. (4) Tomas Scheckter Dallara-Chevrolet 220.417 11. (6) Sam Hornish Jr. Dallara-Toyota 220.180 12. (16) Roger Yasukawa G Force-Honda 220.030 ROW 5 13. (1) Scott Dixon G Force-Toyota 219.319 14. (2) r-Mark Taylor Dallara-Chevrolet 219.282 15. (10) r-Darren Manning G Force-Toyota 219.271 ROW 6 16. (52T) r-Ed Carpenter Dallara-Chevrolet 218.590 17. (20) Al Unser Jr. Dallara-Chevrolet 217.966 18. (70T) Robby Gordon Dallara-Chevrolet 216.522 ROW 7 19. (39) Sarah Fisher Dallara-Toyota 215.771 20. (8T) Scott Sharp Dallara-Toyota 215.635 21. (14) A.J. Foyt IV Dallara-Toyota 214.256 ROW 8 22. (41) r-Larry Foyt G Force-Toyota 213.277 23. (7T) Bryan Herta Dallara-Honda 219.871 24. (51T) Alex Barron Dallara-Chevrolet 218.836 ROW 9 25. (24) Felipe Giaffone Dallara-Chevrolet 216.259 26. (12) Tora Takagi Dallara-Toyota 214.364

*--*