IRL 1999: For Us, By Us (but will the season ever end?)

It’s a minor distinction in the racing history books, but I do take pride in the fact that my 1999 Indycar team, LP/Nienhouse Racing, was the first racing team sponsored by a major African-American company, the clothing company FUBU. That was one of many memorable points to a year filled with the redemption of Eliseo Salazar, a driver that had suffered massive injury the year before, his struggles from race to race, and the team’s perseverance waiting for him to regain his lost confidence.

Salazar was a tough nut to crack, for all of his F1 experience, victories in the IRL, and wins in Sportscar racing, detuning his swagger to an acceptable, vaguely humble level wasn’t an easy transformation. Salazar was nearly broken in half in 1998 at the Dover IRL round—a mechanical failure shot his car into the high banked walls at a horrible angle, and he carried scars from the crash that ran the lengths of both legs, his side, his arms, and most everywhere else you could image.

Beneath his firesuit, he’d look like he’d been stitched together limb by limb. From the outside, his heavily limp told the tale of a leg that was shortened many inches by the impact. He’d spent six months rehabilitating, going through repeated surgeries for overall repair, and did daily cardio work to get back to the impressive competitive form he’d shown in the IRL.

With a large cache of sponsorship following him from his native Chile, Eliseo’s backers made a return to the IRL possible. I’m afraid that without funding few teams would have considered him for a drive, based on the last images they’d seen of Eliseo included him being loaded into a Medivac Helicopter and the gasp-inducing replays of his crash looped on the TV monitors.

Nienhouse Racing, owned by Phil and Bob Nienhouse, a front running and cash-rich program prior to 1999, found themselves without sponsorship or a team to run their Indycar efforts for the new season. LP Racing, coming off a successful bid in the IRL running Sam Schmidt, was an obvious choice for the brothers. Salazar, carrying 7-figures worth of Chilean beer, telecom, energy, and petroleum sponsorship, was an obvious choice for the Nienhouse camp to put behind the wheel of their GForce-Oldsmobiles.

I’d seen and exchanged pleasantries with Eliseo in ’97 and ’98 as we crossed paths, but I will admit it was a bit surreal for me the first time he came into the lounge/engineering office of the race trailer and formally introduced himself.

A lifelong F1 nut, I bought the 1982 F1 season review on videotape when I was a teen, and like many that have seen the WWF match between he and Nelson Piquet at the ’82 German GP, the images and infamy of two F1 drivers boxing after a crash still stuck in my mind.

When Eliseo walked in that first time, my immediate reaction was “Hey, it’s HIM! It’s THAT guy—it’s Piquet’s punching bag!” OK, sometimes I can be an idiot…

The season started out as poorly as I’ve ever been a part of; Eliseo struggled massively at the Orlando 1mi oval and never got to grips with the physical and aggressive nature of the track. Complaining of simultaneous l understeer, oversteer, sideways-steer, and vertical-steer, Salazar was quick to slam the entire team, our engineering, the setup, the food—everything about the team for Eliseo was just wrong.

For a new relationship, this one was seemingly headed for an annulment before the honeymoon was over. The inter-team frustrations spiked when Salazar, cursing the car while on his qualifying run, failed to make the cut! It was shock for me because in all my years of racing, I’d never failed to make it into a race. Orlando 1999 still serves as the only event I’ve ever packed up and flown home before the race started.

Phoenix was the next race, another 1mi oval that requires great feel and great commitment. Eliseo languished at the back of the field all weekend, finally retiring due to “handling problems.”

No one doubted his desire to get back to his previous competitive form, but the first two races highlighted a glaring fact: Salazar’s body had recovered from his nightmarish crash of ‘98 but his mind had yet to heal. We all understood his dilemma, and his need to overcome the psychological impact he’d suffered, but watching his slow, tepid mental recovery in the middle of the racing season was something I wasn’t sold on.

His funding was critical to seed the team, and he’d said all the right words and seemed his normal self when signing with Nienhouse, but really, he needed a lot more time to get his head back in the Indycar game.

Eliseo’s confidence on the bigger ovals wasn’t that bad, but on any track that was smaller than 1.5mi (Orlando, Phoenix, Pikes Peak twice, and Dover were all 1mi or less, and comprised 50% of the schedule in ‘99) Salazar drove in a hazy, traumatized emotional state. In testing at Atlanta, the 1.5mi track we visited six weeks after Indy, we came away with the fastest lap of all the major teams in attendance. Eliseo turned in an effortless lap at just over 223mph…

We’d done the ATL test before Indy, and a number of days of private test days at Indy, Firestone test days there, and all the official IRL pre-event tests. Nienhouse heavily overcompensated in Eliseo’s behalf to get him thousands of miles of testing at the Speedway and other big tracks to help conquer his Dover demons. What made all of this incredibly hard on the team was Eliseo’s refusal to admit he carried any lingering mental blocks or elements of apprehension n his driving.

