Race Car Driver

Scott Pierce, according to the fact sheet, is a driver. Not a cab driver or a truck driver or a race car driver or even a cattle driver. Instead, what he drives is something numbered U-8 and called Miss Executone Telephones. It sounds like it should be a cross between a submarine and a beauty contest, whatever that kind of mixture would produce. Pierce's craft may not be a submarine, but it is a boat. However, it is a boat like a penguin is a bird.

The toughest job for Hiroyuki Matsushita these days is to sit back and watch other people work. The 31-year-old race-car driver, who last year became the first Japanese to qualify for the Indianapolis 500, is hobbled by a cast on his right leg--the result of a car crash during a May Indy 500 practice run. With help from crutches, though, he manages to get around in his jet-black ZR-1 Corvette, which he says can reach 60 miles an hour in just under five seconds.

The car closed toward the sharp corner at the end of the straightaway at almost 100 m.p.h. From the cockpit, a traffic cone marking the start of the turn was clearly visible. Eyes fixed on it, the driver pressed the clutch, slipped the car into fourth gear and floored the accelerator. The engine responded and the car picked up speed toward the cone. Wind blew through the seam between his face mask and helmet.

He doesn't look like a race driver. The Prime Minister, perhaps. A colonel in the Khyber Rifles. One of the Queen's Own Fusiliers. He wouldn't look out of place in a monocle. You want to address him as Your Lordship. Cricket should be his sport. Ronald Colman would get the part. He's stiff-upper-lip English. You figure Clive of India looked like this. His wife might be the duchess of something or other. What he's doing in an Indianapolis race car is something for him to answer.

For Paolo Barilla, the talented 24-year-old race-car driver from Parma, Italy, the family's pasta business could wait. There was another calling that had first claim on his hopes and ambitions. "In Italy, motor racing is one of the most popular sports--because we have Ferrari," Barilla said. "My goal was to be a racer since I was about 10 years old."

"True it is that politics makes strange bedfellows." --Charles Dudley Warner Not to mention stock car racing. A decade ago, Dale Earnhardt and Darrell Waltrip were bitter rivals, Earnhardt the young "Ironhead" fighting to win his second Winston Cup championship, Waltrip the aging "Jaws" struggling in vain to win a fourth crown. Their rivalry was not a friendly one. After one race in Richmond, Va.

It might be too early to name the comeback driver of the year, but Steve Millen, a transplanted New Zealander who lives in Newport Beach and drives a Nissan 300ZX in the International Motor Sports Assn. GTS series, should head the list of nominees. Millen was involved in a freak accident June 27, 1993, at Watkins Glen, N.Y. He suffered a double skull fracture, broken jaw, several broken ribs and a severely shattered left arm.

Tim Enoch once sold his motorcycle to pay for his hospital bills after a motocross accident. He once sold his pickup truck to raise enough money just to try out to be a race car driver. He once moved from Mission Viejo to Tennessee to compete in a racing series, and while he was there he lived in a house that lacked a floor and window frames. "I've been in debt up to my eyeballs the last four years," he said.

The next time you're cruising the Ventura Freeway in light traffic--from 3 to 3:15 a.m. on a Wednesday might be your only shot at this--and you pull alongside a cream-colored 1955 Porsche Speedster, get any ideas of racing out of your mind--the car might be driven by Mike Groff, and you don't want to race against him. Not, of course, unless you have also had the experience of going wheel to wheel with Rick Mears and A. J. Foyt at 220 m.p.h. in the Indianapolis 500 and did not flinch.

A. J. Foyt turned 55 Tuesday and acknowledged that it was about time to call it a career as a race car driver. "I've got a full season ahead, maybe 30 to 35 races, but this could pretty much be it, this year," he said from Houston, where he celebrated his birthday by working in his racing shop. "It's still fun getting behind the wheel and driving, but if all goes well, this could be the last season.