Al Unser: He’s a Finish Product

What the Rothschilds were to banking, the Hapsburgs to empires, the Rockefellers to oil or the Fords to manufacturing, the Unsers were to auto racing. They weren’t a family, they were a dynasty. Royalty of the roaring road.

They weren’t born, they were tooled. An Unser, it was said, came into the world wearing goggles, carrying a lug wrench in one hand and a steering wheel in the other. Other families boast when their kids take their first steps or say their first words. The Unser family boasted, “Junior hit his first fence today.”

It’s not uncommon for a family to hand down the secrets of watchmaking or jewel-cutting to succeeding generations. It’s not uncommon for several members of a family to enter the same profession.

What is uncommon, if that profession is sports, is for them to be of relatively equal ability. To be stars defies the laws of probability. One of the wry jokes of the baseball profession is to guess the answer to the trivia question of which brothers have the most home runs of any siblings in baseball. The answer is the Aaron brothers with 768. Henry had 755, Tommie had 13.

Well, the Unser brothers have won seven--count ‘em--Indy 500s. Al, still driving, has won four, and Bobby, retired, won three.

Astonishing as that stat is, it’s the fact that Al caught up with and passed brother Bobby that amazes most of the stopwatch set along pit wall.

It was Bobby who was Hollywood’s--and everyone else’s--idea of a race driver. Flamboyant, impetuous, disdainful of death, Bobby was a guy who, if he hadn’t been a race driver, probably would have been a high-wire walker in a circus or the point man in a suicide patrol.

Bobby was a guy who always looked to be in a hurry. To die, if it came to that. To crash. Certainly, to win. If the car couldn’t keep up, well, Bobby couldn’t wait. Bobby never checked the brakes on a car, just the gas pedal.

Al was more cautious, more methodical. Al checked the brakes, all right. Al came into focus as an accountant in a fire suit. Al subscribed to the yellow-light theory of racing--to finish first, first you must finish. Finishing bored Bobby. Bobby wanted to be on the lead--or on the wall.

In another life, Bobby would have been Billy the Kid, and Al would have been a sheep rancher. If they had been jockeys, Bobby would have brought the horse to the finish line filleted with whip marks, and Al would have finished under a hand ride. Al has started 22 Indy races and has finished 14 of them. Only A.J. Foyt has finished that many. And he has started 30.

Only the great ones--Jack Nicklaus, Ben Hogan, Bobby Jones--win four U.S. Opens. Only the elite jockeys--Eddie Arcaro, Bill Shoemaker, Bill Hartack--win that many or more Kentucky Derbies. And only Al Unser and Foyt have won that many Indy 500s. It was no fluke. Al also has been second three times and third twice.

But he is never just out for the ride. In his first race at the Speedway, in 1965, he started next to last. And finished ninth. In 1972, he started 19th. And finished second. In 1985, he finished exactly one lap behind the winner, Danny Sullivan--the lap he was penalized for running over a hose on pit row. This year, he started 20th. And won for the record-tying fourth time.

On the record, Al Unser is the best race driver in history in this country. This surprises a lot of people who didn’t think he was the best driver in his own family.

Al’s trouble is, he has no talent for self-promotion. When cops pull you over for speeding, they say, “Who do you think you are--Barney Oldfield?” Or, “Where’s your driving license, Mario?” No one says, “He’s a regular Al Unser.”

The operative word with Al is steady. Yet, he’s probably driven more laps at more than 200 m.p.h. than any other man on the ground. Even so, he’s always been known as the other Unser. Standard race track wisdom had it that another older brother, Jerry, was the best race driver in the family. We’ll never know. Jerry died of burns received in a crash at Indy in 1959.

Al has demonstrated his special combination of speed-cum-durability right from the start. Ironically, it was the man whose place in history he would overtake--A. J. Foyt--who gave him his first ride at Indy in 1965.

Al was trying to qualify, of all things, a Maserati, which was the nearest thing on the speedway to an exploding cigar, when Foyt put him in his backup car. When Foyt went out on the 115th lap that year, Unser’s crew expected Foyt to call in Al and take his place. Foyt shook his head. “Leave the kid alone,” he said. “He’s doing a fine job.”

He’s been doing one ever since. If you want one man for one race today, Al Unser is your man. If you’ve got the car, he’s got the touch. If it’s got four wheels and turns left, Al will take care of the rest.

He takes the act to Riverside this Sunday, where there’ll be a scene as typically American as a barbecue--a race with two Unsers in it.

This will be the Jeep Mini Metal Challenge, a feature of the 15th annual Stroh’s SCORE Off-Road World Championship series. This is a race run on terrain that seeks to combine the worst aspects of the surface of the moon and a roadway on which a truckload of bottled water has just turned over, an obstacle course that could break down a tank advance.

To an Unser, it looks like a dance floor looks to Gene Kelly. And it’s playing their song--the high-pitched whine of a racing engine on a hot day.

Wherever there’s a checkered flag, there’ll always be an Unser.

“I still get the adrenaline flowing,” says Al Sr., now 48. “When I don’t, it’ll be time to get in a back seat.”

The sport hopes that won’t be till he has a chance to take the fifth--a historic fifth at Indy. The other Unser has become the Unser. But if you want to find him, don’t look at any head tables or watch for him on talk shows. You might try under a car, though.