A solo spin and crash during private testing tore up our primary car enough to pull it out of service for nearly a month. Any crash at Indy tends to generate multiples of damage severity, compared to any other track. The engine was cracked radially around the chassis mounts, holes were ripped in the carbon tub, and most of the other bits from the firewall back were wrinkled.

This all just menat a lot more work.

Fron this crash, the whole team knew he needed help, his practice and race results confirmed as such, but as a proud man, he was the only man in the IRL paddock that couldn’t see his true condition.

There was another hard event for LP/Nienhouse, and every other IRL team for that matter. At Charlotte, an accident involving a few cars coming out of turn four resulted in a wheel and tire breaking from one of the cars and flying into the main grandstands, killing three fans.

CNN still has a brief, safe video clip of the story online.

The race was stopped immediately, thankfully, and looking at the IRL’s event history, they’ve stricken the Charlotte event from the record altogether.

It happened right in front of the pits and most of us on the lane saw the wheel fly up into the stands. A wheel and tire combo weighs a little over twenty pounds, so the thoughts of what its weight and mass traveling freely at 200mph could do aren’t worth imagining.

Sports Illustrated later printed an alarmist story on the tragedy, offering their beliefs that the cars were at fault, rather than a mix of speed, low fences, and the always-present possibility of danger. True, in retrospect, the track should have had much higher fences to protect the fans, and wheel tether technology wasn’t in place yet. Tethers were soon developed and installed on all cars, and also became mandatory on everything from formula Atlantics to Formula One cars.

Sports Illustrated also took a lot of heat, and justifiably so I think, for running a picture in their story that showed the section of grandstands mowed down by the wheel and tire, and the three dead fans covered with a blue tarp, with a lot of blood surrounding them and running down the steps of the grandstand.

That was like pouring acid on a wound, much less salt.

The deaths at the Charlotte event led into our next race: Indy. All of the days spent testing at Indy before the event served little purpose once we moved into our garage for the month of May.

Started a promising 18th.

Spun by ourselves on lap seven.

Smacked the turn two wall.

First car out.

Finished 33rd and dead last.

That, my friends, sucked in every way possible.

It’s important to understand that not every season goes according to plan, or will register fondly as time goes by. The ’99 IRL season to date had all the ingredients for disappointment: failed to qualify for the first race, retired from the second race under the false pretences of “electrical problems,” the third race was stopped when fans were killed in front of us, and a complete month of eighteen hours days was wasted with a silly, self-induced spin five minutes into the biggest race on the planet.

This was the Indy 500 equivalent of training for three months for a marathon and tripping over your own foot and breaking your ankle before you’ve taken your first step. This was some Rodney Dangerfield “I get no respect” type stuff.

At this point, the only points of positivity came from the warm and personable crew. Working with them was a joy, and they served to help temper the underwhelming season we were in the midst of. Humor and brevity wasn’t sacrificed by them in the wake of Eliseo’s performances; I’ve seen that once a team stops laughing or kidding one another, a season can’t end quickly enough.

Some of the mechanics amused themselves whenever I’d walk out to the garage area after a routine debrief with Eliseo. “Let me guess, the car stinks, you stink, and we stink. Am I close?” became a common refrain…

No everything was bad—there were a lot of little things for me that made Indy fun; we’d visited “Whiteland” (classic name) Outdoor Karting, just as we did in ‘98, when I organized a “Friends of Marshall” event. A blast was had by all with some good friends and a few 500 drivers that joined us. Unlike the 500 where strict rules for driving are in place, the assorted drivers and crew brought some of the most underhanded driving tactics and vehicular sabotage imaginable. That I was the worst offender is completely immaterial…

Eventual Indy 500 Rookie of the Year, FF2000 champ and Formula Atlantic winner, Steve Knapp (a good friend, and cousin of my mentor, Thomas Knapp) won the Whiteland demolition derby. I’m sure his Whiteland victory meant more than his 500 R.O.Y. award.

Needing a proper helmet for the pending Karting fest, Eliseo was kind enough to give me his spare Bell Dominator. I’d originally thought he’d just lent it to me for the night; they ran about $900 back then, so it wasn’t cheap. When I tired to return it the next day, he was surprised, and said “No, I meant I’d give you my spare helmet, not lend it to you…”

It was a very nice gesture.

