The second running of the Gold Coast Indy was sponsored by Japanese real estate giant Daikyo Incorporated. Daikyo had started building in Australia in 1972, and benefitted heavily from the late-1980s property boom, with projects in Brisbane, Cairns and of course, Surfers Paradise. No doubt a couple of the high-rises overlooking the circuit were theirs, but even so, their name was not especially familiar in this country.
Like Daikyo, IndyCar was busy building a foundation in Australia, but it would be another year yet before they rose high enough for the country to take notice...
More Cudgel than Cutlass: NASCAR on the Gold Coast
Once again, CAMS refused to have a bar of this event, leaving the support categories to come from Bob Jane's Thunderdome. Unfortunately, last year's NASCAR support race had been a demolition derby with extra steps, and the '92 edition brought déjà vu of the worst kind. The commentators spent some of their airtime taking exception to one Jackie Stewart's comment that stock cars were clumsy beasts, but the evidence – along with a substantial portion of the entry list – was piling up before their eyes. The Saturday afternoon race was red-flagged on the very first lap due to crashes blocking the first chicane: the restart, when it came, held for all of a lap and a half before the Pace Car was deployed to clean up another wreck at Turn 4.
In the meantime, Charlie O'Brien in his Oldsmobile Cutlass had put a move on the similar machine of visiting American Doug Taylor, edging him out in a chicken run down the Esplanade and into the back chicane. That move ended up deciding the race, because after two restarts in three laps, the people in race control were understandably getting edgy. Ergo, O'Brien was still leading a handful of laps later when the engine in Terry Byers' Chevrolet Monte Carlo went kaboom and the resulting oil slick sent several other cars skating into the wall. With that the race organisers finally called it off and declared O'Brien the winner, ahead of Doug Taylor and then Gregg Hansford in yet another Oldsmobile Cutlass.
So... were stock cars clumsy? In the narrow confines of Surfers Paradise, yes, absolutely. They were just too feeble in the brakes relative to their weight and power, and the resulting long braking zones left the drivers without any options if something went wrong... and those big engines dropped a lot of fluid if you cracked anything open. They might've been good fun in their element, but their element was firmly down at the Thunderdome in Melbourne, and there they realistically should've stayed. Fortunately, there was also...
The More the Merrier: Sports & GT
The so-called "Sports & GT" support race featured a huge grid that seems to've drawn from at least three sources: the Australian Sports Sedan Championship, the equivalent scene from New Zealand, and Group A touring cars, most of them from Queensland. Touring cars were allowed partly because it's hard to infringe the rules when there are no rules to infringe (Sports Sedans were the next thing to Formula Libre, after all), and partly because this was just a bit of fun, not a championship round. So the Benson & Hedges team fronted up with their three BMWs for regular drivers Tony Longhurst, Alan Jones and Paul Morris, and a couple of their old Sierras made an appearance in the Queensland Plastics livery of Brian Bolwell Racing. The Peter Gazzard VL Walkinshaw was also evident, one of several Commodores in the mix, with the rest of the grid made up of the usual Sports Sedan allsorts of Chevy Monzas, Jaguar XJ-Ss and the inevitable slew of Porsche 911s.
In the event both Tony Longhurst and Alan Jones ate the wall before the end, and Paul Morris parked with some sort of mechanical failure, leaving the race an intense struggle between Tasmanian Greg Crick in the white Chevy-powered Honda Prelude, and Brian Smith in the similarly Chevy-powered Alfa Romeo GTV. If you're reading this blog, then the blood-red Alfa with the reptilian eyes painted into its headlights should need no introduction: it's no coincidence the windscreen strip read "B&M Ricciardello", meaning Basil and Maria, the parents of the same Tony Ricciardello who'd one day be the most successful Sports Sedan racer in history. At the time, however, young Tony had only just celebrated his thirteenth birthday...
Greg Crick had won the Saturday race and managed to out-drag Smith on the second lap here on Sunday, but then blew his engine just before half-distance, leaving him with an inglorious DNF. If Smith thought he could relax, however, he was mistaken, as he spent the latter half of the race fending off the Chevy-engined Toyota Supra of another Taswegian, Kerry Baily, who came up barely half a car-length short in the final lunge to the chequered flag. Baily would have the last laugh, however, taking the 1992 Australian Sports Sedan Championship after a tough twelve-race calendar.
