LOUDON, N.H. – For three years now, the Indy cars have roared their way around the 1.058-mile oval at New Hampshire International Speedway.

For three years now, the driver who won the New England 200 here also won the IndyCar PPG championship series: Bobby Rahal in 1993, Nigel Mansell in ’94, and Al Unser Jr. in ’95.

Emerson Fittipaldi would like to break that tradition.

Fittipaldi enters this weekend statistically out of the running to win the championship this year, but he’s excited about being back at New Hampshire for Sunday’s race.

“Last week at Mid-Ohio, he kept talking about New Hampshire,” says Vince Kremer, a Fittipaldi mechanic who the public will see come race day as the guy changing the inside rear tire during pit stops.

In fact, Fittipaldi was in New Hampshire two weeks ago for some testing, and ran well on the same tires which Goodyear plans to deliver to the drivers this weekend.

“He’s pumped,” Kremer says.

It was 25 years ago, in 1970, that Fittipaldi, then 23, won his first Formula One race, traveling from his native Brazil to the United States to win at Watkins Glen. Two years later he became the youngest person to ever win the Formula One world championship. He won again in 1974.

He retired from driving in 1982, and headed back to Brazil to manage his business interests, which today include orange groves and custom automobile wheels. But racing was still with him, and in 1984 he began a second driving career, this time in Indy cars.

In 1989, Fittipaldi won both the Indianapolis 500 and the series championship, becoming only the second person in history to havechampionship, becoming only the second person in history to have won both the IndyCar and Formula One Championships and the Indianapolis 500. Mario Andretti is the other. Fittipaldi won the Indy 500 again in 1993.

Fittipaldi is part of the most successful Indy car racing team in history. As of the start of the 1995 racing season, Roger Penske’s Indy car drivers had sat on the pole 114 times and won 91 races, including 10 victories at Indianapolis. Penske drivers have won the series championship nine times.

Clearly then, Fittipaldi is someone to be reckoned with on the track. But if he is victorious at the fourth running of the New England 200, his success will have started a long time before he climbs into the car.

The three Marlboro Team Penske trucks rolled into the infield at New Hampshire International Speedway on Wednesday. The rigs can carry two race cars up high, and have a full bench setup as well as a small crew lounge on the main deck.

These cars had raced in Ohio on Sunday, then been trucked back to the Penske garages for rebuilds, as they were changed from road-course setup to the short oval of New Hampshire.

Thursday was setup day at the track, and a crew of mechanics swarmed over the garage and pit areas. They set up tool boxes and gas cylinders, then brought out the cars.

The team is large. There’s a crew chief and two mechanics, as well as specialists for the gearbox, shocks, and tires, an engineer and an electronics technician. The two truck drivers serve as setup men and roustabouts. If Fittipaldi is to become a tradition breaker this year at Loudon, it is this crew which must do its work well from the time it arrives until the checkered flag drops on Sunday afternoon.

Even though the car was completely ready before it was loaded onto the trucks Tuesday, it got a complete lookover on Thursday.

“When we leave the garage Thursday,” says Crew Chief Rick Rinaman, we want the car ready so that you could start it up and run it Friday morning. The point is, you don’t want to be behind on Friday morning.”

As he speaks, Rinaman is joining other crew members in polishing wheels. In fact, almost any spare minute someone in the crew has is spent polishing something. With the car, of course, the more polished it is, the faster it will go. But this crew polishes everything. Truck driver Bill Canales polishes his truck. People polish tool boxes, and even the fenders of motor scooters used to shuttle drivers back and forth to the pits.

This spic ‘n span mentality is just part of what makes Team Penske so strong. These are, after all, white-shirted mechanics, working with engines where all the grease and oil stays on the inside where it belongs. Their work area is more than neat. If a fluid is spilled on the garage floor, it is wiped up immediately.

Once the cars are rolled out Friday, they are checked again. Shocks are filled with nitrogen, brake and clutch fluid bled, and tire pressures checked. Because the race will be run on an oval, all four tires will have different pressures in them, Rinaman says.

