Friends Rooting for Fox : Indy 500: Injured driver who specializes in midget cars has been a favorite at the track.

INDIANAP0LIS —  Everyone could spot Stan Fox in Gasoline Alley. He was the man riding around in a golf cart built to look like a bowling pin.

Over the years, his sponsors were mainly local cafeterias, tool rental firms and, once, a bowling alley. He and Ron Hemelgarn, his car owner, designed the distinctive cart.

It sat alone Tuesday outside the Hemelgarn Racing garage at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, a silent monument to the man who drove it.

Fox, who suffered critical head injuries Sunday while driving in his eighth Indianapolis 500, is clinging to life after having a blood clot removed from his brain in the neurological unit of Methodist Hospital. The 42-year-old driver from Janesville, Wis., remained unconscious Tuesday and in critical condition.

“With the initial injury, the damage is done,” neurosurgeon Kenneth L. Renkens said. “We’re treating him now to prevent further swelling of the brain. Unchecked swelling could cause additional injury.”

Fox is breathing with the help of a respirator.

“The family is cautiously optimistic,” Fred Fox said after visiting his brother Tuesday. “Stan moved his fingers and his toes, and that gives us hope.”

Fellow 500 drivers who watched video reruns of the first-lap accident and studied photographs in the Indianapolis Star that showed Fox airborne in the remains of his Reynard chassis, with his lower body totally exposed, couldn’t believe it when hospital reports said he had no broken bones.

“It seems to me to be impossible for someone to withstand the impact that broke a car in half and not have at least a toe or a foot broken,” Scott Brayton said.

The accident occurred shortly after Fox started through the first turn on the first lap. His car seemed to wiggle slightly, and his left-side tires ran over the rumble-strip on the edge of the track. The car suddenly shot to the right, across the track into the path of Eddie Cheever’s car and then into the wall, almost head-on.

“We may never know what happened,” Brayton said. “So many things are happening in that first turn with all the cars coming down at 200 m.p.h.. It’s like a dozen tiny tornadoes, turbulence is everywhere, things are happening so fast you can barely breathe, or barely see. One tiny bump and things are out of control.”

Lee Kunzman, crew chief for the Hemelgarn cars, said the lap belts were ripped from the car, and only his shoulder harness and crotch belt kept Fox in the car when it turned upside down.

“You look at what’s left and just shake your head,” said Kunzman, who was out of racing for four years because of a head injury suffered when he hit the wall during practice at Ontario Motor Speedway in 1973.

Six cars were sidelined, either immediately or from damage uncovered later, by Sunday’s accident. Cheever’s was among them, giving him 31st place in the race.

“If my job was to help make Stan’s impact a little softer, then I was glad to be there,” he told the Victory Banquet audience.

Roberto Guerrero, who finished 12th, reminded friends that he was unconscious for 17 days after a crash at Indianapolis in 1987 and recovered sufficiently to resume racing the next year.

“It does not matter if he comes back to race, as long as he has full recovery,” said Jacques Villeneuve, the 500 winner.

Fox is one of a fading number of drivers who race all season long in midgets or dirt cars and come to Indianapolis once a year to drive for Hemelgarn or A. J. Foyt or Jonathan Byrd, who have roots in the small U.S. oval tracks.

Although he kept a home in Janesville with his wife, Jane, and two children, Marie, 11, and Alex, 5, Fox spent most of his time on the road, chasing big purses for little cars from Pennsylvania to California. Last Sunday was the first time Alex had been at Indy when his father was driving.

Most of Fox’s racing in recent years has been for car owner Steve Lewis of Huntington Beach--in midgets built by Bob East, a former California Racing Assn. sprint car driver who now builds cars called Beasts in Indianapolis.

“Stan is more than a customer, he’s a close family friend of ours,” East said. “He has won every important midget race in the country and he’s one of the main reasons that our business has been successful. Stan is just a wonderful guy, always cheerful and always a lot of fun. It’s hard, thinking about him in the hospital, but if anyone can recover from a hit like that, Stan’s the one.”

In a 20-year career, Fox has won 19 U.S. Auto Club national championship midget races, six in Southern California. Since 1987, they have all been in Beasts owned by Lewis.

His biggest victory was in the 1990 Turkey Night Grand Prix at Ascot Park. It was the final race held at the half-mile dirt oval, where J.C. Agajanian and his family had made the Turkey Night race a Southland tradition for 30 years. Previous winners include Foyt, Parnelli Jones, Gary Bettenhausen and Ron Shuman.

“When Stan took the checkered flag at Ascot, it was like winning the Indianapolis 500 for us,” Lewis said.

Fox also won the 1991 Turkey Night race on the asphalt at Saugus Speedway. Earlier, he won fall championship races at Ascot three years in a row, 1980 to ‘82, and also won at Ventura Raceway in 1986.

It was while attending Arizona State that Fox, then 20, drove his first midget race at Corona Raceway.

“I had been a fan of Jimmy and Danny Caruthers when I was growing up in Wisconsin,” Fox said in a 1991 interview. “I had always wanted to drive a race car and I drove that first race for Don Edmunds [who was 1967 Indy 500 rookie of the year]. For the rest of the school year, I studied on weekdays and headed for Southern California weekends.

“I raced at Corona, El Toro, Chula Vista, San Bernardino, Speedway 605 in Irwindale, every place midgets raced.”

Once he started driving at Indy in 1987, he agreed not to race between the Copper World Classic at Phoenix International Raceway in February and the start of practice at Indy in May.

“Racing Indy once a year is enough for that kind of car,” he once said. “It pays well, it’s satisfying to make the race and it doesn’t make sense to run the other races.”

Fox’s highest finishes in the 500 have been a seventh in his first race and an eighth in 1991.

His last major victory came in the 1993 Copper World Classic midget race, where he came from 26th to catch pole-starter Page Jones four laps from the end of the 25-lap race. Coincidentally, Jones is also in rehabilitation after suffering a head injury in a sprint car accident last year in Ohio.

Fox also won Copper World Classic features in 1980 and ’90. Also in 1990, he took midget racing’s Triple Crown with victories in the Turkey Night Grand Prix at Ascot Park and the 4-Crown Nationals at Ohio’s Eldora Speedway, in addition to the Copper World Classic.