DATE: Wednesday, May 28, 1997 TAG: 9705280708 SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C1 EDITION: FINAL SOURCE: BY BOB ZELLER, STAFF WRITER DATELINE: INDIANAPOLIS LENGTH: 74 lines
Sitting on car owner Felix Sabates' jet for the trip back to North Carolina with a bandage the size of a boxing glove on his badly burned right hand and other bandages on his left wrist and right thigh, Robby Gordon was one lucky race-car driver.
His fate Tuesday in the 81st Indianapolis 500, to be sure, had been miserable. But his luck had been good, considering that the car he was driving - the car that didn't even make it around the track at speed for an entire lap Tuesday - was a time bomb carrying some five gallons of spilled fuel.
And on the first lap at speed Tuesday, it only exploded a little.
The fire was enough, however, to burn the NASCAR Winston Cup driver badly. He won't be driving in the Miller 500 this Sunday at Dover Downs International Speedway, and he may not be able to drive at Pocono on June 8.
The burn on Gordon's thigh was about 3 inches wide and 6 inches long with huge blisters a half-inch high. Some of the area may have received a third-degree burn.
His right hand was badly burned from the wrist to the fingertips. He had used that hand to unbuckle his safety belts. That's when the fire in the cockpit had got him, burning a hole right through his safety glove.
It was just the capper to a lost weekend for Gordon, who finished 41st after crashing on the 186th lap of the Coca-Cola 600 Sunday night.
But despite his burns, and considering that his month of May at Indy ended in disappointment and injury, Gordon was in pretty good spirits on the flight to North Carolina.
``I promise you,'' he told Sabates. ``Nobody tried harder than us. We had the speed. We had the speed.''
Sabates said he will return to Indianapolis Motor Speedway only with ``my taxicabs'' for the Brickyard 400, and never again with an Indy car.
``This could have been ugly,'' he said. ``It could have gone up like a rocket ship.''
Overnight, after rain had forced the second postponement of the race after only 15 laps Monday, fuel had dripped out of the 35-gallon fuel cell that sat behind Gordon's back in his Indy car. Inside the vent valve, an O-ring - the same thing that failed on the space shuttle Challenger - had sprung a leak.
The dripping fuel collected under Gordon's seat.
``The undercarriage of the car was full of fuel,'' Sabates said. ``They got a bucket full out of it - I'd say five gallons.`
And apparently the only way the crew could have seen it was if it had taken the car apart before the race.
``It just dripped a little at a time, but it dripped all night long,'' Sabates said.
Unaware of the danger, Gordon buckled himself in for the restart of the race on lap 16. He was in fourth position.
During the three warm-up laps, Gordon began to get wet.
``I'm getting wet all over my back now,'' Gordon said on his radio. ``Cold water. It's cold, whatever it is.''
On the restart on lap 19, Gordon blasted past Robbie Buhl and took third place. He was passing eventual winner Arie Luyendyk for second on the backstretch when the fire erupted.
``I felt heat, a lot of heat,'' he said. ``I thought maybe it was heat from Arie's exhaust, but then I got clean air and it got hotter and hotter. I was burning the whole time I was slowing down.''
But only a small part of the spilled fuel burned - that which was close enough to air to feed a fire.
Gordon tried unsuccessfully to stop near a fire truck at the entrance of turn three. He bailed out of his car in the middle of the turn and started rolling on the ground.
Finally, all of the rain that had so bedeviled Gordon on this Memorial Day weekend did him some good.
``The grass was wet,'' Gordon said. ``And once I saw there was nobody around to throw water on me, I was looking for wet grass.''
Note: Wally Dallenbach will drive Gordon's No. 40 Coors Light Chevrolet. And Sabates is looking for a substitute for Pocono, since Dallenbach is scheduled to drive his own car there.
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