Final adjustments are made on the electronics, and the crew spends a lot of time just looking at the car as members check each others’ work. Because they got their work done Thursday, they have time to triple-check things Friday.

While Rinaman and his crew continue to go over the car, Rick Schuppan pays attention to every move. Schuppan is responsible for Fittipaldi’s backup car, an identical machine which will be called into play in the event the primary car malfunctions or is damaged.

Every change made to the primary car is duplicated in the backup car, so that if Fittipaldi has to change cars all the setup information is not lost.

As he watched his car go through tech inspection Friday morning, Schuppan talked about the responsibilities of being a race driver’s mechanic.

“When you’re putting on a bolt you think about what kind of stress it will experience. This car has a lot of high tech parts, but it’s basically simple, anyone could put it together. But you have to learn to feel it, to know that it’s done right.

“There are no unimportant parts on this car,” Schuppan adds, “the worst crash I’ve seen was caused by a 30-cent clip.”

The importance of maintaining the cars is not lost on the crew. They know that one little mistake may not only cost their team a victory, it could also injure their driver.

“I’ve tried to think about it,” Schuppan says, “but I don’t know how I’d feel if a driver got hurt, how I’d handle it.”

Fittipaldi first meets the car at the 11 a.m. practice. He makes a few laps and come in for changes. To the crew’s delight, the motor sounds strong, and requires few adjustments. But tire pressure and suspension are another matter. The session is a flurry of shock and tire pressure adjustments, along parts of the car.

Much of this information is relayed from the car to the team computers via radio, while other information is stored in the car, and connected to the computer system when the car is in the pits.

Pushing the buttons is John Faivre, who works in a shaded booth in the pits, with three computers in front of him.

“We watch wheel bearing temperatures very carefully,” he said, “because they take a real beating on ovals. As he spoke, the bearings were running at more than 150 degrees centigrade.

The computers can also show every steering wheel movement, as well as the location of the car on the track, but Fittipaldi knows it takes more than numbers to let the crew know what changes he wants.

Success, he says, is measured in terms of the ability of the driver and the crew chief to communicate.

“It has to be a great relationship so the crew can know what’s going on,” says Fittipaldi, who while he sits at the pit wall will make sliding and turning motions with his hands to show exactly how the car is behaving.

“The electronics will always help,” he says, “but they aren’t the total solution.”

One computer program, written by the Penske team, monitors fuel consumption. Fuel use is a little joke in the crew, as last year Fittipaldi stayed out one more lap than his crew wanted and ran out of fuel on his way into the pits. He almost ran out of fuel during the first practice, too, coming in after his last lap with the computer showing minus six-hundredths of a gallon of fuel in the tank as the car rolled to a stop.

“We’re loose,” Rinaman says back at the garage after the first practice session, referring to the car’s tendency to slide in the turns.

So the team sets out to change the rad pods, the parts of the car which covers the two side-mounted radiators, but which also affect the aerodynamics of the car. It’s a major job, as it involves removing the radiators. At times there are 10 men crawling over, under, and almost through the car. As the work progresses, Rinaman keeps checking his watch, mindful that the second practice period is rapidly approaching.

Back on the track, the change helps, but Fittipaldi wants more. With him sitting inside, the car goes up on jacks, the skidplates come off, and the balance gets changed. The resulting difference in the two changes is a half second cut off his lap time, which moves him from 17th to fifth.

Fittipaldi is clearly pleased, and gives credit to the crew.

On any given race day, he says, he will be successful only if everything and everyone works together.”

“With so many pit stops, the crew has to be perfect. If we have to change the setup for the second half of the race they have to be quick. Being a member of a racing crew is one of the toughest jobs there is.

The first real test will come Saturday afternoon, when the drivers qualify for starting position. Fittipaldi has every expectation of starting high on the grid. When he first started in Indy car racing, he expressed some concern about the short ovals, as they were foreign to him.

“They were a challenge, but I concentrated on learning,” he says, “I’m doing well on them, but so are other people.”

Still, he likes this track. When told about Vince Kremer’s remark that he was pumped up for this race, Fittipaldi wholeheartedly agrees.

“That’s right,” he smiles, “I am.”