Simon Says It Has Been a Great Ride

INDIANAPOLIS — If I were A.J. Foyt, I’d be a race driver, too. Fastest cars, finest crews, unlimited monies, fearless, front-running. Born to drive.

I can’t blame Mario Andretti for climbing into a race car. Born a waif in the postwar flotsam of northern Italy, even shark-riding or snake hunting seemed a sensible option.

You look at the Johnny Rutherfords, the several Unsers, the great European drivers and you know what they’re doing in a cockpit. Some people have to buy railroads to make the kind of money they make with an engine.

Then, there are the guys the Indy 500 couldn’t do without. These guys are just kind of the bulls in this corrida. They’re the piano for the artists to give their recital. They put their lives, livers, eyes, hearts and limbs on the line every year with about as much chance of winning this thing as a stock Edsel.

You can spot them. Look down the list any year. There they are. The honor roll of also-rans. They make the grid, somewhere from the middle row back, they’ve got a car that looks as if it were pasted together from a torn drawing, if it had legs it’d be a camel.

They start the race in the caboose and stay there. They’re spear carriers. The chorus line. The butlers. The soloists, the star players blow by them in the backstretch in their gaudy multimillion British designs as if they weren’t there. They’re always a lap down and lagging. They’re in the race, but not of it. Their only hope is, some year, all 32 other cars will drop out of the race. They can only hope to inherit a race, not win it.

You all know who they are. You track them by their finishes, year after year--25th, 26th, 31st, even 33rd. They know who they are: the George Sniders, Spike Gehlhausens, Steve Krisiloffs, Bud Tingelstads. Some of them died on this track here chasing the rainbow. An Art Pollard. A Chuck Rodee. Others in other places in bad cars and bad luck. A Ronnie Duman.

Without these magnificent men in their non-flying machines, the show might not go on. Don Quixote would love them.

For instance, take Dick Simon . . .

Dick Simon is almost the patron saint of every guy who ever tooled around this track in a wheezing, coughing, underpowered automotive mule that wouldn’t make a good flowerpot.

When Dick Simon first came to this track 18 years ago, he was president of three insurance companies, one of the richest men in Utah. He used to wear out three briefcases and a closet full of sincere ties and pocket handkerchiefs a year.

Some guys run off with dance hall hostesses, others fall for chorines. The one who got Dick Simon out of his three-piece suits and into a flameproof jumper, out of his company limos and into an open-wheel deathtrap was the painted lady: auto racing. She took him for everything he had.

When Dick came to Indianapolis in 1970 in a five-year-old bucket of lugs that went just fast enough to escape a forest fire, he had a little red tool box and a tire iron. To this day, no one knows how he put the car in the race. He almost didn’t--he qualified 31st and he was only on lap 168 when the winner got the checkered flag but he was hooked.

That was four marriages and a couple of million dollars ago. It wasn’t as if his friends didn’t warn him. It was the classic story of his wife--no, wives--and family telling him, “Can’t you see she’s no good for you? She’s a tramp!” First, the insurance company turned the screws after his wife had gone to the board of directors to complain. “You’ll have to quit, racing is splitting your concentration on the company,” they told their chief executive. “You’re right!” Simon said. “I’ll quit. The insurance business.”

Wives (correctly) saw racing as a demanding mistress. It was the old Hollywood scene of the girlfriend saying to her hero in a race car, “I just wish you looked at me just once the way you look at that car!” Says Simon: “They got jealous. My life was never theirs.”

You get some idea of the clunkers Dick Simon came to the Speedway in when you check some of the qualifying positions--33rd twice, 30th another time, 29th. His finishes weren’t much better, 31st one year, 32nd, 33rd. He was just faster than the track ambulance.

“Racing has cost me a fortune,” Simon admits. It also cost him three wives, an office with a rug on the floor and maybe a yacht on the Riviera.

Dick thinks it was a fair exchange. He is on his way to being a Speedway legend without ever coming within seven laps of winning or even finishing.

He is not only the oldest man in the race this year, he is the oldest ever to be in it. Dick Simon is 54 (will be 55 in September), but he still has 20/20 vision. He passes the stringent Speedway physical each year with marks of men half his age. He has the best peripheral vision of anyone in the field. An ex-skier (alternate on the 1960 U.S. Winter Olympic team), one-time world-class scuba diver, nonsmoker, nondrinker, Simon is an athlete of indefatigable energy.

He startled the race world last year by posting his best finish ever (that wasn’t hard, his record was 13th) and ending up 6th. “Better car?” Simon was asked, as he stood at his garage here the other day. “Better wife,” this Simon says. “When I married Dianne (the present Mrs. Simon), I was in the real estate business (at Capistrano). The first time I took her to the track at Phoenix, she got the picture right away. ‘Oh-oh,’ she told herself. ‘I either join him or leave him.’ So, instead of resenting and resisting, she joined. She loves it as much as I do, the first one of my wives who didn’t say ‘It--or me.’ ”

So, what would an Indy 500 be without a Dick Simon? He rides for every guy who ever has to take a wrench and go fix his own suspension, change his own tire, every guy who can’t just hand the under-steering to Roger Penske and say, “Fix it. And call me when it’s ready!” Every guy who had to go hat in hand to companies like Provimi Veal or Sounddesign to get enough money just to fill the field. Dick Simons are as important to this race as steering wheels and yellow flags. Without them, it’s just another Sunday drive in the country. Where would A.J. Foyt, the Unsers, Mario, J.R. be without them? Do they need them? Did Caruso need an orchestra?