Dover 1999: site of where Eliseo’s vicious crash twelve months earlier. We’d had modest results in first practice as Salazar confronted a lot of fears and concern while lapping the track. Dover had the highest banking of any track we visited–scaling the side of a building would have been easier than trying to walk up Dover’s incline. The surface is also made from concrete–not a surface known for its grip, so the combo of a short track, low grip, and high banking required maximum downforce.

In the 2nd practice, the rear wing mounts on the GForce failed; the rear wing is connected to the gearbox in two places using aluminum vertical mount plates. The front mount tabs on these mount plates broke clean off of the gearbox, allowing the rear wing to lay back behind the car and drag on the track. By coincidence, a rather eerie coincidence, this happened as Eliseo was entering turn 3, the same turn his accident had happened in ‘98.

The rear wing now laying flat behind the car, Salazar lost all rear downforce as he turned in at 150mph. The GForce spun and crashed into turn 3 with the right rear corner. Thankfully, it was at a very slight angle, so while the chassis and engine were completely destroyed, Salazar’s body didn’t encounter the same kind of unabated smashing impact it had the year before.

Still, same series, same track, same crash, same exact spot, and most disturbing of all, he came to a rest in the exact spot he had in ‘98. With the images of that ‘98 crash fresh in everybody’s mind, seeing the car in the same predicament and same spot in ‘99 made a lot of people cringe.

Eliseo limped from the car once he was lifted out, but it was obvious he wanted to walk away from this crash rather than be bundled into a helicopter again. The IRL emergency response team had a handful with Eliseo refusing their forceful attempts to tend to him—I couldn’t fault him though. If that was me, and I was able to walk away from the second of two identical crashes, I’d throw ‘bows if that’s what it took to prove to myself and others that I’d moved beyond the trauma of ‘98.

His demonstrative actions outside the wrecked car spoke of someone that was done being treated as a crash victim. I think it was the first step he took towards breaking free from the fears of his previous crash, for he proved to himself he’d survived Dover again, yet walked away under his own power.

He seemed to decompress little by little after that, and by the end of the year, he’d made some major strides to healing all of himself. I was no less hard on him, and would continue to point out his weaknesses shown from the Pi data system.

Like the mechanics would kid Larry and me, Eliseo, in the last race or two, would come back to the trailer after a poor showing, walk up to me, and say “I know, I know. The driver sucks. He’s not trying hard, blah blah blah. I don’t need to look at the d*mn computer to tell me this…”

At least he was starting to be honest with himself.

The spare car was pressed into service for the Dover race, and Larry and I picked through the $500,000 Indycar yard sale the cleanup crew returned to us. Even in a big crash like this, you’ll usually be able to pick some salvageable bits from the wreckage. Not so with this one. Pedals? Bent. Steering wheel? bent. Sway bar adjusters? Bent. Electronics? Smashed and scattered. Suspension? Origami.

Firestone wanted the burst tires back, for they lease them rather than sell them to their teams. I think we were only able to return two at the time because the other two wheels were fused to the spindle and uprights from the impact.

Can’t dismount a tire if you can’t dismount the wheel it’s on from a broken bundle of suspension…

The rest of the season flashed by pretty quickly; if there were memorable points, they’ve escaped me. The Nienhouse brothers continued on with LP for 2000, but did so at the last moment, and missed the season opener at Orlando. I’d gone to work for another team, and was saddened to see the Nienhouse’s lose interest after their driver Scott Harrington, failed to qualify for Indy.

I’d flown out to help LP for Harrington’s Indy rookie test in April of 2000 (as I tell in my IRL 200 review, my team that year caused so much turmoil that they let me work freeweekends with other teams or in other series to help keep me sane) and really felt bad for Larry Nash when Scott crashed in qualifying for the 500, ending their hopes of making the race. A sour 1999 season and a lackluster 2000 season through Indy saw Bob and Phil Nienhouse liquidate their IRL assets immediately.

Sam Schmidt, LP’s IRL driver in ’97 and ’98, would hire Larry to run his new Sam Schmidt Motorsports effort in 2001, so Bob and Phil leaving opened a door for a brighter future for LP the following season.

Larry Nash deserved that, and still deserves to have an IPS or IRL team of his own.

Epilogue:

It was only the following year, 2000, when Eliseo signed to drive for A.J. Foyt, that he regained his missing form; he ran in the top three or four in points for most of the year and a constant threat for a win, that he reached out to LP Racing, and me separately, to apologize for his attitude and pissy demeanor in ‘99.

“It wasn’t the car…it was me” was the shortest and sweetest vindication he could have offered. It went a long way to mend a lot of sore feelings and to bridge some rather distant relationships that had strayed in our turbulent 1999 season.