The Haves & the Have-Mores: CART in '92
There was a bit of a theme in 1992, and that theme was the re-emergence of Ford as a performance brand. Someone in the paddock had already encountered Jackie Stewart, for example, and got the benefit of his considered opinions: at the time the triple World Champion was Ford's star quality control officer, and would be setting up a de facto works Formula 1 team for them within the next few years. Jackie's presence here was a sure sign the eye of Dearborn was nearby, and you only had to look as far as the end of pit lane to see the proof. The Pace Car this weekend was one of Ford Australia's new EB Falcons, the facelifted update to the EA of 1988 – and even more excitingly, it was one of those new "S-XR8" models, the first Falcons in a decade to leave the factory with V8 power. It says a lot that a V8 Falcon with a yobbo bodykit and wonderfully tasteless early-90's livery could fade into the background, but this was IndyCar, and the Falcon was by some margin the least exotic hardware on display.
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A year on from the first CART PPG IndyCar Series race in Australia, the game had moved on in subtle but important ways. Top of the heap was still Roger Penske's Marlboro Team Penske, starring the original Brazilian F1 champion, Emerson Fittipaldi, and the four-time Indianapolis winner Rick Mears. The car was the new Penske PC-21, best known today for being the car Ayrton Senna tested when he briefly considered leaving Formula 1 (although that wouldn't happen until December, after Mears announced his retirement). More significant than the chassis, however, was the engine in the back.
For several years now the Chevrolet Indy V8 had been the engine to have in CART, winning nearly fifty races including the last thirty-seven in a row. But it had always been strictly limited in its availability: in 1988, Ilmor had only had the facilities to guarantee a supply for five cars, with no more on offer for any price (at Indianapolis, they even asked team owners not to indulge in the time-honoured practice of renting out spare cars to ageing pay drivers, because if any of these hopefuls made the race, their workshop would be overwhelmed). For 1989 that expanded to six cars, then ten in 1990, then to an even dozen for 1991... which was still barely half the grid. Since these engines were doing all the winning, the series was neatly divided into the haves and the have-nots, leading to the famous accusation that CART stood not for, "Championship Auto Racing Teams", but, "Chevrolet And Rich Team-owners".
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| Emmo turning laps at Mid-Ohio. |
Roger Penske, of course, couldn't give one rip about that. He had a special relationship with Ilmor and his team had put in the hard yards testing and developing the engine, nurturing it through its unreliable early years... so if the Chevy engine was finally becoming readily available, then of course he'd have to find something better. That something turned out to be the new "B" version of the Chevrolet Indy V8, which swiftly became known as the Chevy/B (retroactively making the older one the Chevy/A). Designed to be slightly smaller, lighter and more powerful than the A, the Chevy/B took the lessons of six years of hard racing and ruthlessly applied them. Since the Chevy/B was exclusive to Penske it resurrected the old complaint about Chevy And Rich Team-owners, but no doubt Penske thought it would be just enough to give his team an edge. It must have been a shock, then, when his rivals pitched up with something that was not evolution, but revolution.
There was really only one team that could stand against the might of Penske, and that was Newman/Haas Racing, the team owned by glamorous movie star Paul Newman, and his cigar-chomping business partner Carl Haas. They were the ultimate customer team, making nothing for themselves but buying or leasing as needed. They had a special relationship with their chassis supplier Lola Cars Ltd, and like Penske they'd soldiered together through the hard early years before Lola got their act together. By 1992, however, the only cars not made by Lola all were home-brews built by the teams themselves, so to maintain an edge Newman and Haas had to be more efficient and effective at the track, and secure some serious driving talent. To that end, they maintained the services of two of the Andretti clan: the patriarch Mario, a legend in his own lifetime, still quick and experienced but now without that extra spark that makes a champion; and his son Michael, the reigning series champ, who if anything had too much of that spark and needed to learn to dial it down.
