Youth Served, While Adults Dine on Crow

Let me get another look at that book--you know, the one that says rookies cause most of the big accidents in Indy-car racing and that you need veteran drivers in a race to keep them from destroying themselves and the race generally.

Read me again the part where it tells you to look out for young guys in their first race.

Because I have trouble reconciling that with what happened in the big doubleheader of oval auto racing Sunday.

Let’s see, those wild-eyed young kids managed a 500-mile race here that had mishaps but was relatively routine for a contest between cars that go 230 mph at will. It was somewhat slow motoring. Not the kind you do with kids in the back seat, but well under the Speedway record average of 185.981 mph. It had accidents. But one of them took place after the race was over, not before it started.

Meanwhile, back at Michigan, 200 miles north, the veterans, the steady, careful guys who (it says here) have learned to respect the track and the sport that the crazy kids defy, didn’t even get out of the pace lap before the race and the track were littered with almost as much twisted metal and rubber as the Battle of Jutland. Somebody turned right for whatever reason and, pretty soon, the flower of American racing was piled up all over the track. Whatever you do in Indy racing, you don’t turn right. Even the rawest rookie knows that.

It’s not a new predicament for Establishment racing at Indy. In 1966, a veteran driver hit the wall at the start and racked up--get this!--11 cars. One-third of the field was out before the race went a lap. One of those knocked out, Dan Gurney, was to observe, “You’d think 33 of the greatest race drivers in the world could get the car backed out of the garage before they totaled it.”

In 1973, a driver named Salt Walther, going too fast, cracked up at the start, 11 spectators were burned and 11 cars were damaged.

So, the 1996 Indy 500 was supposed to be a rookie festival of mayhem because, for the first time in 66 years, rookies outnumbered the experienced in the field. The betting was, the ambulances would get more laps than the race cars.

The race logged 10 yellow lights. But the winner is a guy whose life has been lived under the yellow light generally of late. The name Robert B. “Buddy” Lazier now goes on one of the most famous sports trophies in history, alongside the names of such legends of the game as the Unsers, Foyts, Mearses, Andrettis and Rutherfords. But he has been dealt such a losing hand in life this year, if you saw him on a street corner only a few weeks ago, you might have been tempted to drop coins in his hat and murmur “Poor devil! I wonder if he was in the war?”

He got it in the next closest thing--car racing. Lazier is the first guy in history who got in a race car when he probably should have been getting into an iron lung. Lots of guys finish Indy with a broken back, Lazier started with one. He’s the first who had to hand his cane to his pit crew before it helped him in his car. He came to Indianapolis on crutches.

They had to have a specially constructed seat for him. Our Buddy broke his back in so many places at a practice run in Phoenix in March that the doctors had to find them before they could fix them. “I had 16 fractures,” he explained. “I had 25 chips off the sacrum. It looked like a smashed hard-boiled egg.”

The question was not whether he could drive 500 miles but whether he could walk five feet. The doctors thought the only thing he would be driving for the rest of his life would be a wheelchair. “I didn’t have any feeling in my legs for a while. Paralysis was a possibility,” he said.

A 230-mph race is a threat to a guy whose back feels fine. To a man whose vertebrae had to be collected and re-assembled like pieces of a broken sugar bowl, even a minor wall brush can be catastrophic. You would think Lazier would not want to be in anything that moved faster than 5 o’clock traffic.

Every melodrama has to have a hero and a villain. I make a veteran driver named Eliseo Salazar no worse than even money to be the Bela Lugosi of this plot.

Salazar is a Chilean driver who pretty much decided this year’s 500. First of all, on Lap 95, he came by the pit entrance to the track just as Arie Luyendyk was coming out of a pit stop. There were clearly two lanes of traffic, and Luyendyk was well on the inside of his.

Salazar, ever so imperceptibly, edged his car over onto Arie’s. Now, Luyendyk is the fastest driver in Indianapolis 500 history and the only former winner in the field this year, and he was moving up relentlessly in the grid. But as he came abreast of Salazar his race was over. Salazar let his car drift left and collide with Arie’s. Luyendyk, out of contention, eventually had to drop out of the race. Salazar only had a hole in his car and returned to the race.

He wasn’t done. Now, it was Lap 179. Young Davy Jones, who had been running first and second all day, was down on the inside of the track trying to get by Salazar. Salazar was a lap behind but a half a car-length ahead. Again, he moved over almost imperceptibly and stuffed Jones into a fleeting wall collision.

Jones finished second, but an hour after the race he was still struggling to keep his temper when he talked about Salazar. He figures the incident cost him the race.

“When I touched the wall, I lost some of the handling on my car,” he said. “Did Salazar do it on purpose? Well, maybe I shouldn’t have been there, but these guys bring some of their European tactics with them. You don’t need ‘stuff’ tactics here at Indy. But he stuffed me against the wall. I lost my chance in the final run at Buddy.”

If they make the movie, Salazar gets to wear the black hat or turn into a bat at midnight. Lazier gets the Kevin Costner role.

And the young and the restless carry the day. For once, youth made the old folks look careless, reckless, heedless of tomorrow.

Look at it this way: in another couple of years, these young drivers will be seasoned drivers, too, and they’ll be ready to rack up the field on the parade lap just like their elders.