Every Year, the Best Day on Wheels

Down at the corner of 16th Street and Georgetown Road, just outside the most massive grandstands on earth, the revelers are completing their annual ritual of repaving the intersection with tens of thousands of flattened beer cans.

Across the Atlantic, on the Riviera, the little Heliport de Monaco is bedlam; packed helicopters arrive by the minute, raising a relentless spray off the surface of the Mediterranean, ferrying in high rollers from Nice Airport across the bay. The harbor is full of yachts. Inbound traffic is gridlocked on the mountain roads, backed up along the French coast in one direction and to the Italian border in the other.

Down near the town of Concord, N.C., just north of Charlotte, motor homes and campfires for miles in every direction are reminiscent of enormous armies encamped on the eve of some great battle.

The world’s biggest motor racing weekend is at hand.

Today, the world’s best drivers will be divided into three fields--for the 86th Indianapolis 500, the 60th Grand Prix of Monaco and the 43rd Coca-Cola 600.

The traditions are tied to Memorial Day weekend in the United States and Ascension Day in Europe. The race here is oldest, dating to 1911, when the first 500-mile race on Earth was run.

Speedway founder Carl Fisher wanted a longer race than the 100-milers he had been staging at his new track. But he had to limit the race to seven hours so spectators could travel in daylight from their homes to the track and back, in their carriages and primitive automobiles.

He reckoned the race cars of the time would average about 70 mph. Seven hours times 70 mph equaled 490 miles, and Fisher’s promotional sense in rounding up to 500 because it sounded better is why there are so many 500-mile races in the U.S. today.

In that first 500, winner Ray Harroun more than made up for Fisher’s extra 10 miles, blistering the track at a race average of more than 74 mph. (The field for today’s race averaged more than 228 mph in qualifying.)

All different, all the same

Few folks here or at Charlotte have a clue what “banco”--the most ice-nerved utterance in the Casino de Monte Carlo--means, let alone the inclination to place a 100,000-franc plaque on the longshot “tie” area of the baccarat table.

Nor would the women in Hermes scarves, sipping Dom Perignon on terraces overlooking the street course, care at all for a taste of North Carolina barbecue or an Indiana corndog.

The engine in Michael Schumacher’s Ferrari alone cost more--about $5 million--than any 10 cars in the Indy 500, or indeed, the total value of the entire 43-car field at Charlotte.

But high technology be damned in NASCAR’s realm. “All our fans want inside a race car is a hero,” Lowe’s Motor Speedway President Humpy Wheeler says.

What they all share, from the first-turn grandstands here to Charlotte’s infield to the balconies in Monaco, is a love of motor racing--and not necessarily pure speed.

The Indy cars will run at more than 220 mph, the stock cars in the 180s, but the exotic Formula One cars at only about 95--but this through narrow streets and around corners where you’d be hard-pressed to do 15 mph in a passenger car.

More than half a million people will attend the three. But the best seats, by far, will be occupied by millions of TV viewers. With one click of the channel-changer, American fans can catch all three. ABC will telecast the 500 live, followed by Monaco on tape. Then comes Fox, with the 600 live this afternoon, and one of racing’s great illusions comes into play--”The darker it gets, the faster they go,” is how Wheeler describes the sensation.

Which scenario raises more goose bumps, tightens more throats, mists more eyes?

Is it during the final strains--”How I long ... for my Innn-dee-ah-nah home”--when more than 300,000 voices roar in unison?

Or is it the Carolina air trembling with the thunder of 43 huge engines awakening, preparing for the longest journey in NASCAR, starting in daylight, roaring through the dusk and into darkness, as the speedway’s massive lighting system intensifies?

Or is it the grid at Monaco, sitting still, engines revving to a siren-scream 18,000 rpm in the final seconds before the light turns green, then shrieking away, diving into the semi-dark mile of the tunnel, popping back out into daylight, through the little chicane, then dashing up the incline along the sea wall, in full view of the yachts?

To have stood amid all three, at one time or another, is to know that each in its way is just as magnificent as the others on this, the grandest racing weekend of the year.