No Slowdown: Pole to Mears : Auto racing: He sets a record of 168.169 m.p.h. in qualifying for today’s Indy car opener.

PHOENIX —  The 1990 Indy car season is starting exactly as it started last year--and exactly as it ended last year.

Rick Mears, driving one of Roger Penske’s Indy Chevrolets, ran a record lap of 168.169 m.p.h. Saturday to take the pole for today’s Autoworks 200 at Phoenix International Raceway, opening event of the $20-million Indy car season.

Last year, in both the season opener here and the season closer at Laguna Seca, the veteran Bakersfield driver set qualifying records and went on to win both races.

A Championship Auto Racing Teams rules change designed to decrease speeds by reducing downforce apparently missed its mark as far as Mears was concerned. His lap around the one-mile oval shattered his record of 166.536, set last year.

It was also Mears’ third consecutive qualifying record. He ended the 1989 season with record runs at Nazareth, Pa., and Laguna Seca.

The superiority of Mears is such that he is almost 4 m.p.h. faster than the No. 2 qualifier, Al Unser Jr., who went 164.354 m.p.h. in his Lola-Chevy.

It is the first time Unser has qualified for the front row in an oval race. He has a long way to go to emulate his famous uncle, Bobby Unser, who sat on the pole for a record 11 Phoenix races before he retired in 1982. This was the fifth Phoenix pole for Mears.

“I don’t know why we’re running so much faster,, except that the overcast day made for ideal qualifying conditions,” Mears said. “After Danny (Sullivan) came in and told me that the grip was better than it had been all week, I carried more throttle through the turns than I had been in practice.”

Sullivan, one of Mears’ Penske teammates, had been the first of the 24 drivers to qualify and went 163.577 to give the field a target.

As expected, Chevrolet-powered cars dominated the front of the starting grid. The first three rows are Chevrolet-powered, as are eight of the first nine. Only Dominic Dobson, with a Cosworth engine in his new Lola, broke through the Chevrolet domination. Dobson, primarily a road racer, ran 161.616 for seventh position.

Mears might have been even faster but the popoff valve--a CART maintained manifold pressure relief valve that limits the intake manifold to a maximum of 45 inches of mercury--blew off twice during his record lap.

“I don’t know how much it affected the time, but to me it felt like 20 miles an hour,” Mears said. “It seemed like forever. Each time it popped off, I had to adjust the dial with my left hand in hopes it wouldn’t pop again.

“There’s still some speed left to find. If I find out how to stay flat out through turn one, that’s where I have some throttle left. We definitely have to lift there, but a few years ago we lifted going through three and four, too. Now, they’re flat out.”

Didier Theys, in Frank Arciero’s Buick, estimated he lost “a few tenths of a second” when his popoff valve opened.

The reduction in speed, Unser predicted, would come during today’s race.

“When you’re out there all alone, like we are in qualifying, you don’t notice the difference in the downforce the way you do in traffic,” he said. “The difference comes in dirty air. When you’re following a car and it’s having handling problems, it will magnify your own handling.

“We wanted (the rules committee) to give us slower cornering speeds and that’s just what we got. The straightaway speeds don’t matter, it’s the corners where the trouble happens. What they’ve done with the new rules is put the driver back in the driver’s seat, and that’s what the good drivers wanted.”

Mears and Unser will come up on traffic quickly today as the disparity in speed between the pole sitter and the slowest car is 25.318 m.p.h. On a track where the leaders will be lapping in about 22 seconds, they should be lapping Guido Dacco and his 1988 Lola-Cosworth by the fourth or fifth lap.

The only Chevrolet-powered drivers not up front are A. J. Foyt, the 55-year-old Texan who might be making his last whirl around the Indy car circuit, and Eddie Cheever, the rookie from Formula One.

“We didn’t get any testing in before this weekend and the chassis is off just a bit,” Foyt said after going only 158.793, good for 12th place.

Cheever got sideways and slid about a quarter of a mile without hitting the wall during his first qualifying lap. After coming in for a new set of tires, the Phoenix native returned to the track and went 153.329. He will start 18th.

Paul Tracy of Canada won the 100-mile opening race of the American Racing Series, designed to train drivers for Indy car racing, by three seconds over Mark Smith of McMinnville, Ore. Smith, the pole-sitter, led for the first 20 laps before Tracy took over.