Hearn waiting for call to resume racing career

Tuesday, March 2, 2004 | 9:29 a.m.

If there was a record for getting nowhere fast, Richie Hearn would probably own it.

Back in 1996, Hearn was going to be the next-biggest thing to hit open-wheel racing since ground effects. He won the inaugural Las Vegas 500K Indy Racing League event as a 25-year-old just a week after it was announced he was moving to the Championship Auto Racing Teams (CART) circuit, which back then was where every American-born Indy-car driver aspired to be.

So it was a big deal when the All-Star Cafe on the Las Vegas Strip hoisted Hearn's Las Vegas-winning car to the rafters as one of the most talked-about pieces of sports memorabilia in its collection.

Now, the All-Star Cafe is history, and unless a lightning bolt drops from the sky in the vicinity of his back yard in Henderson, so is Hearn's driving career.

"I'm sitting here, pretty much doing nothing," said Hearn, who moved to Green Valley with his wife, Brenda, shortly after spraying champagne in victory lane at LVMS. "I'm wasting the best years of my racing career."

At 33, he should be enjoying his prime. Instead, Hearn finds himself on the periphery of the sport, and just barely at that. He is starting a Formula Mazda team, an entry-level series for youngsters, that he probably will run out of Las Vegas Motor Speedway. Other than that, he sits at home waiting for the phone to ring.

Only he is resigned to the fact that it probably won't.

Oh, he plans on showing up at Indy in May, with his firesuit and helmet, just in case something opens up or (he would never say it) somebody gets hurt in practice for the 500. That was pretty much how he landed four rides with three different teams last year.

As for NASCAR, where drivers often are competitive into their 40s and even their 50s, Hearn said he tried to get his foot in the door in 2001 and promptly had it closed on his racing boots.

"I tried pretty hard to get into the Busch series or trucks but they just want my money, they don't really want me," he said. "But I really didn't want to put in the effort of racing in (stepladder series) in North Carolina, or driving a Southwest (series) car. I mean, I had pretty much been on top in Indy cars ..."

So you really can't blame Hearn for not wanting to go that route. There aren't many guys who finish third in the Indy 500, which Hearn did as a rookie in 1996, willing to start over at the Saturday night bullrings.

In retrospect, Hearn's biggest problem was a personality trait that seldom makes it out of the paddock in big-time auto racing. He was linked to several top CART rides a few years back, including one in the Miller-sponsored car fielded by Bobby Rahal.

But Hearn stayed loyal to John Della Penna, a wealthy businessman and racing enthusiast from South America, who had nurtured Hearn's career up the open wheel ladder. The two won the Toyota Atlantic championship in 1995, launching Hearn's Indy-car career, and Hearn went on to post eight top-10 finishes in CART in 1998, including a career-best fifth at the Michigan 500.

A year later, Della Penna Motor Sports went out of business. Meanwhile, the Team Rahal car, now being driven by Buddy Rice, another young American in a series that is lacking them, qualified on the pole for Sunday's IRL season opener at Homestead, Fla.

So now, other than contemplating what might have been, which isn't much fun, Hearn finds himself drawing up football plays, which is. In 2001, the Broncos, a Henderson flag football team he coaches, won the national championship for 12-to-14 year-olds at the Disney Wide World of Sports Complex in Orlando, Fla.

As irony would have it, it was just a stone's throw from the Walt Disney World Speedway, where Hearn made his Indy-car debut in 1996.

These days, he'd probably be the first to tell you there are times when big-time auto racing can be a Mickey Mouse business.