Recalling Brickyard experiences
This year marked 33rd time covering the race
So many details have faded into oblivion, and connecting a name to a date to a set of circumstances was never my strength.
That's why we take notes, why we type our thoughts, why we read newspaper clips and history books or search for videos online.
Actually that's a little funny, the last option on that list, given the context of this column. This Sunday marked my most Indianapolis 500 of Indianapolis 500s: No. 33. YouTube wouldn't exist for another 15 years when I called the Indianapolis Motor Speedway credentials office and told the people Phil Cash had died and I was the new auto racing writer for the Milwaukee Sentinel. Choppy black-and-white films and yellowed ABC videotape were tougher to find then.
What's the best way to commemorate the anniversary? Maybe we shouldn't. Most people who read the coverage from 1990 have gone the way of Doug Shierson Racing and the Sentinel itself. On the other hand, the goal has always been to tell stories.
Never a car guy and still new to racing, I hadn't been to the Indy 500 before that year. I knew the facility was huge and the event enormous, and that some of the people would be familiar from the few times I helped Phil at State Fair Park Speedway – the “Milwaukee Mile” nickname came later – and at Road America. This race would be a little like those but also more different than I could imagine.
The first thing I learned was that it's impossible for a first-time visitor to focus on a car going 240 mph while standing behind the pits for practice. The second was pit road is a lousy place to try to talk to a driver.
Arie Luyendyk, the Dutch-born driver who had lived in Brookfield, recognized me from my part-time days two and three years earlier and invited me to the Shierson garage for a proper chat. That worked out well. If you're going to know one driver, the guy who wins on Memorial Day weekend is the
best one to know.
That pressroom scene was overwhelming, a concrete bunker with no view of the track, filled by chain smokers who seemed to know one another and despise their computers and their editors. (“Blankety-blank, this is the last blankety-blank thing I need on deadline.” Slam! There goes the handset of another rented telephone.) At the end of the day, though, someone usually would bring beer. That part I understood.
Could we rank my 500s and turn them into an Indy-style lineup? Well … there had only been 32 so far and I'd have to refresh my memory by reading a lot of embarrassingly bad stories. Then, frankly, how do you even begin to compare Rick Mears' fourth win from 1991 with Helio Castroneves' from 2021? Someone will. I can't.
But I will say this: The cool Mears remains one of the most thoughtful, analytical and well-spoken teachers you could find in the sport, and his star pupil, the excitable and ebullient Castroneves, will forever be one of the great characters of the race.
The '91 500 had the buildup with Willy T. Ribbs becoming the first Black driver to compete and a heck of a battle between Mears and Michael Andretti. Last year's was won by a passed-over, 46-year-old driver given a chance by the upstart Meyer Shank team and followed by a raucous victory celebration that virtually made up for the previous year's COVID 500 with no fans on site.
One might have predicted in 1990 that Roger Penske would continue to own the 500, metaphorically, and sure enough, he won 11 of the 32 races from that May forward, with Mears, Emerson Fittipaldi, Al Unser Jr., Gil de Ferran, Sam Hornish Jr., Juan Pablo Montoya, Will Power, Simon Pagenaud and Castroneves times three.
One might not have believed, though, that he would literally hold the deed to the world's most famous facility and the series that carries the Indy name, as he has for 21⁄2 years.
But that's the way things work for most of us. In many cases, we're disinclined to imagine, accept or cope with change.
Pat Patrick, Carl Haas and Paul Newman have gone, but Chip Ganassi, Michael Andretti and David Letterman are players. The venerable Speedway Motel is no more, but that's addition by subtraction. The party has matured a bit. Probably.
Mario and A.J. are still around, and they'll never need last names. That's a good thing.
The decline of Foyt's driving career was sad to see and his exit unceremonious, but he's hardly alone in that regard. Still, what Indy and the first of its 4 four-time champions mean to each other is a bond like few others in sports. To have seen that close up has been a privilege.