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| Mimmo Michael at Loudon. |
Like Penske, however, the real news was the engine sitting just behind them. For the first time since the Total Performance era, the Ford Motor Company was returning to Indianapolis, putting the Blue Oval back at the Brickyard for the first time since 1971. With the deep pockets of Ford, Cosworth had been able to put into practice all the things they'd been wanting to do for years, so the new Ford XB Indy V8 was no development of the long-serving DFX. It was a "clean sheet of paper design" built especially for CART racing, with a redesigned cylinder block, different heads and other major castings and forgings. In concept it was the same 2.65-litre, 32-valve, methanol-burning turbo V8 used in IndyCar racing for fifteen years now, but in execution it was a game-changer. Its dimensions were just 566mm in height, 551mm in width and 546mm in length, meaning it sat 11mm lower and 38mm narrower than the "upgraded" Chevy/B; you could easily fit the whole thing within a two-foot cube. So although it produced more than 560 kW at 12,700rpm from its very first outing (thanks to a single Holset HX50R turbo), it was the reduction in frontal area that promised such dramatic gains. By Round 2 at Phoenix, Lola would step up to offer a bespoke version of their latest T92/00 chassis with an engine cowl that was lower and narrower behind the cockpit, to take advantage of the packaging of the XB.
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| Same car, same corner, different engine. Top, John Andretti in a '92 Lola with the Chevy/A; bottom, Eddie Cheever, also with a '92 Lola, but with the new Ford XB V8. Notice that the silver boost control valve is much more exposed on the red car, and the roll-over hoop seems to stand up more, even though Cheever is a much taller guy than Andretti. Both hint at bodywork pulled in much lower and tighter on the #9 car, allowing better airflow to the rear wing. |
Debuting a new car and a new engine was a bridge too far for a "customer" team like Newman/Haas, however, so to keep things simple they were debuting the engine in last year's T91/00. Only four drivers were using the new T92/00, and all of those had the old Chevy/A for power. Most of the backmarkers were stuck with older '91, or even 1990-spec Lola cars, with correspondingly outdated engines.
For the sake of variety, however, there was also the Galles Racing team, who this year had joined Penske in building a car of their own. They were able to do this thanks to a former March Engineering employee named Alan Mertens, who'd quit March to join the team back in 1988. It was said Mertens had changed so much on the team's March 88C that little remained of the original car, so stepping up to building the whole thing from scratch was a logical next step. The resulting car was named for Mertens and team owner Rick Galles, hence the Galmer, with the model number becoming G92. Whether in Al Unser Jr's Valvoline colours or the rich Molson blue of Danny Sullivan, the Galmer was identifiable by its needle-sharp and rather droopy nosecone, which contrasted starkly with the more sturdy-looking item found on the Lolas.
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| Little Al steering the Galmer at Long Beach. |
Since Galles retained a contract with Ilmor there was no trouble securing Chevy/As for power, but initial tests with the Galmer had been disheartening. The team went back to the drawing board and designed a new front wing, inspired by the one on the Leyton House F1 car (the brainchild of another March employee, Adrian Newey). That unlocked the car's potential, and Al Unser Jr took pole in Surfers Paradise with a lap of 1:38.744, or 1.3 seconds faster than Michael Andretti's time last year. It was a great starting position for Sunday's race, but it meant out of the top ten qualifiers, three had unproven new engines (Mario, Michael, and Chip Ganassi's driver Eddie Cheever); four had unproven new chassis (Bobby Rahal, both Galles drivers, and the Truesports 92C of Scott Pruett); and the two Penske drivers had both. Only the Canadian Scott Goodyear had a battle-tested chassis and engine combo, and significantly, he'd qualified way back in 10th place. It was very much going to be anyone's race.
Race Day
The thing was, Little Al's pole had been claimed with a very taily setup and it wasn't likely he'd be able to race with his car in that state. As it turned out, he didn't even get the chance. As they came around the final formation lap, the flag man waved the double green and Michael Andretti put his foot down, passing Al under power almost as soon as the race began. Thus the 1992 Daikyo IndyCar Grand Prix started off in very similar fashion to the '91 race, with young Michael utterly dominant.
Unser seemed to keep up in the early laps, getting back in the braking zones what he lost under acceleration, but it soon became clear he was putting no pressure on Michael as he steadily fell away into a race of his own. Michael had been racing the Lola T91/00 for a year already and now he had a very familiar, dialled-in car beneath him, but with more power. The Galmer was on its very first actual race, so Little Al was just that little bit more unsettled – a situation that only got worse when spits of rain began landing all around. It was all blue skies and bright sun overhead, but there was a storm just off the coast and it was keeping all the team strategists on edge, as it would take very little extra moisture to force a switch to wet-weather tyres. In these changeable conditions, Michael was supreme and Little Al was good enough: both were pulling away from Emerson Fittipaldi in 3rd.
