Their Driver, Their Car--Our Race

“Unknown Wins Open,” move over.

“Foreigner Takes Masters,” how about an echo?

What would your idea be of the most American event you can think of? The World Series? Well, OK, but next to that?

The Indianapolis 500? Right! I mean, the automobile is the American icon. An American without his car is like a Frenchman without his wine, or an Italian without a song. The symbol of America shouldn’t be a bald eagle. It should be a two-door coupe with a rumble seat and a shrunken head hanging off the rear-view mirror.

So, they put on this race in the cornfields of Indiana at the turn of the century, put up a trophy, a little prize money and a whole bunch of guys driving Marmon Wasps and Pope-Hartfords and Simplexes and Stutz Bearcats show up, and they have this 500-mile race in a circle, and it only took them a little under seven hours to run it, and an American tribal rite and a tradition was born.

So far as I know, the tires worked all right. The race was won by Ray Harroun, who was as American as apple cider.

Americans kept winning it. Guys named Howdy Wilcox, Jimmy Murphy, Joe Dawson. Even Gaston Chevrolet was a Michigander.

But, the fastest (by 15 m.p.h., the biggest jump in the history of the race), smoothest (four caution lights) race in the history of the track was won for the second year in a row by a guy who talks funny--and I don’t mean A.J. Foyt.

Arie Luyendyk is not your basic household name in auto racing. Neither is the guy who won last year, Emerson Fittipaldi.

Luyendyk is about as American as a wooden shoe. Fittipaldi is about as American as the samba. These guys humbled the flower of American racing the last two years in a row now. In an era when our golf championships go to guys named Severiano, and our tennis championships to guys named Boris or Ivan, I suppose it shouldn’t be a surprise.

But, an Arie Luyendyk winning an auto race with a whole bunch of Unsers and Andrettis and Vukoviches and Bettenhausens in it--to say nothing of a Danny Sullivan--has to make you wonder if America should go back to the horse. Americans losing Indy races is like a Bedouin losing a camel dash, a shark drowning.

Not since 1965-66 when the Great Brits, Jimmy Clark and Graham Hill, won back-to-back Indys have green card aliens tooled into Victory Lane on succeeding years.

The cars are made in Europe. So are the engines. And so are the drivers. Back home again in Indiana, a million-dollar prize has gone two years in a row to guys who grew up a long way from the moonlight on the Wabash and the scent of new-mown hay.

Emerson Fittipaldi was a world-champion driver who came out of retirement to make Indy car racing look easy, but Arie Luyendyk kind of dropped out of the clouds. He sneaked up on Indy this year after a so-so career here, where he usually managed to keep a car running--just not very fast.

He comes from a country whose favorite venue of transportation is by canal and whose national logo is not the automobile but the windmill.

Where Arie grew up, the natives probably weren’t real sure what language Indianapolis was, and the motor car was a distant second to the bicycle as the vehicle of choice. Arie’s notion of a car race was through the streets of Belgium or the hairpins in the south of France.

He became interested in Indy only because his driving idol was the little Scot chauffeur, Clark, who came to the Speedway with Team Lotus in the early ‘60s. If it was good enough for the Great Scot, Arie figured it was a shorter cut to fame and fortune than the Formula One motoring of his homeland. When an American sponsor offered to pay the way to the States of any of the first five finishers of a European Super Vee series, Luyendyk was the only one who took him up on it.

He was never much of a serious factor in Indy-type racing. This was his first Indy car win. But, he scattered about 10 crack drivers in the second qualifying day this year with a startling 223.304 m.p.h. This splashed him into the front row with the lordly Penske cars of Fittipaldi on the pole and Rick Mears in second spot, and he bumped Bobby Rahal, an ex-winner, off the row.

Arie came to the Speedway with a new car (Lola-Chevy), new owner (Doug Shierson) and new sponsor (Domino’s Pizza), but he probably won less because of new metal than because of old rubber. It soon became apparent to old Indy hands in mid-race that the car set-ups of the contenders had resulted in over-inflated right-rear tires blistering in the high-heat, high-speed circling. Fittipaldi spent more time changing tires than a guy driving through downtown Beirut. Young Al Unser blistered eight sets of tires before his crew figured out to lower the pressure.

Over-full tires tooling around an overheated track at record speed tend to develop aneurysms and, by the time crews figured out the pressure was the culprit, Luyendyk, whose crew got wind of the tire trouble earlier in the week, had won the race.

But, whatever the reason, he beat Americans at their own game. This is like winning a pot on a riverboat from a guy in a beaver hat and a checked vest or selling a sore horse to David Harmum. This used to be our wheel. Oval racing was our deck. We used to know how much air to put in the tires, how high to open the boost, what line to take through the corners, and the only foreigners we’d let win anything would be NFL place-kickers from Cyprus.

This would never happen if Ray Harroun were alive. They didn’t build this place for tulip-growers from Sommelsdyk to show up the flower of American racing.