An aside on Foyt: Early in my career I needed a few minutes with him for a story and when his public relations representative presented the idea to him, he asked her whether I was “that guy from Milwaukee I don't like.” Talk about intimidating. I wasn't – that was Roger Jaynes, a Journal predecessor – and would like to stay that way.
No conversation about what's changed and what hasn't in the past 33 years would be complete without the Indy Racing League era, as much as we'd all love to forget.
The goals of preserving oval-track racing and a place for the little guy were noble, but in addition to being misguided they came at a bad time. The popularity pendulum swung further toward NASCAR at a time the love of the automobile was on the wane and myriad options were spreading entertainment dollars thinner.
The best things were Luyendyk's second win and almost a third, Buddy Lazier's story of perseverance, Kenny Brack taking Foyt back to victory lane, and Tony Stewart. The worst was a racing dentist and the way too many other in-over-their-heads drivers in a race that lost considerable luster.
Around that dark period, though, the 500 has been graced by the likes of Nigel Mansell, Jacques Villeneuve and Fernando Alonso – Formula One champions, all – and their NASCAR counterparts Kurt Busch and now Jimmie Johnson. There aren't many sporting events in which something like that can happen.
Another aside: Villeneuve was asked one of the all-time worst questions by a reporter who wanted to know, what did his father do for a living? Well, Gilles Villeneuve may have been the fastest and boldest driver in Formula One, winner of six grand prix races, before his death in a racing crash a dozen years before the question. … Of course, Wikipedia wasn't around then either.
Anyone with a shred of modesty will admit to having asked a bad question or 10 over three decades plus, whether due to ignorance, ineptitude or momentary brain-lock. Now I can blame a memory overwhelmed by years of facts and data.
In sitting down to record memories of my first 32 Indianapolis 500s, I expected to have more specific, vivid moments of races come back. A few stand out, but the key word there is few.
Penske's failure to qualify with winners Al Unser Jr. and Emerson Fittipaldi in 1995. Janesville native Stan Fox, airborne, his legs hanging out from his shattered car on the start of the race that year. Sam Hornish Jr. running down Marco Andretti on the final lap in 2006. Leader JR Hildebrand's crash within sight of the checkered flag in 2011. Takuma Sato's all-or-nothing try on Dario Franchitti in 2012. Ryan Hunter-Reay's pass nearly in the grass to beat Castroneves in 2014.
I had to look up the year for each of them.
At least as memorable are the people and their stories.
Foyt and Fox, Mears and Luyendyk, and Franchitti and Castroneves. Bobby Unser. Uncle Bobby, retired from driving by then, was a special case. He once spent so much time answering a question I nearly wet myself waiting for him to finish, and our final interview – ostensibly about Bob Wilke but ultimately about whatever topic Unser chose – will remain on my recorder as long as I own it.
Chuck Lynn, who despite cerebral palsy hawked newspapers in Gasoline Alley for decades, and Mario Andretti, who tipped Chucky far better than anyone in the media center could.
So many are no longer with us: Writers Robin Miller, as big a critic and as big a cheerleader as the sport could have; and Shav Glick of the Los Angeles Times, who both watched Jackie Robinson play junior college baseball and covered Indy into his mid-80s. Tom Carnegie and Bob Jenkins, whose public address voices positively screamed Indy. And Jim Nabors, who sang “(Back Home Again in) Indiana” and talked about his nuts with the same zeal. What? He grew macadamias on a farm in Hawaii.
Then there've been such surreal moments as seeing daredevil Robbie Knievel hit it off with Florence Henderson over dinner that'll leave a person shaking their head.
Will my personal field of Indy 500s grow to 34th, or 35 like my old friend Shav Glick? Times have changed, and the only way I got to the last few was by saying I was going, not by asking if I could, and dipping into my pocket. The opportunity to stay relevant and see history firsthand are as professionally and personally valuable as when I first arrived at the intersection of 16th and Georgetown for qualifying ahead of the 74th Indianapolis 500.
I wish I knew half as much now as I thought I did then.
I also wish I could have imagined then what all I would have seen and learned over this time.