Hoosier Hysteria

A decade ago this summer, Indianapolis Motor Speedway President Tony George was a man in a quandary over this NASCAR business.

He wasn’t sure whether to accept a proposal for the grandest wedding in modern-day motor sports--of America’s most popular form of racing to America’s most-hallowed track.

George feared this would be a Hollywood marriage, glitzy but brief.

“Those NASCAR fans,” he said, “are accustomed to being able to see all the way around their race tracks.”

Indy’s mammoth grandstands would be their own obstacle to continuing sellouts of a NASCAR event, he thought.

“Oh, I think they’ll come to our place once,” he said. “But when they realize they can’t see the whole track, they may not come back.”

Well, now ... they’re back. Again. More than 300,000 strong, as always.

Today’s Brickyard 400 will be the ninth running of the most immediately and enormously successful event in the history of motor sports. No other race has become so big so fast.

The fans can’t see much, except for hordes of one another. Even if they could, there wouldn’t be much racing--in the NASCAR sense, door-to-door--to see.

Running big, clumsy stock cars at Indy is like stampeding a herd of buffalo down a waxed hardwood hallway. They slip, slide and lumber through the flat, sharp, treacherous turns of an ancient “oval”--actually a rectangle--built in 1909 for cars that ran 70 mph.

Many generations of Indy cars have evolved, designed specifically to go fast on the old Speedway, with all other tracks merely afterthoughts.

NASCAR brings its standard equipment. And so primitive cars plus primitive track configuration add up to dull and tentative racing with little passing.

Doesn’t matter. Indy is the towering paradox of the Winston Cup tour--arguably the worst track for NASCAR-style racing but clearly the best venue. No other Cup race comes close to the Brickyard in attendance.

And even as the oldest track by far on the tour, Indy is in many ways the most modern--today’s race will be the first Winston Cup event ever run with life-saving “soft walls,” first used for this year’s Indy 500, which George has spent years and millions of dollars developing.

Above all, the Brickyard 400 is worship, instant tradition, McReverence, steeped and seasoned and microwaved in the armies of motor homes that invade central Indiana the first weekend of each August.

The NASCAR legions have taken racing’s most hallowed ground for their own, all those decades of very different tradition at Indy be damned--or rather, just ignored.

It all amounts to a phenomenon no one could have forecast. Not even George, who in 1992, his third year as head of the Speedway, had such revolutionary ideas for the place that many deemed him either a dreamer or just not very smart.

The place where he expressed his concerns was in itself telling of the tradition-shattering options he was weighing. It was in the paddock at the Canadian Grand Prix in Montreal, where he was the VIP guest of yet another suitor of the Speedway, Formula One.

His flirtations with NASCAR and F1 had outraged purists who held “The 500-Mile Race,” known to the world as the Indy 500, to be sacrosanct. It must, they felt, be the only event here each year, as it had been since 1911.

George wasn’t bothered by the charges of heresy, bent as he was on awakening the grand, old track from stodgy tradition. From the day in 1990 when he ascended the throne of his grandfather, the late Anton Hulman, George clearly meant to run Indy as a business, and a growing one at that.

But on NASCAR, he moved cautiously. The last thing he wanted was a novelty event that would flash but once, then ebb.

In the summer of ’92 he agreed to a sort of first date with NASCAR. It was billed as “a tire test” for Winston Cup cars but amounted to a dress rehearsal. Everybody who was anybody in NASCAR came. When they got here, they knelt and bowed and kissed the storied “yard of bricks” at the start-finish line.

America’s race fans took that as the engagement of the titanic couple, though it was by no means official, and prepared to pounce on tickets.

All seats were gone within hours after ticket sales opened. Then the backlog of demand blew out Indy’s computerized ticketing system. All of this occurred in 17 hours.

And the Brickyard 400 has been sold out ever since.

When CART pulled out of the 500 in ‘96, claiming to take the “stars and cars” with it, even local sports pundits laughed. The league with all the stars and cars was NASCAR, and so the 400 leapt over the 500, at least in the hearts and minds of locals who preferred the all-American cast to the imported personalities of the 500.

A Brickyard 400 weekend is now what an Indy 500 weekend used to be--a Woodstock with grandstands. Venture too near the corner of 16th Street and Georgetown Road by Friday afternoon, and you risk being hopelessly lost in gridlock, not only of traffic but of pedestrians.

Yet anybody in the service industry in Indianapolis will tell you they’d rather host the NASCAR crowd--which is better behaved--than the rowdy 500 throngs.

This is yet another paradox, for in the 400’s beginnings, Indy officials, fearful of NASCAR fans’ reputation for hooliganism in the South, decided not to open the infield for general admission and RV parking. They still don’t.

Otherwise, the 400 might easily outdraw the 500, and what is annually one of the dullest races in NASCAR might become the biggest race in the world.

The venerable TV racing commentator Chris Economaki, when he was a track public-address announcer, had his own rule for creating excitement: “The crowd must never leave having seen a race that was as good as it thinks it saw.”

The Brickyard 400 may be racing’s best example of Economaki’s Law, plus a current political catch phrase: Perception is reality.