Driver getting back on track

Wednesday, Sept. 9, 1998 | 10:48 a.m.

Roberto Guerrero's career has been a series of second chances and this season has proven to be no different for the likeable Indy Racing League driver.

Fired earlier in the season by Pagan Racing, Guerrero missed three races before landing a ride with Cobb Racing. In his first start for his new team, Guerrero qualified 10th at Pikes Peak International Raceway -- matching the best qualifying effort by an Infiniti engine in an IRL event -- but finished 21st after his car developed ignition problems.

His next race, at Atlanta Motor Speedway, brought more bad luck. Guerrero qualified 28th and finished 19th after his car was sidelined due to a faulty clutch.

The disappointing results notwithstanding, the 39-year old native of Colombia was his usual affable, upbeat self as he put his G Force/Infiniti through its paces during a Las Vegas Motor Speedway test in preparation for the Oct. 11 season-ending Las Vegas 500K.

"I'm really enjoying this," Guerrero said of his new alliance with team owner Price Cobb, a former champion sports car driver. "I think the (Infiniti) engine has made a lot of progress since last year; they know that it's not quite there yet but it has made incredible progress.

"The team, I very much enjoy Price and the other guys are very new, too, and they're building (the team) the right way. Whenever I get chances like this, I always do the best I can, I give it 100 percent effort and I still think I do a pretty decent job at it."

Guerrero would like nothing more to make the most of his latest second chance and prove his critics wrong. Following a pair of wins during the 1987 CART season, Guerrero crashed during a tire test at Indianapolis Motor Speedway and was in a coma for 17 days with a serious head injury.

"That particular accident, I still have no recollection of it, whatsoever," Guerrero said. "The only thing that I know about it is what people tell me so I don't really believe it, I don't think the accident ever happened.

"That was the bottom of the world. Racing is tough -- you have a few ups but you have a whole bunch of downs. But those couple of ups that you have every once in a while keep you going for a few years."

Miraculously, Guerrero came back the following spring and finished second at Phoenix International Raceway in his comeback race, but never won another CART event.

Since then, Guerrero's career has been dotted with a number of racing accidents -- no fewer than seven in the Indy 500 alone -- leading some observers to remark that he isn't the driver he was before his near-fatal accident.

"Roberto has really gotten a bad rap (because of the crashes)," team owner Cobb said while watching Guerrero tour the 1.5-mile Las Vegas oval.

Guerrero has heard the comments time and again and would like to put them to rest before he ends his career.

"It's one of those things where a lot of teams wrote me off and said, 'Aw, he never was as good as he was before the accident,'" Guerrero said. "There are a lot of people who think that and, unfortunately, since then I have never been with the right team at the right time to be able to show that I'm just as good as I was before.

"It's been a little frustrating but the accident has been 11 years ago now so I have learned to live with it and I don't let it bother me anymore. The fact is that I'm still around (and) I don't get too upset about anything."