By Bob Priddy, Missourinet Contributing Editor
This was farmland once. Flat. Open. Three hundred-twenty acres owned by a family named Pressley. The city was five miles, a few hours’ buggy ride, to the east and south. But then a guy named Carl Fisher showed up—this was late in 1908—and with three partners bought the place for $72,000.
In time, the railroad would bring passenger cars loaded with people to this place. In time, automobiles would navigate the muddy roads to the countryside. Eventually there would be paved streets and Pressley farm and the agricultural land around it would turn into a small town and people would build hundreds of homes and businesses and schools on farmland around the farmland where Fischer and partners James Allison, Arthur Newby and Frank Wheeler had invested an additional quarter-million pre-World War I dollars into their new business venture.
Four years after buying the Pressley farm, the four partners laid out a planned residential/industrial community that would not rely on horses and instead would emphasize the automobile. Many of the residents would work at a chemical company and an engine manufacturing company.
They named their town for their business venture. Speedway. It’s now a town of about 14,000 people entirely surrounded by Indianapolis, just across Indianapolis’ Sixteenth Street from the first race track in the world to bear the word “speedway” in its name.
The race track these four men built covers 253 acres, not counting the areas around the track that cover hundreds of acres more and are used for parking, camping, tail gaiting, partying, concession stands and 14 holes of a golf course (the other four holes are on the infield).
And every May, this former farm field becomes a shrine.
Various comparisons have been made to show how massive the development of the site by Fisher and friends has become. It’s big enough, it is said, to hold SEVENTEEN Yankee Stadiums. It’s big enough to hold all fourteen Big Ten Football stadiums. Put another way, says the IndyCar Series, it could hold EIGHT nationally and internationally-famous sites;
Trains no longer bring thousands of spectators to the “Greatest Spectacle in Racing.” There are wide, multi-laned streets and nearby intestate highways and on a few days each year those streets and roads become huge traffic funnels pouring tens of thousands of vehicles ranging from beater cars to multi-million dollar luxury motorhomes to this 253 acres.
A crowd about forty or fifty-thousand people larger than the entire population of St. Louis descended overnight on this area, drivers and passengers often stalled in enormous traffic jams for three or four hours, the smart ones turning off their vehicle’s engines because they weren’t going to move a vehicle’s length for several long minutes.
Only a few could park inside the track. The front yards of residential areas with their two-lane streets around the track became private rental parking areas for race fans. Huge open fields turned into parking areas by today’s Speedway owners were packed.
Knowing they would face all of this, they came.
Knowing very bad weather was moving in from the west, they came.
Knowing they might not see a race because of another storm system was behind the first one, still they came. A hundred thousand. Then two. Then three. And then as many as fifty thousand more.
And then came the lightning. And the rain.
The grandstands were ordered cleared with tens of thousand of people taking refuge under the concrete floors of the giant infield front-stretch grandstands and in the tunnels under the track and other safe places.
All those people. In those crowded spaces. Many of them brought coolers full of food and drink because the race was going to be underway at lunch time.
Hungry people.
Thirsty people.
Wet people
People knowing the weather might mean no race at all that day.
And you know something?
We saw no fights. Nobody got stabbed or shot (at least nobody that we’ve heard about in these two days after all of this).
345,000 people, one out of every one-thousand people in this entire United States, jammed into 253 acres of damp disappointment.
And nothing happened while nothing was happening.
Then it quit raining. And the track-drying machines came out, marvelous pieces of engineering designed only to transform two and a half miles of wet asphalt into dry asphalt.
It is in situations such as this that people-watchers have a field day.
The fans looked for ways to entertain themselves before the race could start—including appropriately-attired folks rooting for children in a footrace near the souvenir stands, including a volunteer flag man at the finish line.
(The track is nicknamed “The Brickyard” because the pavement for the race for many years was millions of bricks. Today the finish line is a yard of bricks.)
(Incidentally, the real flag man for the race, known as the Chief Starter, is Aaron Likens and he has just brought out a book called Playing in Traffic, My Journey From Autism Diagnosis to the Indy 500 Flagstand.)
Patriotism is always big at automobile races.
And coveralls with the Speedway logo accessorized with “gold” chains, again with the famous winged wheel logo that has in one form or another represented the great old track from its earliest days.
After years of personal experience people watching at the Speedway, we can note that you have seen only the most moderate of outfits typical of the events. (We’ll do a commentary on going-to-the-car-races clothing in a later entry.)
Driver Pato O’Ward, one of the young guns and one of the favorites, entertained fans by signing hats and shirts dropped from the grandstands into the garage area.
Or chatting with fans—
But the intense work paid off on the track. The asphalt turned a lighter gray and it was time to go racing, time for 32 men and one woman to hurtle at 230 miles an hour into a near-flat left turn, the first of 800 left turns they would make before the finish, fighting to get through each of those turns ahead of the other cars.
The skies remained grey; although the weather outlook brightened; maybe the entire race could be run before the next storm. Time to roll out the cars In the end, only one car would complete the challenge of making those 800 left turns ahead of all others in one of the most dramatic races in the 108-year history of the Indianapolis 500.
Time on the grid for a few moments with family—Josef Newgarden showed his two-year old son, Kota, the “office” where he would spend the next three hours or so defending his championship of the 500.
