In preparation for Patty's misguided and misinformed efforts to cover this year's race at the Brickyard, we take a look back at six Indy 500 races that will live on in the history books for any number of reasons. Not all of them good.
1) 1989 - A classic duel.
Although we often pine for a "more the merrier" sort of approach to motorsport, with rule breaks, reverse grids and performance-equalising rules spreading their way into just about every series going to try and level the playing field and induce most of the field to scrap it out for glory, there remains something of a desire for a simple, old-fashioned duel from time-to-time. Think Senna v Prost, Schumacher v Hakkinen, or in the case of the 1989 Indy race, Unser v Fittipaldi. A playing field so skewed in favour of two battling protagonists to render anything accomplished by the rest of the field as a mere footnote in the overall piece.
In the words of Unser, the defining crash in the 1989 Indy event was unavoidable, as "both of us wanted to win it badly". If it was so inevitable that the frontrunning duo of Unser and Emerson Fittipaldi would eventually clash, it made the preceding laps no less absorbing. After long-time leader Fittipaldi pitted under a late caution, ceding the lead to Unser who gambled on still having enough fuel to make the finish, the Brazilian reeled his quarry in at an inexorable rate, eventually catching and moving to pass when Unser came upon traffic on lap 198 of 200. As Fittipaldi dived for the inside, the two cars made contact and Unser was flung into the wall, ending his race there and then, much to the delight of Fittipaldi, who was escorted to victory lane behind the pace car, and much to the despair of Unser, who came as close as he had ever come to winning the greatest prize in American motorsport. Such was the dominance enjoyed by the front two after the other frontrunners had hit problems, Unser was still classified in second place, with third placed Raul Boesel some six laps in arrears. It was Fittipaldi's first, and greatest, Indy 500 win.
2) 2002 - Tracy wins, or does he?
Imagine a scenario, admittedly an unlikely one, in which a current Indycar team was allowed to compete in this weekend's Monaco Grand Prix as a one-off. They end up doing surprisingly well, and towards the end of the race, one of their drivers passes Jenson Button for the lead, just as they cross the line to start a new lap. But then there is a crash, the race is red-flagged and on countback, Button is awarded the victory by virtue of apparently still being millimetres ahead as they crossed the line on the crucial lap. Cue political turmoil between Indycar and the FIA, amidst accusations of favouritism towards the full-time F1 brand. All slightly silly, but pretty much the way that the 2002 race at the Brickyard unfolded.
Once the damaging "split" occurred in American open wheel racing back in 1995, the IRL could hardly be accused of being too friendly towards it's established rival. In 1996, Tony George introduced the "25/8" rule, effectively leaving the Champ Car teams planning to enter "his" Indy 500 scrapping over a mere 8 grid spots, the rest being earmarked for full-time IRL competitors. Then, in 2002, Champ Car regular Paul Tracy grabbed the lead from IRL man Helio Castroneves with a lap to go. At around the same time, Laurent Rédon and Buddy Lazier crashed on the opposite side of the circuit, triggering a full course caution. Though Tracy crossed the line under caution in the lead, the win was awarded to Castroneves, after race officials declared that Tracy had got ahead of his rival just after the caution period began. Despite a court hearing, Castroneves kept the win, and Champ Car's side of the divide were convinced that they had been cheated out of a victory that was rightly "theirs". Tracy in particular affirmed that he would never compete in the IRL or at Indy again, coining the term "crapwagon" for Indycar's maligned car design in the process. To this day, his official website still lists one of his career honours as "2002 Indy 500 Runner Up (yeah right)". Decide for yourself by looking at the video over here.
As a footnote to this piece, it turns out that nothing lasts forever in this world, even the wronged anger of a motor racing driver. Tracy returned to the wheel of a 'crapwagon' at the Edmonton round of last year's newly unified series, and has qualified an ominous-sounding 13th for this year's event at the speedway.
3) 2000 - Montoya dominates to CART's cost.
Hindsight, like discovering an unopened bottle of gin in the kitchen cupboard upon returning from another unforgivably miserable day in the office, is a wonderful thing. In the immediate aftermath of the 2000 race at the speedway, in which the IRL regulars of the time had been systematically humiliated by the crack Chip Ganassi outfit from it's then-stronger Champ Car rival, all the noise was of crowing delight from the Champ Car side of the line. Surely the way that Ganassi turned up, relatively under prepared, with an unfamiliar combination of car, tyres and competition, only for Montoya to sit his car on the front row with ease and win the race in as dominant a manner as the tightly-run oval event will allow, was proof of CART's preternatural dominance over the young upstarts of the IRL. And, on the surface, it was exactly that. The depth of talent in Tony George's series at the time was severely lacking, and Montoya, fresh from winning the 1999 CART series, made all sorts of hay for the whole distance of the 200 lap race.