Behind them, the little outbreaks of mayhem inevitable in racing began to occur. In the greasy conditions Tony Bettenhausen Jr nosed his secondhand Penske PC-20 into the wall on Breaker Street, although he kept it running and would eventually finish five laps down. Then last year's winner John Andretti came into the pits with a deflating rear tyre, followed suspiciously closely by Rick Mears with a front wing endplate missing from his shiny new Penske. That they'd had a coming-together seemed obvious, but no penalties were applied and both rejoined.
The first retirement of the race was in fact A.J. Foyt, a man of Jack Brabham's vintage, who actually had a car of his own in the race (Gregor Foitek, driving the #14 sponsored by Copenhagen, a maker of snuff tobacco). What was he doing driving a Walker Motorsport entry, then, when he'd arrived in the country not planning to drive at all? Most likely it was a start-n-park, meeting the contract for a minimum number of cars started after a pay driver's money failed to show. Hiro Matsushita had been slated to start for Dick Simon Racing, but he'd crashed heavily in practice and broken his leg, leaving him unable to start the race (although, incredibly, he would be back racing only two weeks later at Phoenix). That left the grid with only twenty-two starters, so it was a case of, "Hey, who here has a CART license?" Either way, before too long he was joined by Ted Prappas, whose P.I.G. Enterprises car was seen smoking at the side of the track on lap 18, turning it into nice crispy bacon.
With a 65-lap race to complete the first pit window opened up somewhere around lap 22, which led to question marks over the legs on that new Ford XB engine – sure, Michael had shown it made a lot of power, but wouldn't that come at the expense of efficiency? We soon found out. In fact it was Rick Mears who was the first to blink, hoving into the pits from 9th place for fuel and tyres. He was followed smartly by Little Al and his teammate Fittipaldi, but Michael continued for another lap. When he did pit however it took 15.5 seconds, almost two seconds longer than Unser, suggesting the team were being careful to load every possible drop into the tank in the back of the car. This middle stint would be a long one.
Sadly for Fittipaldi, he had to return to pit lane only a lap later to serve a stop-go penalty, having run over the air hose feeding one of his rattle guns, which was apparently a prosecutable offence. He was still better off than Eddie Cheever, who spent agonising minutes sitting in his pit box while the team diagnosed a gearbox malfunction. Eventually the team revealed it was a clutch release bearing preventing the clutch disengaging. That was why you didn't debut a new car and engine at the same time: the '92 Lolas had mounted their gearboxes backwards compared to the '91 cars, purely so the biggest cog – first – was at the front of the stack, allowing for a more tapering aerodynamic shape. Being fed the extra torque of the new Ford XB engine, the gearbox had proven the weakest link, and although Cheever would rejoin – he'd be fine while he was running, as long as he shifted without using the clutch – his race was now ruined. Notably, Scott Goodyear had managed to strip a gear in the morning practice session and been forced to start the race in his spare car: over in the Newman/Haas pits, the mechanics watched sagely and congratulated themselves for choosing the '91 car today.
Michael Andretti fed back into line ahead of Unser, but only just, as whatever time he'd eked out during his first stint had been eaten up by that longer pit stop. Luckily for him, it turned out not to matter as CART decided to throw a caution and have the Pace Car bunch the field back up for a restart. Their excuse was that there were several cars littering the track that needed cleaning up, and it was true Foitek had picked up a puncture that left him unable to stop, leading to a wreck but no injuries, and in the meantime Scott Pruett parked his Truesports with gearbox failure, followed soon after by Scott Brayton (what was it with gearboxes today?) Overall, then, the real beneficiary of this first caution period was Team Penske, as Fittipaldi's early stop-go penalty was effectively nullified, and the Captain called in Rick Mears to top up his tank while the train was on a go-slow – he was able to do it without losing a place, so why not?
At the first restart it was still Michael Andretti leading Al Unser Jr and Emerson Fittipaldi. Once again Michael was untouchable, so once again race control threw a caution, this time on the excuse that Scott Goodyear had just had a spin. It was after this second restart that Unser finally began to put some pressure on Andretti, although Andretti managed to hold onto it for the moment, and so secured the the bonus point for leading the most laps – we'd just passed half-distance.
