Commentary : Indy Racing Has Its Own Mystique : Auto racing: No one who hasn’t done it can quite understand the death-defying sport, but it sometimes seems to be in the blood.

Staples of the evening sports throughout the month of May are the stupendous practice crashes from Indianapolis, bouncing fireballs of brightly painted auto parts disintegrating around miraculously spared drivers.

Not all the racers walk away, obviously. “If you hit wrong, I don’t care if you’re in a Sherman tank,” said A. J. Foyt. “It’s over.”

He has a credential to speak this way: stretched, shiny pink skin that signifies Foyt has been on fire. He wears it around his neck.

A few years ago, when two-time champion Gordon Johncock abruptly retired on the eve of the 500, Al Unser Sr. started to express understanding but suddenly took a U-turn. “No, it’s not fair,” Unser said. “I don’t understand it. I haven’t done it.”

That’s the problem with discussing automobile racing. No one who hasn’t done it can quite understand it.

Merle Bettenhausen, a man covered with the credential, whose right arm was sliced off in the Michigan 200, clicked his hook and muttered to a stranger: “I know why you feel sorry for me. Do you know why I feel sorry for you? You may be alive, and you may have two arms, but you have never felt it.”

Bettenhausen is one of those grand Indy names. The father, Tony, died during a practice run in 1961. The sons, Gary, Tony Jr. and Merle, carried on. “We’re discoverers,” Merle said.

Like the tiny circus car with its thousand clowns, the Indy car is piled into (not to mention plowed into) by all the generations. When Al Unser Jr. arrived at 21, he delighted the Speedway in the closing laps by trying to set a pick for his father. Little Al’s Uncle Jerry was killed at Indianapolis in 1959.

“Is it in the blood?” Big Al mused. “I don’t know. I don’t think anyone does. Let’s not kid ourselves. At age 7 or 8, Al Jr. didn’t know what he wanted--it was me. But at 16 or 17, he started to realize--partially--what it was all about. It’s about being the best there is.”

In the son’s earliest memories, he is seated in his daddy’s lap steering the family car around the yard. Uncle Louie, who won the Pikes Peak Hill Climb nine times, is crouched behind them in the back seat, laughing. For fun, Louie clamps his hands over Little Al’s eyes. But the boy doesn’t panic. He doesn’t cry.

“We had a wrecker yard and towing service,” said Al Jr., who was astonished to discover that helling on the highways was not only a free-form joy but a business. “Dad was just an auto-repair guy to me. The first time I realized he didn’t have an eight-hour job was the day of the Indianapolis 500. We went to the closed-circuit showing in Albuquerque, and I got to sit in the front row. I couldn’t get over how big the cars looked on the screen. How big and beautiful. Dad won.”

Mario Andretti welcomed son Michael to Indy with an uneasy glance across the starting row. “I’m happy but I’m not happy,” the father said. “I don’t like to talk about the downside of racing but obviously I’m guilty of getting him involved. Guilty may not be the right word. But it’s the only one I can think of.”

On the upside, Michael is coming to that understanding the older racers share. “All along he’s been a passenger on this road,” Andretti said. “Now he’s a driver. He’s beginning to see.”

In Johncock’s retirement speech, he said: “If your heart isn’t in this, you might get yourself into trouble, or somebody else. I’ve loved the competition but this morning, all of a sudden, I sat up in bed and said: ‘That’s it for me.’ I’m not going to say that two or three months from now I won’t go back to racing, but I hope I don’t.”

Of course he did. Mark Donohue, who won the 1972 Indy, withdrew for a time in a pool of dread. He got over it and died in the Austrian Grand Prix. While Formula One racer Niki Lauda stayed away more than two years, nobody questioned his courage.

In a horrific crash in Germany, Lauda’s helmet had been ripped off and his left ear burned off. Six weeks later, he drove again, and within a year he was champion again. Then Lauda walked away. Why did he return? “The challenge,” he said.

Naturally, it is easier for a spectator to walk away and make it stick. He has no credentials. He’s alive, and has two arms but has never felt it. More than one walked away from Indianapolis in 1973, when Art Pollard was killed in qualifying, Salt Walther was maimed on the first lap, Swede Savage was fatally injured in the fourth turn and pit-crewman Armando Teran was run over by a firetruck hurrying to Savage. Teran died too.

To someone standing a few feet away, the sound of that thud and the sight of engine builder George Bignotti gently collecting Teran’s shoes should have been a cold horror. But the reflex thought was calm, just the irony of betrayal. The firetruck was speeding the wrong way up the pit. Who would think to look both ways before stepping out into the most famous one-way street in the world?

The terror missing then occurs now when the flaming cars come on TV. No matter what the sportscaster says, nobody walks away from these accidents.