Facelift Changes Speedway

The Indianapolis Motor Speedway that the late Tony Hulman saved and nurtured and Tony George inherited is--like the original bricks that Ray Harroun drove over in 1911--a thing of the past.

Today, it is basically a Formula One facility, where on Sunday an assortment of drivers from the Indy Racing League, CART and NASCAR will compete in the 84th annual Indianapolis 500. With all the emphasis at the Speedway on the coming of racing czar Bernie Eccelstone and his F1 troupe in September, it’s almost as if the IRL is renting the facility for the 500.

Thirty-six concrete Formula One garages, with gleaming steel-and-glass suites above them for the European teams’ hospitality, dominate the south end of the main straightaway. That’s where the old “Snake Pit” was located in the days when streakers and topless ladies displayed their wares.

The trackside garages were a requirement for Formula One. The cars will be housed and maintained in the garages and when a car is ready for practice, it can be pushed out the door, fired up and driven out onto the track.

“The new garages were purpose-built for Formula One, but despite the changes, the main straightaway’s appearance is very reminiscent of the way it has appeared for decades,” said George, IMS president.

Indy cars and NASCAR Winston Cup cars, which will run in the Brickyard 400 on Aug. 5, are still housed in the infield Gasoline Alley garages and must be towed back and forth to the trackside pits before being started.

A new Pagoda tower, as high as a 13-story building, dominates the landscape. It has seven floors, one for timing and scoring, one for race control, one for domestic radio and suites for George and one with leather floors especially for Eccelstone.

The Pagoda has been a tradition here since George Fisher, the original track builder, had a wooden Pagoda erected in 1913 to handle the officials, scorers and media. It burned down the day after the 1925 race and since then, there have been a succession of towers at the start-finish line.

The old upper press box, which hung from the second deck along the front straightaway, has been given over to foreign radio broadcasters who will carry the message of the U.S. Grand Prix to 206 countries.

A new four-story media facility, needed to accommodate the 500 members of the foreign press corps, stands in the infield just north of the Pagoda.

“Whatever Bernie wanted, Bernie got,” said one IMS official who asked not to be identified.

Estimates of the cost of the major overhaul, including a 2.606-mile road course that wiggles through the infield after running the opposite direction up the front straightaway, adjacent to four holes of the Brickyard Crossing golf course, range from $40 million to as high as $80 million.

“It’s more than I thought it was going to be,” George said when asked how much it cost. “I don’t know if I want to know.”

What George does have is the largest one-day sporting-event attendance in the world, the Indianapolis 500; the largest stock car racing event in the country, the Brickyard 400; and now the largest Formula One race in the world.

“This was my dream 10 years ago and now it’s almost here,” George said. “This is the true Triple Crown of racing.”

The Formula One race, on Sept. 24, is sold out. All 250,000 seats are gone five months before Michael Schumacher, Mika Hakkinen and David Coulthard are due to arrive here.

The Brickyard 400 will have a turn-away crowd of 300,000.

Sunday’s race, which will have its usual audience of close to 400,000 spectators, is Round 4 of the nine-race Indy Racing Northern Light series.

Still, even with a sold-out Indianapolis Motor Speedway for Sunday, there seems to be a bit of malaise surrounding the event. For instance, the crowd was no more than 25,000 last Saturday for pole qualifying, an event that once attracted 200,000. On Sunday, a dramatic Bump Day, the crowd was much smaller.

“I’ve never seen such a small crowd for qualifying,” said Jim Wilson, a former Indy 500 announcer and longtime observer of the 500. “And I don’t see all the flags and signs you used to see all over town. It’s just not the same.”

Midweek attendance for practice was so sparse that Speedway officials last year cut preparation time in half and also cut qualifying from four days to two. That didn’t have much effect this year as daily crowds have remained small.

Although much of his time has been spent preparing for Formula One, George realizes that something must be done about the flagging interest in the IRL, which he formed in 1995 when he did not like the direction CART was taking, with its emphasis on road and street races that attracted foreign drivers.

“It has taken longer than we had hoped for to get to this point,” he said. “We feel we have a good product, we just need to work at better telling our story. We need to create stars and personalities, the way NASCAR promotes its people. Part of that is running in better markets with better dates.

“When we started, we had hoped to grow two or three races a year. That hasn’t happened and that is a major problem we are addressing. We will have one new track this year [in Kentucky] and two new ones next year in Chicago and Kansas City. We have eight or nine races solid for 2001 and are looking at five or six other sites. We’d like 12 or 13 next year.”

George also pointed out that the IRL has a new TV package in place with ABC Sports for the next five years, and that its Web site, www.Indyracing.com, has grown by nearly 200% over last year.

George insists there is little likelihood in the future for compromise between his IRL and CART.

“Ours is a private company, theirs is a public company,” he said. “Their need is to grow their earnings, ours is to grow the sport. I don’t want to be critical of CART--we don’t agree sometimes--but what they are doing seems to be working for them. We can still work together without unifying. In areas like safety, we have mutual interests.

“I see no reason why we can’t have two series, especially with the construction of all these new tracks. There is plenty of room for both of us, even if we choose to go down different philosophical paths. We must both promote open-wheel racing without name-calling.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Indianapolis 500 Facts

* When: Sunday, 9 a.m. PDT, Channel 7

* Where: Indianapolis Motor Speedway (oval, 2.5 miles, 9 degrees banking in turns), Indianapolis.

* Race distance: 500 miles, 200 laps.

* Last year: Kenny Brack, left, won when race leader Robby Gordon ran out of fuel with a little more than a lap to go. Brack earned a record $1.47 million.

* Fast facts: Arie Luyendyk set the race record of 185.981 mph in 1990. . . . John Andretti made history in 1994 by competing in the Indianapolis 500 and the NASCAR Coca-Cola 600, at Concord, N.C., on the same day. Tony Stewart duplicated the feat last year. . . . Greg Ray, the defending IRL champion, is on the front row for the third consecutive year, but on the pole for the first time. Ray won the pole with a speed of 223.471 mph. . . . Juan Montoya, who won the CART series championship as a rookie, is making his first Indy start. Montoya will start from the front row.