The race lasted one minute and eleven seconds short of three hours and featured 49 lead changes among 18 drivers, more than half of the starting field, the last lead change coming time when Kota’s dad broke O’Ward’s heart by passing him on the outside of the next-to last turn and holding on to the finish.
It’s Newgarden’s second straight 500 win, both coming with a last lap pass—his victim last year was the 2022 winner, Marcus Ericsson—who had held off a last lap charge from O’Ward that year.
O’Ward remained slumped in his car for a time after the finish, his helmet still on, admitting later, “It was wet in there.”
Newgarden is the sixth driver to win two of these races in a row. He will try in 2025 to become the first to do a threepeat.
Helio Castroneves almost did it after winning the race in his first two years and finishing second in 2003. Al Unser Senior also finished second after winning in 1970-71.
Bill Vukovich came with eight laps of winning in 1952 before a part of his steering failed, returned to win in ’52 and ’53 and died while leading on the 57th lap of the 1955 race.
Wilbur Shaw came close to winning not three but FIVE straight. He won in 1937, was second in 1938, won the next two years and crashed while leading with 48 laps to go in 1941. That was the year a fire roared through the garage area. It is believed some of the water used to fight the fire washed chalked words “use last’ from an out-of-balance wheel that collapsed, causing his wreck.
But we’ll have to wait a year to see how that pans out.
Thousands of fans remained in the stands as evening clouds thickened and the light grew dimmer while Newgarden and his wife took the traditional victory lap in the pace car then kissed the bricks and went on to celebrate until the late hours.
Newgarden’s victory was worth almost $4.3 million of the nearly $18.5 million in prize money. O’Ward got more than one million for being second.
Thousands of the fans were deadlocked for hours in their parking lots as traffic oozed back to the nearby interstates or moved through downtown Indianapolis. This reporter’s car didn’t turn a wheel for more than three hours in the parking lot and was another hour, at least, before getting to his overnight accommodations—with a stop at a gas station because he was down to his last thirty miles of reserve fuel and would have run out had he not shut off his engine for at least 45 minutes of the three hours it took to get to his parking space in the morning and never firing it up again until seeing other cars start to move.
By Monday evening the former farm field was quiet and empty, except for volunteers earning money for their groups by picking up tons and tons of trash left behind by the one-out-of-one-thousand Americans who found themselves packed into those 253 acres where one of the nation’s greatest holidays was celebrated.
(NASCAR)—NASCAR star Kyle Larson left Indianapolis as the race’s Rookie of the Year but disappointed with his 18th place finish. Larson was among the five fastest qualifiers in his first IndyCar ride, and was running sixth when he drove too fast into the pits with seventy laps left. He had to do a drive-through penalty that set him too far back too late in the race to recover all the positions he had lost.
Still, he was only 9.4846 seconds behind Newgarden at the end of the 500 miles and averaged 167.6 mph. Newgarden averaged 167.8.
Larson had planned to run the 500 and then jet to Charlotte for NASCAR’s 600-mile traditional Memorial Day race. But bad weather, including rain and lightning, caused NASCAR to decide to end the race after 249 of 400 scheduled laps with Christopher Bell declared the winner. Brad Keselowski racked up another second-place finish, his third runner-up finish of the year. Larson had arrived at the Charlotte Speedway in uniform and helmet on just as the race was stopped because of rain. NASCAR determined restarting the race would make it end at about 3 a.m., Monday, at best and decided to call it a night. Larson never got to turn a lap for the second half of his “double.”
But there is next year. The deal between Hendrick Motorsports and McLaren racing in IndyCar us a two-year contract.
0-0-0
After the Charlotte race, former NASCAR champion Tony Stewart and his partner, Gene Haas, announced they would be shutting down their team at the end of the year. Stewart-Haas fields four cars in the series this year but will sell all four of its franchises for several million dollars. The team has two championships and 69 victories. Stewart is driving a full National Hot Rod Association schedule (His wife is an NHRA competitor) and Haas wants more time to spend with his Formula 1 team.
(FORMULA 1)—The Grand Prix of Monaco is the third major race held on America’s Memorial Day Weekend. Ferrari’s Charles LeClerc became the first Monaco native to win there.
Now the stick and ball sports that usually lead these entries;
(MIZ)—The Missouri Women’s softball team lost the last game of the super regional tournament to Duke Sunday. Duke goes to the world series. The Tigers come home with a 48-14 season record. (ZOU)
(BASEBALL)—The Cardinals are heating up as the warmer weather settles in. They won 8 of their last ten after Sunday’s weekend wrap up and had moved in top third place and were only one game under .500. Sonny Gray is up to 7-2 now.
The Royals continue to be the prime candidate for comeback team of the year and were 13 games above .500 before last night’s game against the Twins. The Royals didn’t get their 34th win last year until August.
The Royals had not had an American League Player of the Week since Vinnie Pasquantino in August, two years ago. Bobby Witt broke that dry spell last week when he went 10 for 26 in six games with four homers and 11 RBIs. One of those homers was his longest ever, 468 feet.
(HAWKS)—The St. Louis Battlehawks dropped to 6-3 last weekend as the Arlington Renegades turned three interceptions and two fumbles into a 36-22 victory. The ‘Hawks are still in the running for the top playoff spot in the XFL Division, though.
Quarterback A. J. McCarron missed his second game because of a bum ankle. He’s considered day-to-day.
(Photo Credits: Bob Priddy, Rick Gevers)