The Race Is Between the Races

Like to see a burro winning the Kentucky Derby? In fact, like to see 18 of them loaded into the starting gate?

How about replacement players in a World Series in Yankee uniforms?

Nuns in a chorus line? Maybe a Final Four tournament with a height limit? A U.S. Open only for guys with a handicap of five or over? Wimbledon with a limit on serve velocity and no drop volleys?

Well, what about an Indianapolis 500 contested by stock Edsels? How about one in which no Andretti, Bobby Rahal, Fittipaldi can drive, no Penske can own?

It has come to that, sports fans. The most venerable auto race in history, the most prestigious in that sport has become minor league. It’s like going to Yankee Stadium and seeing Elmira play Binghamton, seeing the America’s Cup race between two canoes.

The Brickyard has become a sandbox. When Mary Hulman quavers “Gentlemen, start your en-gines!” this year, she may add, “Whoever you are!” Some of the drivers this year are right off a lube rack. Recruited right off a United Parcel Service truck. You hope they remember to turn left.

I mean, this is Indy? There’ll be no “Andretti is slowing down!” this year.

What would the ghosts of the Brickyard think? The guys who loved this place so much they kept going to it till they left with a sheet over their faces. What would Eddie Sachs make of this? Billy Vukovich? Tony Bettenhausen? Any of the martyrs of Indy, the guys who bet their life on this place?

How can you have an Indy 500 with only one former winner in the field? What has happened to turn the Indy 500 into a replica of a Hoosier 100?

Well, it’s hard to tell. It usually is with Indy. Sometimes it seems as if this race was put together by Lewis Carroll. Alice in Wonderland in a Ford Cosworth.

First of all, it is a power struggle. On one side is Tony George, grandson of the storied Tony Hulman, who rescued the track from the scrapheap of history after World War II when he found it a weed-choked pile of blacktopped bricks and rotting timbers in the cornfields west of Indianapolis. He cut the weeds, painted the fences, dusted off the race and restored it to sports history. He did it with a shrewd eye for publicity, a gentle manner and a backstage presence. He didn’t need the money, he had a baking powder monopoly. He just loved the game.

He restored it to its preeminent place in auto racing, the world symbol of speed and excellence, the crucible of the sport.

Corporate America got into the mix. The same people that bought bowl games and golf tournaments bought racing teams. The ante went up and up. As with other sports, the money you earned on the track became unimportant compared with the revenues off it.

The U.S. Automobile Club, an old-boy network, ran Indy. It made laws and regulations as unilateral as the Czars, until a rival organization, drummed up by the drivers themselves, the Championship Auto Racing Teams Inc., came along. CART and USAC maintained an uneasy relationship. CART ran almost everything except Indianapolis.

This year, Tony George decided not to run the ribbon clerks out of the game, but the high rollers. He had an announced aim of returning the sport to its roots, reducing the costs, making it more of an on-track competition, less one of the counting-house. He formed something called the Indy Racing League. These were to be less-expensive racing machines, not these four-wheeled yachts the game was being given over to.

What did Tony want to do? Turn the game back to the Marmon Wasp? The Duesenbergs? Maybe even the front-engined Novis?

He earmarked 25 spots in the 33-car field for his IRL brainchildren. This left eight spots to be contested for by the flower of American racing, the Unsers, Andrettis et al. They said, “You’ve got to be kidding!”

So, if you want to see the legends of the game race on May 26, you go to Brooklyn, Mich. The U.S. 500. If you’re a sentimentalist, you go to Indy.

Who’s right? Can George turn the sport back to the days when a guy can build a car in his garage at Torrance or Texas, work on it lovingly, truck it to Indy and qualify it on the front row on spit and glue?

Andrew Craig, President and CEO of CART, thinks this is the whimsy of all people who want to turn back the clock, more myth than reality.

“You can never turn the clock back,” he said. “You can’t fight today with yesterday. You deal with the sponsors today. Their needs have to be consulted. It costs $6 million to run a racing team for a year now. Tony could probably reduce that by a million or so. But not enough to mean anything--and at what cost to . . . racing?”

George, of course, has aces showing in this no-limit game--the Indy 500 itself. Craig will have hole cards--the best drivers in the world.

Suppose Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and their teammates had defected in their heyday to play in something called, say, the “American Series.” Meanwhile the “World Series” would be played as usual by a substitute lineup.

Would the event overshadow the individuals? Tony George is betting on it. Individuals retire, get old, get out. The event stays.

If he’s wrong, the weeds will be back growing on the main straight where his grandfather found them in 1946. More than a Borg-Warner Trophy and a bottle of milk is at stake on May 26. The future of racing will be. One race will get the checkered flag. The other will get the black flag.