But with the benefit of the aforementioned hindsight, what the 2000 race actually proved to Ganassi and the other CART teams was less the fact that they were in the stronger series, and more that they were actually in the wrong one. The media exposure that Montoya and the team received from one race at the Brickyard far eclipsed anything that they had received during their whole title-winning season the year before, and though viewing figures for the rest of the IRL calender were lamentable, the millionfold increase in value for just this one single race was not lost on Ganassi or his sponsors. They returned to Indy in 2001, along with a number of other CART teams, and so started a series of full-time defections to the IRL, from which the Champ Car brand never recovered. In hindsight, 2000 didn't highlight Champ Car's dominance, it highlighted it's fatal flaw.
4) 1965 - Clark flies in to win.
A strange quirk of F1's loose association with the Indianapolis 500 during the 1950s and 60s is that while the race was formally recognised as a round of the world championship, it was almost completely ignored by the Formula One teams, which led to the odd strange American name finishing well-placed in the F1 WDC, and such statistical anomalies as Lee Wallard, who has an official grand prix victory record of 50%. Then, as the 1960s rolled around and the Indy race moved away from F1's remit, so F1's elder statesmen suddenly decided they wanted a piece of the action.
The flurry of F1 teams entering at Indy reached a high point in 1965, when Jim Clark took time out from his endeavours in the F1 world championship to fly in and grab the bottle of milk for winning the race in his Lotus, in a supremely dominant performance for Colin Chapman's team, beating the likes of Mario Andretti (albeit a doe-eyed rookie), Al Unser, AJ Foyt and Dan Gurney in the process. The records tumbled for the Scot, as he led 190 of the 200 laps, won by over two minutes and became the first driver to average over 150 miles per hour for the race distance. A performance that owed as much to the brilliance of Clark as it did the design of the Lotus car, which directly began the era of mid-engined machines in the Indycar championship. Watch some nostalgically jerky footage of Clark's domination here.
5) 1995 - The last "proper" 500.
Much as an Indycar fanboy may argue that 2008 represented a return to stature for the Brickyard event, with the now-unified world of American open wheeled racing competing on a level playing field for the first time in over a decade, the difference in standing of the 2008 event compared to the last "pre-split" 500 in 1995 is like comparing the British Grand Prix with an invitational historic Formula Ford 1600 event at a wet Oulton Park.
1995 was perhaps not the greatest ever Indy 500, but it was the last race at the Brickyard that truly held a worldwide audience in it's sway. Such was the competition at the 1995 event, that neither of the formerly dominant Penske pairing of Emerson Fittipaldi and Al Unser Jr managed to qualify. The starting grid saw the likes of Christian Fittipaldi, Jacques Villeneuve, Bobby Rahal, Arie Luyendyk, Danny Sullivan, Bryan Herta, Jimmy Vasser, Paul Tracy, Michael Andretti and Stefan Johansson peppered throughout the grid. Which if you judge them by their relative F1 career in largely uncompetitive machinery, isn't much of a who's who, but without the F1 Encyclopaedia blinkers on is something of an embarrassment of riches. It was Villeneuve who went on to win, despite running two laps down early on following a penalty infringement, though he benefited from Scott Goodyear's failure to take his own penalty towards the end of the race. Villeneuve left for F1 shortly after, and the Indy 500 descended into a sorry mess.
After the split, the following years race, which suffered the gruesome indignity of losing it's polesitter in a fatal practice crash, and boasted the limitlessly average likes of Danny Ongais, Eliseo Salazar and Buzz Calkins as frontrunners was a sad mess of an event. Over the long, gruelling IRL/CART years, the celebrity of the 500 dwindled in the face of the NASCAR juggernaut. By the time the two series finally reunified last year, the 500 wasn't even the biggest race at the Brickyard any more, never mind in North America. The race may now recover it's standing, but for the foreseeable future, 1995 will remain a high watermark for the race as it once was.
6) 1992 – Unser Jr wins the closest-ever finish.
If there's one thing that oval racing is designed to do, it is to keep the racing tighter than an [insert rude metaphor here]. And in 1992, it did that to an absurdly efficient extent, as “Little Al” got his revenge on the race that had treated him so cruelly in 1989 by snatching the most dramatic of wins from Scott Goodyear by a mere 0.042 seconds.
It didn't look like it was going to be his day, starting back in 14th place, but he fought through a series of mid-race crashes, one involving Emerson Fittipaldi, his duelling partner from three years ago, to briefly lead and then run second behind Michael Andretti late on. But Andretti, who to give him credit had dominated the race, retired with a fuel pump issue with a handful of laps to go and Unser Jr was handed the lead from the charging Goodyear. For the last seven laps, the pair of them were nose-to-tail, before Goodyear made a move into the final corner on lap 200. The cars were together across the line for the final time, but Unser had just held him off, by the width of the thinnest of cigarette papers. Unser Jr would go on to win again in 1994, but his breathless win in 1992 remains as close as the Indy 500 has ever been.
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