For Cheever, Right Turn at Phoenix Is Left : Motorsports: After 10 seasons of Formula One racing, he has come back to the U.S. for Indy Cars and oval tracks.

PHOENIX —  Although he has driven in 132 Formula One races in the last 10 years, plus numerous world endurance races, Eddie Cheever has never driven in a race on an oval track.

Oval track racing is unique to the United States, and the only time that Cheever, a native of Phoenix, drove in this country was in a Grand Prix at Long Beach, Las Vegas or Detroit.

Sunday, in the Autoworks 200, opening event of the PPG Indy car season, he will make his turn-left-only debut at Phoenix International Raceway, a one-mile oval.

“In all candor, I wish I were driving my first Indy car race somewhere else than Phoenix,” Cheever said Friday between practice runs in his year-old Chevrolet-powered Penske PC-18. “These short ovals are not easy. The hardest thing is getting used to the speed. Every 22 seconds or so, you’re right back where you started. That makes me uncomfortable.”

Cheever, 32, retired from Formula One at the end of last season after a career that saw him drive for the Tyrrell, Ligier, Renault, Alfa Romeo and Arrows teams.

This year, he is driving for Chip Ganassi, co-owner with Pat Patrick of the car Emerson Fittipaldi drove last year to win the Indianapolis 500 and Indy car championship.

The car Cheever is driving here is the one that Fittipaldi drove at Indy.

Cheever was eighth fastest in practice Friday with a lap at 156.338 m.p.h. Rick Mears, the defending champion in a new Penske Indy Chevrolet, was fastest at 161.204 m.p.h.

Cheever decided “it was time to quit Formula One because I was finding it increasingly difficult to motivate myself driving cars with which it was just impossible to finish in the points, much less win races.”

He had planned to race a Jaguar, in which he had won seven world endurance prototype races during 1987 and ‘88, when he was contacted by Ganassi about driving an Indy car.

“I had met Eddie when I was in LeMans to drive a Mercedes in the 24-hour race in 1987,” Ganassi recalled. “He asked me some questions about Indy and said he’d like to race there some day. We said we’d keep in contact, but neither one of us gave it much of a thought. I was driving myself and hadn’t started thinking about owning my own team then.”

Ganassi, whose father is a wealthy Pittsburgh industrialist, bought into the Pat Patrick team before the 1989 season. After Fittipaldi won the championship, the team was dissolved when Fittipaldi took his Marlboro sponsorship to Roger Penske, and Patrick elected to throw his weight behind the new Alfa Romeo team.

“I could have gone with Pat,” Ganassi said, “but I decided it was time for me to start my own team, and I felt I could do better than Roberto Guerrero (the Alfa Romeo team driver), so I decided to go it alone.

“I ran into Cheever at a Christmas party in Indianapolis, where he was there with a close friend of mine,” Ganassi said. “We talked about Eddie’s desire to try Indy, and I told him I had the opportunity for him. I knew he wanted a ride, but he wasn’t going to take a slow car just to say he’d been there. When I told him I had Emmo’s old car, he decided to come with me.

“I think we can be competitive with the old car, but if we can’t, we’ll buy a new one. We’ll see what happens. You can’t judge the team by what happens here, although I think we’ll finish in the top five. After Long Beach and Indy, we can assess where we’re going and how fast.”

Cheever, for years, has been heralded as the lone American driver in Formula One, but the truth is that he left his native Phoenix at the age of 4 and never returned until last year for the Grand Prix.

“I’m still an American citizen,” he said with a smile. The Cheever family emigrated to Australia before settling in Rome.

Cheever said he is already feeling more competitive in the Indy car than he had been for several years in Grand Prix.

“I feel like I’m finally getting into the ring with the same-size boxing gloves as everyone else has,” he said.

“I’m looking forward more to Indianapolis than I am (to) Phoenix, I guarantee you that. I enjoy those long straightaways at Indy. I feel much more comfortable there than I do here. We ran 213 (m.p.h.) there in our test, and I can’t wait to see the place with 400,000 (people) there.”

He looks forward to the future, with races involving both left and right turns.

“I’ll be glad to get this one over and get on to Long Beach,” he said. “Detroit and Long Beach are the two places I’m looking forward to racing because the courses are the same as they were when I ran them in Formula One. I ran very well at Long Beach and was sick when they dropped off the Grand Prix schedule. I’m looking forward to getting back there.”