Michael in fact led the first 40 laps of the 65, but then things went sideways in a hurry. Coming back from an ad break, it was revealed Michael had a problem and was heading for the pits, and he pulled up with a hint of grey oil smoke curling up from beneath his engine cowl. The team swiftly shut the engine down, and although Michael stayed in the car for a minute or so, it was pretty clear this was terminal. A heartbroken Michael thus unbolted the steering wheel and climbed out, soon thereafter fulfilling his duty of explaining to the TV cameras that it was a broken exhaust header. The commentators speculated that he was telling a white lie to spare Ford the embarrassment of an engine failure on debut, but in truth they didn't have much to be embarrassed about: 40 laps in the lead proved that right out of the box, the XB was the most powerful engine on the grid. But, as the saying went, to finish first, first you had to finish.
Michael's demise left Little Al leading with Emmo hot on his heels, but this race wasn't over yet – indeed, it was finally about to get interesting. You see, there were dark clouds only a stone's throw away, and Emmo (and just about everyone else!) was nearly due for his final pit stop. It was time for the team strategists to get the crystal balls out and decide whether to fit wet-weather tyres ready for the expected rain, or risk it with slicks and hope the rain was brief and transient. The difficulty was that the next round of pit stops would be the last, so whatever tyres were fitted now would have to stay on the car to the finish. So, wet race or dry race? Rain tyres or slicks? Call it.
Sure enough, on lap 44 Emmo dived into the pits for his final load of fuel and tyres. It was a long stop – the fuel hose remained attached for an inordinately long time, but the team had already revealed they were going to go for it, turn the revs all the way up and try to win this thing. If their shiny new engine broke, fine, but if it held together they'd need a lot of fuel to reach the finish. Emerson completed his stop and rejoined in 5th, just behind Bobby Rahal, Mario Andretti in 3rd, Danny Sullivan in 2nd and Al Unser Jr in the lead, a promising 1-2 for the new Galmer car. Rick Mears was currently 6th, but with his extra fuel during the yellow flags he was on a different strategy now, so he wasn't necessarily down and out either.
Little Al led until lap 46, when he bit the bullet and made his final pit stop from the lead. The team gambled on dry tyres, but it hardly mattered, as the rattle gun refused to work on the right-rear tyre, dragging the stop on for an inordinate amount of time. When he finally rejoined in a mild panic, he was only just ahead of Rahal – and Rahal was no longer in an especially peachy place, having slowed dramatically with a fuel starvation problem. He'd pushed his middle stint too far, and it had turned around and bit him.
The kerfuffle let Danny Sullivan into the lead, but he was on his inlap, so he initiated a sequence whereby six lead changes occurred in as many laps. Sullivan led lap 47 until he pitted, whereupon the lead passed to Mario Andretti for lap 48, until he pitted too. The good news was, that new Ford XB engine had now demonstrated it had long legs as well as plenty of power, as Mario had gone further than the Chevy-users on every stint, which held promise for the all-important 500-milers later in the year. But all the same, Andretti had to pit, and in a tidy 14.5-second stop the Newman/Haas mechanics ignored the tyres they'd prepared and instead opted for fuel and a turn of front wing only. This was no time for cold, green tyres still slippery with release agent; there was rain coming.
With Mario in the pits, lap 49 went to Rick Mears, but Mears immediately fluffed it, out-braked himself into Turn 3 and landing in the escape road. He'd never been known as a great road-racer, but watching on the monitors was Roger Penske, who wore the face of a golfer struggling to comprehend a disastrous putt. He realised what Mears' unforced error meant: the rain was here. And since Mears had the latest pit stop window, he had the advantage of letting conditions develop. He could choose rain tyres.
Mears' mishap meant lap 50 was led by year's winner John Andretti, but his yellow Pennzoil machine was likewise almost dry, so he too was soon headed for the pits. By the time the incoming wall of rain reached the Esplanade, Roger Penske had already enacted his plan: Mears was already back around the circuit and sitting in his pit box, getting a final top-off of fuel and – gloriously – a set of grooved rain tyres. These were no luxury, as footage of backmarkers like Fabrizio Barbazza and Tony Bettenhausen tip-toeing through ankle-deep water suddenly filled our screen. Mears rejoined in the lead and kept it, as race control finally threw a deserved caution to hold the IndyCars behind the Pace Car while the water cleared. Even so, multiple drivers aquaplaned at absurdly low speeds, but all of them managed to keep their machinery off the walls. The only retirement during the last caution was a rookie named Jim Vasser (no "Jimmy" yet), whose cause of DNF was listed as, "Electrics".
