Eclipsed by NASCAR and beset by a foolish battle of high-octane egos, the Indianapolis 500 has lost its place as America's premier auto race

From Scorecard: Indy R.I.P.

Issue date: June 2, 1997

As taps echoed throughout Indianapolis Motor Speedway on Monday, it was unclear for whom the bugle called. Was it mere prerace ritual—after all, the Indianapolis 500 had been synonymous with Memorial Day weekend since 1911—or did the funereal notes sound for the race itself? For after being bruised and battered by a silly internecine war among the lords of American open-wheel racing, poor old Indy's reputation as the grandest automobile race in the world lay, if not dying, then certainly on life support.

Tracy and his crew were smoking after the finish at St. Louis, but the wheels came off at Indy before the 500 could even begin.    (George Tiedemann)

The start of the 81st running of the 500 was twice postponed by rain, first on Sunday before drivers could even ignite their engines, and then on Monday, when they fired them up but saw the action halted after a mere 15 laps. This second postponement seemed more an act of mercy than of meteorology. All three cars in the fifth row of the grid were knocked out of the race when they crashed on the final warmup lap, and three other cars were forced out by blown engines before the red flag came out. As SI went to press on Monday night, the race was scheduled to be restarted on Tuesday—without those six cars.

Even before the rains fell, the Indianapolis 500 ranked third in quality among the three major oval-track races run during the weekend. Slightly ahead of it was last Saturday's Motorola 300 near St. Louis, the latest stop for the big names and technologically exotic cars of Championship Auto Racing Teams (CART), adrift in a second year of self-imposed exile from Indianapolis.

If you wanted to see the best auto racing America currently has to offer, with a wealth of charismatic drivers and high-quality machinery, the place to be was Charlotte Motor Speedway for Sunday evening's Coca-Cola 600. Although the rain-shortened race was called after 499.5 miles, it included 27 lead changes among 12 drivers. And as if decreed by the gods of promotion, it was won by NASCAR matinee idol Jeff Gordon—his fifth Winston Cup victory in 11 starts this season—in the dramatic fashion that has propelled NASCAR's surge in popularity.

Eighty-five miles into the race Gordon, the pole sitter, dropped to 32nd after his usually flawless crew bungled a pit stop by knocking the jack out from under his Chevrolet Monte Carlo while the tires were still off. He stood third when the race was halted after 292 miles for a 2 1/2-hour rain delay—"halftime," Gordon called it—and when the competition resumed, he barreled his way to second place, right behind leader Rusty Wallace. The two played cat and mouse until Monday morning at 12:45, when NASCAR officials announced that the race would continue for only 20 more laps, or 30 miles. Gordon took the lead with 17 laps to go, as Wallace stalked him around Charlotte's high banks. But the 25-year-old star, his car throwing off a trail of sparks from a damaged fender, was able to hold Wallace off and take the checkered flag by less than half a second, to the delight of a capacity crowd of 150,000.

By finishing second, Wallace narrowly missed giving his boss, motor-sports magnate Roger Penske, victories in both of the weekend's non-Indy races. On Saturday, Paul Tracy had darted past rookie Patrick Carpentier with two laps to go to win the Motorola 300 in a Penske-owned car. It was Tracy's third consecutive win, and it set him high above his rivals in the CART point standings.

Most of Charlotte's sellout crowd stayed past midnight to see Gordon's come-from-behind win.    (Jim Gund)

As thrilling as Sunday's race was, the Coca-Cola 600 isn't even the showcase event on NASCAR's burgeoning Winston Cup tour. That distinction belongs to February's Daytona 500 and—illustrative of the sea change in U.S. motor sports—the Brickyard 400, which has been held at Indianapolis each August since 1994 and arguably is already more popular with local racing fans than the 500. As one veteran T-shirt vendor said at a sodden Indy, "At the 500 they come to party. At NASCAR they come to watch the race."

