Race Team

Sometimes, sponsorships are less than meet the eye.Going into this season, Big Daddy's BBQ Sauce had signed $6 million in contracts with race teams. But just three months later, two of those teams have severed the agreements because of Big Daddy's failure to make payments and a third is working diligently to preserve the relationship.Dan Lloyd, the owner of Big Daddy's BBQ, feels caught in the middle.Sitting in his Oklahoma City office, suffering with a massive headache and pneumonia, Lloyd, 54, explained why he has not met his obligations.

WAMPURN, Pa. - The mountaintop above this small, rural town is awash in activity. It is here, at Beaver Run Motor-sports Park, about 250 miles west of Baltimore, that Maryland sports car driver Chuck Goldsborough has come to test his Lexus IS300 race cars. As his three cars are being unloaded, Goldsborough, looking like a driver out of a Hollywood movie - sun-bleached blond hair falling over his forehead, stylish sunglasses shielding his eyes and dressed in his driver's suit - tells the tale of family and success.

FINALSCitizen CupRace 7Mighty Mary, Leslie Egnot, vs. Young America, Kevin Mahaney, ppd, light winds.Louis Vuitton CupRace 6 Black Magic 1, Russell Coutts, vs. def. oneAustralia, John Bertrand, ppd, strong winds.STANDINGSCitizen CupL Young America, 3 points; Stars & Stripes, 3; Mighty Mary, 3.Note: By agreement of the syndicates, Young America began the round with two bonus points and Mighty Mary with one.Louis Vuitton CupTeam New Zealand, 4 points; oneAustralia, 1.TODAY'S SCHEDULECitizen Cup12-race seriesRace 7Young America vs. Mighty Mary.

In the 1993-'94 race, the helmsman aboard the boat Intrum Justitia was hit so hard by a wave, his body bent the wheel.A former Vietnam prisoner of war visited the members of Maryland's team, Chessie Racing, and coached them on survival skills. The focus of the talk: staying sane during extremely long periods in claustrophobic spaces.In the 1989-90 race, a Russian boat entered the race with an inexperienced skipper. After a month on the boat, he disappeared in the woods in Uruguay during a stopover and hanged himself in a remote spot near Punta del Este.

DETROIT -- Eager to portray itself more convincingly as an American institution, Honda Motor Co.'s U.S. subsidiary said yesterday that it would begin building engines for race cars in the Indianapolis 500 and associated races, starting in 1994.Honda executives said they expected the racing program to help in the marketing of Honda and Acura cars and to provide racing experience for the company's American engineers and technicians.Honda especially wants to improve its sales in the nation's heartland, where the sentiment for buying U.S. products runs high, said Thomas G. Elliott, executive vice president of American Honda Motor Co.Honda's announcement came a day after it suffered a sales setback in the United States, as its Accord yielded first place in U.S. sales to the Ford Taurus, after having led for three years running.

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- When Joe Gibbs started his head coaching career with the Washington Redskins, he lost five games before he won one.Yesterday, the 1992 Super Bowl champion coach lost his first Daytona 500 as a Winston Cup race team owner.Even though his car finished 36th, knocked out in a 14-car pileup on Lap 93 of this 200-lap race, he found something to smile about."My driver walked away from a bad crash, and I think we showed we can run with the leaders," Gibbs said.But Gibbs said he was more than a little shaken by the accident that put his Interstate Batteries Chevrolet Lumina behind the pit wall for the day."

LOS ANGELES - A memorial service for Al Heppner, the Olympic race walking team candidate from Columbia, Md., who apparently took his life in a leap from a bridge Wednesday, will be held at 11 a.m. tomorrow at the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, Calif. A scholarship fund in his name will be started by the North American Racewalking Foundation, based in Pasadena, Calif., announced Elaine Ward, the foundation director. "I had no clue, none whatsoever, that Al might have been contemplating something like this," said Tim Seaman of North Babylon, N.Y., his national race walking team friend and training partner in the Chula Vista-based group.

When he was growing up in Towson, JF Thormann could not, in his wildest fantasies, have imagined a day when downtown Baltimore would be turned into a IndyCar racetrack. He did, however, frequently spend his afternoons and evenings pretending there was a Grand Prix racetrack in the parking lot of Goucher College, where his father was a professor. "I'm not sure my father knows that," Thormann said with a sheepish chuckle. "But I used to practice there a lot. I also burned up a lot of road around the Loch Raven Reservoir.

The best was saved for last for many of the smaller yachts racing in the biennial Annapolis-to-Newport Race this week, as superb sailing conditions filled in behind the fleet Wednesday afternoon."

Some things never change. As you walk around the hospitality and pit areas at an IZOD IndyCar race you can still find Mario Andretti signing autographs more than five decades since he drove his first racecar in competitive open wheel racing. Andretti, the most versatile American racecar driver in history, is at age 71, theoretically, long retired. But that's hard to prove. Over four decades beginning in the 1960s he won four Indy Car championships and became the only driver in motorsports history to win the Indianapolis 500 (1969)