The wall of rain had been intense, but brief: within a handful of laps the sun reappeared and the water began to sluice away down the stormwater drains. When we came back from the final ad break, the order behind the Pace Car was Rick Mears followed by Danny Sullivan, Mario Andretti 3rd, Al Unser Jr in 4th and Emerson Fittipaldi 5th. As the Pace Car peeled off for the final time to leave us an intense seven-lap sprint to the finish, we were set for a mouth-watering Sullivan-versus-Mears, Galmer-on-Penske duel for the win.
At the final green Mears made a clean getaway, but the track was drying and his wet-weather tyres wouldn't last if he abused them. Behind, Sullivan tried to thread his way through the backmarkers to close the gap to Mears, but soon found himself fending off his teammate, Little Al following him around the lap and then going for a spectacular send up the inside into the first chicane... and making it stick!
Eddie Cheever tried the same move on the race leader to un-lap himself, hinting that Mears was running out of grip, but from there Cheever proved no faster and spent several crucial laps getting in Mears' way. In the meantime Danny Sullivan faded, falling into Emerson's clutches as the Brazilian rose through the ranks, so before long it was Emmo edging up on Little Al, while Al crept up on Mears. It had been a long time since we'd seen anything like this from Fittipaldi, who was such a warm and lovely guy away from the track that it was easy to forget what an animal he could be when he had a good car under him and wounded prey in his sights. With the grip level changing constantly and nothing between himself and that chequered flag but two Americans who'd spent too much time on the speedways, the scent of blood was in the air and the feral beast within Emmo leapt forth, and howled.
With just a handful of laps to go, Emmo snuck it up the inside of Little Al into Turn 4, at last putting the Penskes 1st and 2nd on the road. With Fittipaldi on a charge Mears finally threw caution to the wind: he'd been prepared to let Eddie Cheever through because he was a lap down, but his teammate was another matter. Down the backstretch Mears re-lapped Cheever but in the process tore a little more rubber out of his dying rain tyres, and through the twisties at the north end of the circuit Rick's Penske was just dancing, the rear end searching for grip.
With two laps to go Mears finally cleared Cheever, but then so did Emmo, leaving nothing but Mears between himself and the race lead. Down the backstretch the Brazilian stalked his prey, following him through the chicanes that broke up that long run along the beach. And then he saw his chance: into the left-hander onto Breaker Street, Mears stayed out wide to hang onto the grip, leaving the inside open. Instinct took over and Fittipaldi pounced: he braked dangerously late, locking the fronts and converting most of them into smoke... but he landed in the corner still under control, turned in smartly and got away with it. He nearly lost the rear in a massive fishtail coming off the turn, but he'd made the pass and taken the lead.
Caught by surprise, Mears had no answer to that kind of savagery, and Fittipaldi retained the lead to the finish, finally greeting the chequered flag after 2 hours, 20 minutes and 33 seconds of hard racing. Thanks to a late pass on Unser, Bobby Rahal arrived at the finish line in a solid 3rd place, but there was no disputing this was Penske's day. It would've been a win either way thanks to the Captain's masterful race strategy, making lemonade out of an early-race lemon, but it was a 1-2 thanks to the brilliance of Emerson Fittipaldi. It wasn't for nothing the man was a two-time Formula 1 champion, as well as the victor of the 1989 Indianapolis 500.
Touchline Tattles
One name that was also there on the day was the rookie Jovy Marcelo, who finished eleven laps down in an outdated Lola-Cosworth run by Euromotorsport. I'm not sure how his name is actually pronounced ("Yovi Markelo"? "Hovi Marchelo?"), but I'm fairly sure the commentators' "Jovy [as in Bon Jovi] Marselo" is wrong (they never bothered to learn Matsushita's name either, which is endlessly funny to me). But Marcelo's name is worth remembering because, in a 1991 Formula Atlantic race at Lime Rock, he'd become the first Filipino driver to win an FIA-sanctioned motor race. Reaching CART was the dream of a lifetime, so it was deeply tragic when he was killed in practice for Indianapolis less than three months into his career. Formula Atlantic inaugurated the Jovy Marcelo Sportsmanship Award in his honour, but other than that nobody today really knows him. Just another case of what might have been, snuffed out on the walls of Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
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