RESPECT; Herdez Competition battles for wins and recognition.(Motorsports)

Byline: BILL McGUIRE

"I think it's been an identity crisis for us at times too, as well as for everyone else,'' says Keith Wiggins, managing director and co-owner of Herdez Competition. Founded by the late Tony Bettenhausen as Bettenhausen Motorsports, the team has competed in CART since 1986, always struggling somewhere between backmarker and mid-packer. Podium finishes were rare, wins nonexistent until recently. Its best results were two second-place finishes, at Gateway in 1997 and Milwaukee in 1998. Now the team has begun to turn that record around, most notably with a 1-2 at Miami for drivers Mario Dominguez and Roberto Moreno. But the recognition for the team's newfound performance has been slow in arriving as well.

Not that this surprises Wiggins in the least. This is not exactly his first rodeo; he knows how racing works. Success comes hard enough, and the respect it commands trails somewhere behind. One of the more experienced hands in open-wheel racing on either side of the Atlantic, Wiggins has been at it since 1977, first as a race engineer.

"I started working for Ron Dennis in the beginning, when it was Project Four, before it became McLaren,'' says Wiggins, a London native. "There were only about seven or eight of us then, I think. Then I did some race driving myself in Formula Ford. I started my own team in 1983, Pacific Racing. We won the championship our first year, which got us some backing, and from there we won a championship every year for nine years, running Formula Ford, Formula 2000, F3 and F3000, where we won a championship with Christian Fittipaldi in 1991. Having been successful, from there of course my ambition became Formula One.''

F1 is a tough place for upstarts and overachievers, and for all his success in the junior European formulas, Wiggins found that pinnacle insurmountable. "I started Pacific Grand Prix in 1994. We were already broke when we arrived at the first race, and we survived two years,'' he says. "It's very tough. We did the first year with $5 million, which not many people believe. The next year we did our own car and semi-automatic gearbox with only 35 people. We did all right I think, for what we had. But it was such a struggle for money.'' Pacific Grand Prix went the way of most shoestring startups in F1-nowhere.

"I shut down Pacific Grand Prix at the end of '95, but kept on with Pacific Racing, running F3000 with Cristiano da Matta,'' says Wiggins. "But I wasn't satisfied there; you know how it is. It felt like going backward, and there was some burnout, to be quite honest. It was just surviving at that point, like the first time in your life you don't know 100 percent what you want to do. So I shut my company on a Friday and the next Monday I started as president of Lola Cars for Martin Birrane. I thought that was the answer-none of the hassle of running a team. It was a good period, just to settle down for a couple of years. I got married, and recovered from racing, I guess. Working for Lola here in the States, I got to know a lot of the people and teams here in CART.''

When Tony Bettenhausen was killed in a plane crash in 2000, the Herdez Group, a marketer of foods and domestic products operated by Enrique and Hector Hernandez-Pons Torres of Mexico City, purchased Bettenhausen Motorsports. The duo installed Wiggins ...