The reason the Indy 500's reputation has been so tarnished? The Indy Racing League. The IRL, now in its second season, is the invention of Speedway president Tony George, who has tried to use the 500 as a lever—his controversial 25-8 qualifying rule guarantees 25 of Indy's usual 33 starting positions to IRL drivers, leaving only eight for other racers—to pry established teams loose from CART and over to his league. It hasn't worked, and the IRL is still populated mainly by no-name drivers on low-budget squads. The schism continues to drag down both forms of Indy car racing just as NASCAR continues its rapid rise.

Television ratings tell the story. So far this season CBS is averaging a 7.6 rating for its NASCAR telecasts, while ABC is averaging 1.8 for IRL races and 1.7 for CART events. The open-wheel race that drew the highest rating this year, before the 500, was CART's ABC-televised April 27 race at Nazareth, Pa., which had a 2.0 (and that was probably because the NASCAR race at Talladega, Ala., was rained out that day). NASCAR did more than four times better with its top-rated race, the Daytona 500, earning an 8.6 on CBS. Indy, easily ABC's top-rated open-wheel race each year, plunged from an 8.4 rating in 1995 to a 6.6 last year, when CART drivers first boycotted the race. That tied the lowest rating for the event in the past 25 years.

"Our cable TV ratings now are as good as those of any sport other than NFL football," boasts Steve Schiffman, a NASCAR vice president who runs the sanctioning body's recently opened New York marketing office. "In fact, we exceed the NBA regular-season ratings, though their playoffs outdo us. We are really the Number 2-rated regular-season sport, behind the NFL."

Attendance, too, is off at the Brickyard. May 10 saw the lightest Indy pole-day crowd in 51 years, only about 35,000. Even some IRL drivers said privately that qualifying was boring this year because virtually all IRL teams were assured starting spots. On Sunday and Monday scalpers, who as recently as 1995 demanded three times face value for tickets, were glad to get less than half the official price. They didn't take the bath they did last year, however; they had bought blocks of tickets at steep discounts from corporate junketeers who had decided to stay away from the race.

CART teams shunned Indy mainly for technical reasons. Before the IRL season began, George had mandated drastically different car and engine specifications from those employed by CART. The goal was to slash the cost of racing in the IRL series and "to keep the Indianapolis 500 accessible—not out of the reach of anybody who had it as a goal," says George, who felt that the price of racing an Indy car had been getting out of hand.

The IRL specs outlaw the expensive, turbocharged engines CART uses and require that cars be reconfigured to make them simpler and cheaper. George claims those changes put more emphasis on the talent of the drivers and less on that of the engineers. "They want to take Indy car racing back to the 1960s, back to the days of backyard mechanics," complains Carl Haas, who with his partner, actor Paul Newman, fields CART cars for Michael Andretti and Christian Fittipaldi. Some CART drivers expressed concerns about the safety of the new IRL cars. They noted that one consequence of reconfiguring the design was to reduce ground effects, the aerodynamic properties that help prevent cars from becoming airborne.

At Indy qualifying and in two previous events, the engines in the new IRL cars proved unreliable. Not only were the Oldsmobile- and Nissan-built power plants in short supply, but they were also blowing too often for comfort. That led to fears that only a handful of cars would finish this year's 500. When the engines on three cars quit before 37 miles had been run on Monday, those fears seemed well-founded.

George's chief lieutenant, IRL director Leo Mehl, categorized the glitches as start-up pains. "We've been running these cars and engines for four months, and we're having problems you would expect from such new equipment," Mehl says.

NASCAR's biggest problem lately has been handling the traffic in and out of its races. Stock car racing aficionados are growing not only in number (the 31 Winston Cup races last year drew 5.6 million spectators, up from 5.5 million in '95) but also in diversity—geographic and ethnic. "NASCAR is booming in leaps and bounds," says Julius Erving, basketball Hall of Famer Dr. J, who announced last week that he and former NFL running back Joe Washington will field a Winston Cup team next year. Adds Washington, "After you attend one of these events, there's no way for you not to be a fan. If there's a NASCAR event on TV, there's no way I can walk past it. It's as if Lawrence Taylor jumped in front of me and tackled me. I stop dead."

