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Friday 27 May, 2016 Indianapolis. The Holy Grail of motorsport.
I’m here, on the ground, two days away from the one hundredth running of the Indianapolis 500 Mile Race. Sometime after 3:00pm local time on Sunday afternoon, someone will drink the milk in victory lane, forever immortalised not just as a winner of the greatest and oldest motor race in the world, but as the one hundredth winner.
It’s career-defining, life-changing. One of the field of thirty-three drivers will have their life changed Sunday afternoon at the 2.5-mile speedway on the corner of Sixteenth and Georgetown in Speedway, Indiana.
First things first, though, is the traditional Friday at the speedway, Carburation Day (colloquially known as Carb Day, and now, thanks to what strikes me as being a hefty sponsor consideration, known as Miller Lite Carb Day) where IndyCar drivers have their last chance to fine tune their car for the race. At the end of the morning’s session, drivers won’t see their cars until they roll out onto the grid on Sunday morning.
Carb Day is important, with teams running race trim, and gives us a good indication as to who has speed in the configuration that’s all-important. It’s one thing to go fast in qualifying trim but another thing entirely to be fast in race trim.
After the drama of last weekend’s pole qualifying, today was the day to embed setups as everyone – drivers, crews, officials, media types and fans – look ahead to race day.
In order to catch this important final session, I arrived from Sydney yesterday evening, flying to Los Angeles, then on to Chicago before a two-hour drive south into the American heartland, arriving in Indianapolis to find a city so incredibly hyped for Sunday’s race that there are few superlatives to accurately describe the scene. Suffice to say, it’s electric.
If you’ve never set foot inside the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, allow me to set the scene.
You’d imagine that such a big racetrack would be out in the middle of nowhere like most permanent facilities in Australia, but IMS is only a handful of miles from downtown Indianapolis. When the track opened in 1911, it would have been in the middle of nowhere, but now is a part of the larger city.
Let me tell you this: it’s a mammoth facility, quite unlike any other venue I’ve ever been to, including NASCAR’s equivalent, Daytona. Indy absolute dwarfs Daytona. Yes, the tracks are the same size, but Daytona seems puny in comparison, and actually holds less than half of Indianapolis’ capacity.
You don’t understand how big Indy is until you walk in. No TV vision does it justice. To stand around the start finish line, where the famous yard of bricks crosses the smooth asphalt surface, and look down towards turn one as IndyCars buzz by at well over 200mph, you realise the enormity of the place. From there, the cars seem to be driving into a wall of grandstand, rising high to the sky, two and three decks high, and right at the last minute turn hard left and head into the short chute, and turn two.
Unlike other ovals, you can’t see all of Indianapolis, no matter where you sit. Grandstands on both sides of the track (and the famous pagoda at the start/finish line) on the front straight make it impossible. I can’t even begin to imagine how it would feel on the first lap of the race, to see that mass of people in grandstands reaching for the sky.
Being trackside after so many years being an IndyCar fan is exhilarating. I felt like a kid on Christmas morning today, walking into the speedway. Grandstands sparsely populated on Carb Day will be jam-packed on Sunday. There are no grandstand seats left, and even general admission seating is going quickly. Although the track doesn’t post attendance numbers, there’ll be well over 300,000 people on Sunday, making the Indianapolis 500 Mile Race the largest single-day sporting event in the world.
I’ve been an IndyCar racing fan since high school. I remember clapping eyes on the 1998 race at Surfers Paradise in Queensland, back when the CART World Series was the big dog in American motorsports, and I was instantly hooked. Those sweet Honda and Toyota and Ford turbo engines, stacks of horsepower, Reynard or Lola chassis that looked unbelievably beautiful, and the drivers – Franchitti, Tracy, Vasser and Zanardi – who raced so quickly and competitively. Since that day, I’ve been hooked.
I remember back to the days before Channel Ten, when the only broadcast of the Indianapolis 500 was almost twenty-four hours’ delayed, late night on Channel Nine on a Monday night, with Darrell Eastlake and Alan Jones hosting. Then, we had live coverage on Channel Ten, then Ten and ESPN and now FOX Sports have taken over.
So much as changed since 1998. There used to be no Australians in the field, and now, for this 100th Indianapolis 500, there are two. One of them, Toowoomba’s Will Power drives for Roger Penske, the winningest team owner – he has sixteen race victories. The other, Matt Brabham, is the grandson of Sir Jack Brabham.
Since I left high school and started work, I’ve always taken the last Monday in May off work so I could get up before 2:00am to watch the 500 live. Actually going to Indianapolis has been on my Bucket List for a long time. I’ve seen some big American sporting events in my life: the 2006 Daytona 500 and 2009 Rose Bowl Game chief among them, but never Indy. Until now. And, after one mesmerising day, I wish I’d got here sooner.
There’s an energy to Indy that’s hard to explain. You walk around the place and the ghosts of 500’s past feel like they’re following. I saw parts of the track up close today that I’ve seen on TV for years and years, and they spark my own memories of early morning wake-ups.
Things like watching Sam Hornish Jr overtake Marco Andretti on the last lap in 2005; JR Hildebrand crashing on the last corner of the last lap to hand a victory to Dan Wheldon in 2011; Will Power’s so-close-yet-so-far second place last year to Juan Pablo Montoya; Australian-born New Zealander Scott Dixon’s magnificent win in 2008; and fan favourite Tony Kanaan’s momentous victory in 2013. To actually be able to visit locations where so many moments that I’d seen through my TV screen happened was pretty incredible.
IndyCars absolutely fly around this place. We watched final practice from at the entrance to turn one, and settled in for the 100-mile Indy Lights Freedom 100 race. I wonder how many of these young drivers from the IndyCar feeder series will be in the Big Show in years to come?
The race was incredible, and the winner, Dean Stoneman, won by just two thousandths of a second from Ed Jones. It was a finish you had to see to believe. The gap between the two cars was almost non-existent. Maybe an inch in it, if that. You felt so sorry for Jones. That’s a horrible way to lose a race, especially at Indy.
The Pit Stop competition gives all the crews a huge chance to shine – they’re an important part of any race-winning effort, and a pit stop, good or bad, can sometimes be the difference between victory or defeat in the Indianapolis 500 – and to earn bragging rights, too. The way these guys slave so efficiently over their race cars is amazing. These guys are the unsung heroes of racing, and it was great to see them front and centre this afternoon.
Team Penske’s Helio Castroneves won his eighth pit stop competition and climbed the fence to celebrate with the fans. I suspect he’ll be tough to beat on Sunday, too. The Brazilian has won three times before, and is always in the hunt with twenty to go at Indianapolis.
What a day!
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