Richie Hearn has a frustrating day

Monday, June 2, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.

WEST ALLIS, Wis. -- For Henderson's Richie Hearn, the results were even lower than his expectations.

Even before the green flag had dropped on Sunday's CART Miller 200 at the Milwaukee Mile, Hearn was bemoaning the performance of his Lola chassis on one-mile ovals this season.

"Lola is the problem -- the setup is (terrible) on short ovals," Hearn said of his Ralphs/Food 4 Less Della Penna Motorsports Lola-Ford.

His attitude hadn't changed much by the time he retired 77 laps into Sunday's race with handling and electrical problems. Hearn finished 23rd in the 27-car field.

"The car just wasn't really working right and then we had an electrical problem which took us out of the race," Hearn said. "It was just one of those weekends that really didn't go well at all from the beginning."

Actually, the beginning of the race was the high point of the weekend for Hearn. After starting from 23rd position, Hearn moved up five spots before a mysterious electrical problem knocked him off the pace.

"We were hoping for a better race," he said. "I had a good start and moved up like five or six spots right away and then things started going away on me.

"The frustrating part is knowing that we can do so much better a job than what we've shown. We've run well at other races ... it's just the car is the problem (on short ovals)."

With the short-oval segment of the CART season out of the way, Hearn said he is looking forward to turning his season around when the series moves to Detroit this weekend.

"We've done some modifications for our road-course setup and hopefully we can get a day (of testing) in before Detroit this week and get a good setup and have at least something else to work on," Hearn said.

"If we had a couple more of these oval races, we'd be looking pretty bad."

* BOBBY'S BOO-BOO: For the second time in three races, Bobby Rahal was plagued by a fuel shortage in the closing laps. On Sunday, Rahal had his Miller Lite Reynard-Ford in fifth position when he ran out of fuel on lap 199 of the 200-lap Miller 200 and wound up in 11th place. Three weeks ago in Rio de Janeiro, Rahal was on his way to his first victory since 1992 when he ran out of fuel just over a lap from taking the checkered flag and finished 10th. "I can't believe it happened again," Rahal said. "We thought we were getting good mileage but it wasn't enough. I tried to keep (Paul) Tracy and (Mauricio) Gugelmin back at the end and I was able to pull away from them. Unfortunately, I guess we used up just a little too much fuel in that run."

* MILWAUKEE MILE+: Because of changes in manifold pressure and fuel-cell capacity on its Indy cars this season, Championship Auto Racing Teams remeasured all of its tracks and came up with a startling revelation: the official length of the famed Milwaukee Mile on the Wisconsin State Fairgrounds actually is 1.032 miles. The track originally was measured from the racing line but new international standards call for tracks to be measured from the inside and outside circumference and the sum of those two figures divided by two. The extra .032 of a mile is a distance of about 170 feet, meaning Sunday's Miller 200 actually was 206.4 miles.

* WHAT'S IN A NAME?: Pole sitter Clint Mears, son of three-time CART champion Rick Mears, won Sunday's PPG Firestone Indy Lights series event. Mears led wire-to-wire in the 90-lap event and posted a 4.223-second victory over David Empringham. It was Mears' first major auto-racing title. Clint's cousin, Casey Mears, started 10th in the race and finished 10th. Robby Unser, the youngest son of racing legend Bobby Unser, finished sixth and Jaques Lazier, younger brother of 1996 Indy 500 champion Buddy Lazier, finished eighth.