Over the past twelve months I've had the great pleasure to write the story of Rick Mears' remarkable racing career.
The book, untitled as yet, will be published next spring by the Crash Media Group, publishers of the highly-respected Autocourse, Motocourse and Rallycourse annuals, and is the story not only of Rick's life and career, but also of a racing family, the 'Mears Gang'.
Rick's dad Bill was a successful, part-time modified racer in Kansas in the early fifties before moving his family to California in 1955.
Under his tutelage, Bill's sons Roger and Rick grew up in Bakersfield racing motorcycles, stock cars (in older brother Roger's case), sprint buggies and off-road cars. Roger and Rick were very successful in sprint buggies at the old Ascot track in Gardena, and in off-road and desert racing, too.
Both of them went on to win the Pike's Peak hillclimb - Roger in 1972 and '73 and Rick in '76 - beating the traditional front-engined, V-8-powered hillclimb cars with comparatively tiny VW- and Porsche-powered, rear-engined sprint buggies.
The book also tells the story of Penske's Indy car team at the top of its powers over the course of Rick's fifteen years with the team as a driver from 1978-'92.
During that time, Rick won four Indy 500s, twenty-five CART Indy car races and three CART championships while the team won three more Indy 500s (with Bobby Unser, Al Unser and Danny Sullivan), thirty-one additional CART races (with Mario Andretti, the Unser brothers, Sullivan and Emerson Fittipaldi) and three more championships with Al Sr and Sullivan.
But most important of all, Rick's story is about a driver with phenomenal talent who may have been the fairest, most sporting driver in the history of the sport. Nobody has a bad or critical word to say about Rick and in the book's Prologue, no less a man than Mario Andretti says Mears was the cleanest driver he ever raced against as well as one of the most talented and motivated.
In today's world where sportsmanship on the track and an open, co-operative relationship between team-mates is considered naïve and passe, you will find Rick Mears' story to be a salubrious read.
Let me give you a taste by excerpting some comments from the book by some of Rick's teammates and crewmen, starting with Emerson Fittipaldi. Rick and Emerson were teammates at Penske from 1990-'92, the last three years of Rick's driving career and Fittipaldi looks back fondly at those years. Emerson calls Mears the 'King of the Ovals'.
