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Tuesday, May 15
Shopping malls and cartoons?
By Robin Miller
Special to ESPN.com
It had the unexpected, when Chip Ganassi threw his rookie drivers, Bruno Junqueira and Nicolas Minassian, into backup cars on Sunday morning and they joined Tony Stewart and Jimmy Vasser in a four-car armada.
It had the heartwarming story when Sam Schmidt, paralyzed in an Indy car in 1999 and now a car owner, was loaned a powerful engine by Tom Kelley, whose team captured the pole position, to qualify.
|  | | Roger Penske is one of only a few watching practice at Indy Motor Speedway. |
It had heartbreak as Eliseo Salazar, who twice crashed hard during practice, had a strong qualifying run almost completed when his engine blew on the third turn of the final lap.
It had a major upset as Scott Sharp bested Greg Ray for the pole and $100,000 that accompanied it.
It had big drama as Michael Andretti and Eddie Cheever withdrew their first qualifying runs for fear of being bumped and roared back into the starting lineup during the closing minutes of Sunday's time trials.
It had clear, warm weather for all but three hours of practice and qualifying.
But, what the first week of action at the 85th Indianapolis 500 didn't possess was people. The Indianapolis Motor Speedway packed plenty of stories, but very few paying customers during those seven days.
"I was surprised, I thought there would be a lot of people here this week," admitted Andretti, making his first appearance since the open-wheel war between Championship Auto Racing Teams and Tony George's Indy Racing League broke out in 1996.
"I guess it's going to take some time to restore the old crowd."
Unless, of course, there is no reviving this once-vibrant preliminary to the greatest spectacle in racing. For many years pole day at Indy was the second largest crowd in American sports -- drawing as many as 200,000 in the heydays of the '60s and 150,000 in the '70s and '80s.
George continues to regurgitate that Indy attendance for qualifying has been on the decline for 20 years and while it's true, it's also misleading. There were 75,000 in the early '90s on pole days and an estimated 60,000 in '95 -- the last May that CART participated in force.
But, last Saturday, less than 20,000 bodies turned up to give the Speedway its worst pole day turnout ever.
The IMS spin doctors blamed the lack of interest on shopping malls, live television coverage, Survivor, tattoo parlors, Ozone levels, Saturday morning cartoons, soccer, the retirement of Lyn St. James, and blah, blah, blah.
The truth is that Indianapolis lost its month-long luster and bluster in '96 when George invoked a new game that CART refused to play. Twenty five of the 33 slots in the race were reserved for point-carrying IRL teams and drivers.
So, instead of Andretti, Unser, Fittipaldi and Rahal, the Indy 500 settled for guys like Racin Gardner and Bronco Brad Murphey and some old retreads. As the late Jim Murray so eloquently wrote in the LA Times:
"I came back to cover the Indy 500 but they must have moved it. There was no Andretti or Unser or Penske. It was like the Kentucky Derby with a bunch of mules."
Tickets, which once commanded three to four times face value and were the second toughest to obtain behind The Masters, suddenly were all over the street. The lack of racing talent and professional teams, plus the absence of the major sponsors, knocked the bottom out of the ticket and hotel business in Indianapolis.
Sure, race day still filled most of the 300,000 permanent seats, but the atmosphere of May had vanished -- just like the people.
That's why this month seemed like a lock to restore the enthusiasm and buzz that always accompanied Indianapolis.
You had the Us.Vs.Them factor with former CART champs Vasser, Gil de Ferran and Andretti, plus Helio Castroneves, Junqueira and Minassian, competing against the IRL's best.
Stewart, who has replaced Jeff Gordon as Indy's favorite son if not NASCAR's toughest driver week-in and week-out, was coming back to the track he treasures most with the defending Indy winners of Target/Ganassi.
Two-time winner Arie Luyendyk hung up his broadcasting clothes for a drivers suit again, Robby Gordon hooked up with A.J. Foyt and Roger Penske's formidable team was back at the Brickyard.
There were stars and stories galore, yet the only buzz turned out to be in the confines of Gasoline Alley. The racers were juiced about the competition, but the fans obviously weren't.
Other than the opening day, Indy's grandstands were pretty much empty all the way through Sunday's second day of qualifying.
Sure, it can be blamed on many things. ESPN now televises qualifying locally, there was no new speed records to draw gearheads, the infield is no longer open to partiers and, with NASCAR's Brickyard 400 and Formula One's U.S. Grand Prix, Indy no longer has the exclusivity it once did. Maybe, like the last baseball strike, race fans remain bitter about the split and won't forgive.
Regardless, the Indy 500 continues to be the richest, most watched and best attended race in the fragmented world of open wheel racing. But, it's become something nobody could have ever imagined -- a two-day event (carb day and race day) instead of a month of passion. Send this story to a friend | Most sent stories
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