Charlotte Motor Speedway president H.A. (Humpy) Wheeler agrees that the sport has tremendous visceral appeal. "A lot of people are very, very mistaken in thinking that the more complicated you make a car, the more Americans are going to love it," he says. "They don't care what's under that sheet metal. All they want inside is a hero. Here we've got an all-steel car. Is it primitive? Good lord, yes! But it's cheap, and it puts on a great show."

As a rule, marquee NASCAR drivers earn less, starting at about $750,000, than their CART counterparts (but more than IRL drivers). But NASCAR drivers usually more than make up the difference in prize money, endorsements and licensing fees for souvenirs and apparel. Dale Earnhardt's agent, Don Hawk, estimates Jeff Gordon's salary at about $2 million. But Gordon's stepfather, John Bickford, says the wunderkind's overall annual income is between $10 million and $15 million.

It's worth noting that when Gordon was a boy, his family relocated from their native Vallejo, Calif., to the Indianapolis area in the hope of getting young Jeff, then a dirt-track-racing phenom, a ride in an Indy car. Jeff made inquiries to several teams in the Indy Lights series, a minor league version of the big open-wheel events, but was rebuffed. "They basically said, 'Show us the money and we'll show you the seat,'" Gordon said in the wee hours on Monday at Charlotte. But Gordon does not regret ending up in NASCAR rather than open-wheel racing. "I'm much happier here than I would ever have been there," said Gordon. "People give you an opportunity in NASCAR."

The trend of top young drivers' moving from open-wheel to stock car racing is another indicator of dramatic change. Tony Stewart is widely called the IRL's poster boy because, at 26, he is the best result so far of George's efforts to bring young American drivers off the down-home dirt tracks and up to Indy. (Stewart, starting from the second spot, led all 15 laps of Monday's truncated race.) But beginning next year, Stewart will also drive a busy schedule in NASCAR's version of Triple A baseball, the Busch Grand National Series. "I think it's pretty evident that NASCAR racing is where the popularity is," says Stewart.

Indeed, NASCAR is streaking ahead on its own merits. Schiffman's task of acquiring more corporate sponsorship for NASCAR, its teams and its tracks is made easy by companies that are standing in line to get in on the promotional bonanza. "What they see is a sport [with gross revenues] growing at 20-plus percent, attendance quadrupling over the past six or seven years," says Schiffman. "We have an image that fits what they want to be associated with. We don't have people spitting at referees or kicking people or doing drugs." Drivers can't even cuss: After racer Geoff Bodine uttered "goddam" in his complaint about a competitor on a live TV interview in April, NASCAR zapped him with a $10,000 fine.

NASCAR racing is often compared to the current style of Hollywood action films—but with real-life danger. Jerry Bruckheimer, executive producer of the NASCAR-based Days of Thunder, as well as many other action movies, believes both Hollywood and NASCAR are selling "a great adrenaline rush. People can sit there and get excited. It's like an amusement park ride."

"Of course we sell adrenaline," says Wheeler. "We always have. The American public is beginning to realize that. It's been a long time coming."

There have been some very small signs of a thaw between CART and the IRL. George announced on May 16 that the 25-8 rule would be dropped for next year's race. CART driver Al Unser Jr., a two-time winner of the 500, calls that "a step in the right direction." The IRL also opened the competition to more manufacturers but rigidly resisted modifying its technical specs to bring them more in line with CART's. There the conflict stands, with little hope for resolution anytime soon.

CART drivers very much want to be back home again in Indiana next Memorial Day weekend. As Unser says, "I want to go back to the Indy 500. I've told Roger Penske, my boss, that. I've told Marlboro, my sponsor, that. But we need to do it right. They need to adopt the '97 CART rules. That change needs to happen for us to go there and feel safe, feel competitive and run in the tradition that the Indy 500 deserves."

FOYT WINS INDY: 1961 | 1964 | 1967 | 1977