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Winston Cup drivers finally showed some emotion at the Brickyardby Ed Hinton
Winston cup drivers historically have hallowed no ground, shown little sense of place, deferred no more to tradition than paying occasional lip service to old Darlington. Daytona? They revere it only for its power to aggrandize its winner. In their private reality, they have long held that a track is a track is a track, a strip of asphalt to be mastered, not worshiped. When first they came to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, in an exploratory test session for stock cars in 1992, some of them were so irreverent as to scrawl their names on "The Yard of Bricks," a symbolic three-foot strip in the 2.5-mile ribbon of pavement, the last remnants of the original racing surface that gave the Brickyard its name.
The first two times they ran the Brickyard 400 their awe was lacking. In the inaugural event in '94, Jeff Gordon gee-whizzed his way through Victory Lane, but those were the emotions of a 23-year-old winning a big race near his hometown. (Gordon was raised in Pittsboro, Ind., just 12 miles west of the Speedway.)
In '95 Dale Earnhardt won and used the victory as mere psych-fodder in the points battle, proclaiming himself "the first man ever to win the Brickyard 400." (Gordon's age apparently was not of the majority in Earnhardt's view.)
But this year Indy got to the NASCAR interlopers. They finally began to fathom the meaning of a place 46 years older than Darlington and 37 years older than Daytona. People's voices do not crack when paying mere lip service, and voices did crack this time around at the Brickyard: those of winner Dale Jarrett and runner-up Ernie Irvan, and even that of tough old Earnhardt—who came to the race with a broken collarbone and a broken sternum, both suffered in a wicked crash at Talladega the previous Sunday.
NASCAR's biggest crowd was revved from the start.
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Jarrett was especially moved. The late-race dogfight between him and teammate Irvan had been called off when Robert Pressley crashed on the next-to-last lap, causing the final miles of the race to be run under caution and allowing Jarrett to savor the last lap. "Riding around there, it was hard to keep myself composed," said Jarrett, "because of what this is and what this means. Just knowing where I came from to get to this point. I'll cherish this day the rest of my life."
Indy is the pinnacle of racing. It has a way of taking a driver back to his deepest roots, prompting a sudden flashback through an entire career, showing him how far he has come. Jarret later said that during the caution parade to the checkered flag he "was thinking back to '77 at Hickory [N.C.] Speedway, when I started a Limited Sportsman car some of my friends had built. I didn't know how I was going to go about making it in this sport, but I knew that's what I wanted to do. And we've come a long way since that night, when I finished ninth and won $25."
For his Brickyard victory, Jarrett won $564,035—almost twice as much as the $289,146 his father, Ned, had won in an entire 50-victory NASCAR career from 1952 to '66.
The quiver in Irvan's voice was an aberration for the cool Californian, who rarely gets too excited about winning or rattled over finishing second. But this, he said, was "another heartbreaker," for he had lost the Brickyard 400 in '94 when a tire went flat while he was leading with four laps to go.
The banged-up Earnhardt was forced out of the race early.
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"There's no doubt," said Irvan, "that the emotions are so rewarding when you do win and crushing when you don't win. A lot of it is just the tradition of this racetrack. There are more people here than any other racetrack we go to." Indeed, the crowd of 300,000-plus at Indy was about twice the average attendance of NASCAR's other top races.
Earnhardt, just by showing up to race at all, had astounded virtually everyone who had witnessed his horrible crash at Talladega on July 28. He arrived at Indy blasé about that matter, flippantly reciting a blow-by-blow of the crash. His nearly head-on impact with the concrete retaining wall at Talladega "was what broke my sternum," he said with all the emotion of a pro golfer reviewing his round.
And after his car rolled onto its side, a blow to Earnhardt's roof from Derrike Cope's onrushing car "broke my collarbone," he said.
Only four days after the Talladega wreck, he qualified 12th at Indy. "Not bad for a one-armed driver, eh?" he said. "I'm still a little tender, a little sore, so we're just taking it easy." This from a man who had shrugged off physicians' suggestions that a stabilizing device be surgically inserted into his collarbone.
Jarrett went the distance and, under caution, earned the checkered flag—and a huge payday
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Earnhardt started the race in order to collect Winston Cup points, then yielded to relief driver Mike Skinner after six laps. Skinner went on to finish 15th, moving Earnhardt up to second in the points race. While the points were nice, Earnhardt said that driving had not been nearly as painful as getting out of the car—and that the physical part of removing himself had not been nearly as difficult as the mental part.
"It was hard to get out of there," he said, his voice thick with emotion. "This is my life right here." He meant racing in general, but there is no place like the Brickyard for magnifying a driver's love of what he does.
The track opened in 1909 and became world famous in 1911 with the running of the world's first 500-mile race. It is the most important and tradition-rich racecourse anywhere—even the haughty Formula One moguls of Europe admit that. And then along came the Winston Cup drivers, on a lark, writing their names on the bricks.
The sentimental Jarrett and his ecstatic crew were on top of the world.
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But let the record show that during the massive repaving job
at the Speedway in the fall of 1995, the desecrated bricks were replaced with unmarred ones saved from the old surface—and that on Aug. 3, 1996, the NASCAR boys saw the light and felt the awe seen and felt by the likes of A.J. Foyt, Jim Clark, Graham Hill, Parnelli Jones and various Unsers and Andrettis.
Indy has long been world motor racing's most hallowed ground. Now, at last, the feeling is unanimous.
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The third running of the Brickyard 400 brought out the tough guy in injured
Dale Earnhardt and the sensitive guy in introspective winner Dale Jarrett.
